Kashmir’s Necropolis: Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts 1793627967, 9781793627964

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Kashmir and the Optics of Violence
1 From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Reading Violence in The Collaborator and Curfewed Night
2 Narratives of “Horrorism”: Postcolonial Violence and Horror in The Night of Broken Glass
3 Haider: Rewriting Shakespearean Ghosts into Postcolonial Specters in Kashmir
4 “This Is a Troubled Place”: The Kashmir Shawl and the Violence of “Epicolonialism”
5 Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman: The Garden of Solitude and The Tiger Ladies
6 “Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures: Kashmiri Women in Images, 1947–Present
Conclusion: Kashmir and the Uncanny
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Kashmir’s Necropolis

Kashmir’s Necropolis Literary, Cultural, and Visual Texts

Amrita Ghosh

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-7936-2796-4 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-2797-1 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For the People of Kashmir And Arjun Ghosh Shee, for every day that was lost without you.

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

1

1 From Biopolitics to Necropolitics: Reading Violence in The Collaborator and Curfewed Night

23

2 Narratives of “Horrorism”: Postcolonial Violence and Horror in The Night of Broken Glass

41

3 Haider: Rewriting Shakespearean Ghosts into Postcolonial Specters in Kashmir

57

4 “This Is a Troubled Place”: The Kashmir Shawl and the Violence of “Epicolonialism” 73 5 Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman: The Garden of Solitude and The Tiger Ladies 6 “Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures: Kashmiri Women in Images, 1947–Present Conclusion: Kashmir and the Uncanny

93 117 143

Bibliography147 Index 155 About the Author

161

vii

Acknowledgments

The journey of this book originated after the completion of my doctoral dissertation on Partition studies, which drew my focus on Kashmir and the long Partition that aggravated the Kashmir conflict. I am grateful to have incredible support and guidance and acknowledge the timely suggestions and support of many people in this journey. First and foremost, I am thankful for the tremendous support and postdoctoral fellowship at Linnaeus University’s Concurrences: Center of Postcolonial Studies in Sweden (LNUC), where the seeds of the book were first sown. Under the guidance of Johan Höglund, I started my research into new literary productions of Kashmir. I am truly indebted for my time and experience at LNUC for their abundant generosity and for the intellectual growth and excellent scholarship. I thank Johan Höglund who took the time to discuss the project in its very nascent stage with me, and my special thanks to Peter Forsgren and Gurminder Bhambra for their faith in the project. At a critical time, when the world paused during the initial pandemic years, this project also underwent a pause and uncertainty. I thank S ­ ASNET, at Lund University, and Andreas Johansson for the fellowship at the South Asia center that helped me during the initial years of the pandemic to continue the project. I thank Aruni Kashyap and Suchitra Vijayan, whose support, friendship, and unwavering conviction restored and sustained me during this time to continue with the project. I am especially grateful to my c­ olleague and friend Bhakti Shringarpure, without whose generosity in reading, g­ iving feedback and unflinching support, this book would not have come to fruition. I am also indebted to my departmental colleagues at University of Central Florida, where I made major writing revisions, changes, discussed my ­project and each time got invaluable feedback and support. I thank my mentor Anna Maria Jones for time and again listening to my ideas; Bill Fogarty for his ix

x

Acknowledgments

unwavering support and encouragement, and Kevin Meehan who more than once sat with me to painstakingly discuss theoretical shifts and concepts and gave feedback on the whole manuscript. I thank the Department of English for fostering a wonderful supportive and collegial environment, and special thanks to my chair, James Campbell who always made time to listen and give me excellent advice and logistical support toward completion of the project. I must also note Lee Ann Gemeinhart’s persistent efforts at UCF to help me obtain some permissions for photography. I am so thankful for her timely assistance. I am grateful to a lot of erstwhile professors who inspired me and taught me how to think. Badri Raina was the first person who exposed me to the world of critical thinking and writing; he remains the foundation of my academic career and one of the main reasons I embarked on this journey. I have been incredibly fortunate to have the presence of my graduate school professors, Subramanium Shankar and Sandra Jamieson, who continuously inspire me with their scholarship and critical thinking. I thank Subramanium Shankar for his time to read my work and Sandra Jamieson for her 3:00 a.m. calls, in a different time zone, when I needed it the most. I also thank my colleagues Nalini Iyer, Sohomjit Ray, Masood Raja, and Amit Rahul Baishya for reading the initial drafts and especially for early interventions that became instrumental to rethink and revise the project. Thanks to Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Robin Field, and Jaspal Kaur Singh for the support and inspiration always. A lot of people have indirectly helped me in this book, who must be acknowledged. I have learned from a long list of incredible and insightful scholars and academics whose works have influenced me greatly toward thinking of Kashmir’s literary and cultural texts. The works of Critical Kashmir studies scholars has been incredibly valuable, especially Ather Zia, Haley Duschinski, Deepti Misri, and Mohammad Junaid, with whom I had the good fortune of meeting at conference panels, and whose ideas and discussions shifted and modified my approach in this study. I owe my deepest gratitude and thanks to Asiya Zahoor, Amjad Ali, and their family for coming into my life during a time of crisis and taking care of my family without which, this project would have been stalled for an unforeseen time. The works of Kashmir studies scholars Somjyoti Mridha, Rakshan Rizwan, and Hafsa Kanjwal, were of great significance in thinking through recent shifts in the field. A large part of my academic career began in the Department of English at Seton Hall University, where I found the friendship, intellectual advancement, and the courage to pursue an academic dream. I am so grateful to my colleagues there: Mary Balkan, Angela Weisl, Elizabeth Redwine, Jonathan Farina, and Donovan Sherman, for always supporting my intellectual endeavors. This study is dedicated to the people of Kashmir, and I am truly in gratitude to the people I have come to know in Kashmir since my first visit in 2013.

Acknowledgments

xi

At that time, I did not have the vision for this book, but learned about Kashmir and came in contact with people whose stories, ideas, and support have been momentous. My deepest thanks to Javaid Lone and Peer M. Ashraf for welcoming me and my son to Kashmir and for showing us your homeland. I thank Mir Umar, whose writing and brilliance struck me as I wrote the introduction of this project. Special thanks also to Masrat Zahra, whose photography changed the way I thought about some concepts, and her permissions came in very timely for this project. I thank artists Rollie Mukherjee and Soniya Amrit Patel for their artworks, without which the writing would not have been fulfilled. I also thank Talat Bhat for the friendship, support, for our conversations about Kashmir, and for incredible food he cooked in Sweden. Thank you to my friend and colleague Isha Dubey, whose unwavering support led many uncertain days into hope. To Ather Zia, eternally grateful for the friendship and sisterhood. A special note for my friend Shahana, whose presence added amazing serenity to the last few uncertain years. Almost every chapter of this book has been part of research presentations, scholarly talks, and conference panels at various places around the world. I am thankful to Annual South Asian Conference at University of Wisconsin, South Asian Literary Association Annual Conference, invited talk at Stockholm university, Linnaeus University, Lund University Annual SASNET workshop, Annual Literary Conference Cordoba University, in Spain, Invited Speaker Series at Humboldt University South Asian Center in Germany, and I am grateful to my panelists, audience for their questions and observations to shape my ideas better. I also owe my gratitude and thanks to Review of Human Rights (RHR) journal and its editor Sami Raza for publishing an early version of one essay that became a part of this study. This project would also be incomplete without the extraordinary patience and meticulous editorial work by Holly Morgan, Lauren Robitaille, and Arun Rajakumar at Lexington Books. I owe my greatest debt and gratitude to my family: my parents Deb Prokash Ghosh and Chitralekha Ghosh, whose voice stressing “never give up” helped me through a lot of doubtful phases. Above all, thank you to my son Arjun Ghosh Shee, whose sacrifice and kindness would remain unparalleled during the last few years as I embarked on this journey. To PP and Bell, I owe so much for being there always. And to my husband Christian Svensson Ghosh, thank you for the relentless support, extraordinary patience, and for always reminding me, “It will be okay.”

Introduction

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

Whenever it rains in Kashmir there is a feeling of loss. A sense of desolation. There is despair. Inside and outside. But we tell tales to survive. Stories. Of living and dead. We remember the forgotten. We talk to disappeared. There is a conversation of souls. A conversation between the dead and the living-dead. Rain makes it happen. It makes it possible. Mir Umar; August 26, 2020

The summer of 2013 was when I first visited Kashmir and the origins of this book took seeds. I distinctly remember the presence of barbed wire at random spaces, everyday lives of Kashmiri people amid a pall of security and surveillance, and the sudden identity and car checks unraveling an eerie space. During a seemingly ‘peaceful’ time in 2013, the presence of a military gaze in and around Srinagar spoke of a nation’s anxiety and the creation of a “conflict zone” and I came away asking the question: ‘whose’ conflict zone is Kashmir? Thereafter, some poignant memories from this summer of 2013 in Srinagar haunted me often—a magnificent, luxuriant landscape ruptured in spaces with the muzzle of a rifle gun peeking from the Chashme Shahi and Parimahal gardens, or an unspoken acceptance of barred communication with phones abruptly not functioning; local people sharing food and warmth and opening their homes to a stranger within an increasing clampdown on mobilities, checking of identity cards, all pointing to the epigraph of a youth in Kashmir describing the feeling of desolation. Mir Umar’s Facebook post from August 2020, almost six months into the pandemic, reminded me of what Kashmiri subjects have undergone every day, for years—a sense of loss and despair, a social death caught between aberrant and manifold structures 1

2

Introduction

Figure 0.1  A Hidden Rifle Peeks out Disrupting the Land and Nature. Parimahal, Kashmir 2013. Source: Photograph by author.

of violence and power and navigating life in such a liminality of living and dead. Rain does not come as a source of regeneration and life; it heightens the blurry zones that remind Kashmiri people that they are caught in a space of “No Exit”—a space determined by statist determinations of life and death. What Umar’s wrenching post also points to is the importance of stories that Kashmiris tell, to each other and to the world, when possibilities of speaking and telling are heavily marred by literally ‘switching off’ a whole region of millions of people from the rest of the world. Shortly before the beginning of the pandemic, the day of August 5, 2019, saw a total blackout and siege of Kashmir with the revocation of Article 3701 by the Indian nation-state, an article that was recognized by the constitution denoting Kashmir as the conflict zone status during the tribal invasion of Kashmir from Pakistan. Special provisions toward quasi-autonomy were granted after the problematic circumstances of the 1947 Partition, when the arbitrary delineation of the border between India and Pakistan occurred. This was not the first time that a communication blackout like this had occurred in Kashmir. There have been several other times when the state has shut down internet and communication in the entire population, hurting economy and livelihoods.2 Only in 2019 alone, prior to the massive, the longest blackout of eighteen months, there were already fifty-nine blackouts that amounted to

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

3

“more than one blackout per week in Kashmir for the first thirty weeks of the year” (“Blackout State”).3 Suvir Kaul also observes that what happened in August 2019—especially the “internet blockade has been rehearsed for thirty years now” by every government in the Indian state that has come to power along with people in political power in Kashmir who have suspended “civic rights, telecommunications,” whenever they wanted (Kaul 2020). The historic blackout of 2019 has been the longest and strictest in which almost eight million people were alienated from the rest of the world without phone access, internet, and under heavy curfew conditions. Nasreen Ali reminds that, historically too, Kashmir has had a checkered history and the “conflict” does not originate from the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan (147). In the Anglo-Sikh war of 1846, the British defeated the Sikh empire and sold Kashmir to the Dogra Hindu king (who supported the British) for a sum, which began a long exploitation of Kashmiri Muslim population (Lamb & Bose qtd. in Osuri and Zia 253). The year 1865 saw the first shawl weavers’ resistance against the Dogra ruler demanding better working conditions and wages. With the catastrophic Partition and a problematic accession of Kashmir to India in 1947 that came with an unfulfilled promise toward plebiscite by the Indian state, the conflict reached a new stage. The fledgling nation-states of Pakistan and India fought three wars in quick succession—1947 to 1949, 1965, and 1971 (Malik & Kumarswamy 373). In 1999, India and Pakistan fought yet another war over Kashmir in Kargil and the last two-and-half decades have seen continuous border clashes, hostilities in which “armies of both countries are locked into an incessant standoff making a saga of violence against the civilians caught between the armies” (Malik & Kumarswamy 373). Against this backdrop of violence, war and brutal militarization, successive blackouts, surveillance and statist control in India-administered Kashmir, writers inside and outside Kashmir have represented the conflict zone in complex ways to construct alternative ways of understanding Kashmir.

KASHMIR, A “NECROSCOPIC REGIME”4: A CRISIS IN REPRESENTATION The saturated space of representation and its consequences are critically significant to understand Kashmir. What kinds of stories get primacy and are in currency and which stories are suppressed or erased from public discourse have always defined the narrative on Kashmir. The state apparatus continues to define and shape mainland India’s populist impulses with a creation of Kashmir’s image of natural grandeur to attract the tourism industry and consolidate an aura of normalcy. The politics of representation in Kashmir enables a certain form of epistemic violence that continues to construct

4

Introduction

the dominant discourse within the postcolonial Indian nation and globally. From Bollywoodian depictions of romanticized and exotic Kashmir in the 1960s–1970s to state-sponsored tourism videos like “Welcome-Tourists to Kashmir” (2017),5 film, video and photographic documents underscore the crisis in representation that shrouds Kashmir, one that has significant consequences in the way it ultimately cripples Kashmiri life. Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s now iconic book on Kashmir Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009) is instrumental to understand Kashmir’s positionality as a “territory of desire” within the Indian national imaginary and the ways the colonial regime and postcolonial nation have discursively reinstated Kashmir within that fold in populist ways. Representational politics in Kashmir in the visual domain have also been studied by scholars like Nukhbah Taj Langah and Kawal Ud Din who investigate different phases in the Indian film industry that mirror the nation-state through significant historical junctures along with their projections on Kashmir. In the first phase, Langah and Ud Din trace Bollywood’s journey to depict the Partition migration and its trauma to consolidate the idea of the national imaginary and its subjects. In the second phase, they argue, the attention shifts: toward Kashmir with its intricate and paradoxical image of being a bone of contention between India and Pakistan, a river of bloodshed, and yet bearing a magnetic appeal for maturing love, peace, beauty and relationships as depicted in “Kashmir Ki Kali” (1964), “Mission Kashmir” (2000), “Yahaan” (2005), “LOC Kargil” (2003), “Fanaa” (2006), and the latest being, Lamhaa (2010). In the third phase, the Bollywood industry started focusing on the political positioning of Muslims in India, the relationship or marriages between Hindus and Indian and Pakistani Muslims; for instance, in Roja (1992), Bombay (1995), Veer-Zaara, and Kurbaan (2009). (The Magic of Bollywood at Home and Abroad 107–08)

The third phase, according to them, underscores the “political positioning of Muslims in India” and focuses on Hindu-Muslim relations and marriages that often present cross-border relations with Pakistani Muslims and Hindus in India. Langah and Ud Din further explain that the onslaught of negative portrayals of Muslims in this third phase of Indian popular cinema or Bollywood also gets heightened with global politics of 9/11 that spreads the dominant stereotype of Muslims as terrorists (The Magic of Bollywood 108). While these three phases are helpful in locating Kashmir in filmic representation and the image of the Muslim subjects being vilified within the national politics, I would somewhat depart from this periodization of Bollywood. Langah and Ud Din are certainly right in claiming that Bollywood is a metanarrative of the Indian nation-state in its projection of a patriarchal, heterosexual national imaginary, which also forms elite representational politics at the core. Yet the

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

5

gaze on Kashmir, in the films mentioned above, speaks of certain interesting shifts and cannot be grouped together in one phase. As chapter 6 of this book explains, the initial slew of Bollywood films that were centered on Kashmir were invested in the romance and beauty of Kashmir that the two scholars rightly mention, but along with that it generated an exoticization and objectification of Kashmiri women. As noted by Afreen Idrees, such films present Kashmiri women in “the role of desirable objects,” “emptied of subjectivity” (“Painting Against Disremembering”). This exotic focus on Kashmir, its women and landscape shift to a second phase indeed, where Kashmiri Muslims became suspected figures within the nation. The films mentioned above, namely, Mission Kashmir, Fanaa, Yahaan, and so forth, begin a narrative in which the Kashmiri Muslim either is a traitor or a terrorist in the construction of the state. This, I would argue, has not changed, and only been exacerbated in recent memory as a film like The Kashmir Files use the occasion of political upheavals to weaponize the Pandit’s struggle and exile from Kashmir in the service of portraying the Muslim community as the villainous other. Fatima Tobing Rony’s phrase, “visual biopolitics” is useful to categorize the representational violence over Kashmir that continues to reverberate in the Indian nation-state and on a global scale. Rony defines visual biopolitics as a “system, shored up by iconographies of justification found in photography, cinema, television, national monuments, and the internet, that underscores preexisting structural race and gender representations in language, politics, and the unconscious” (“How do we look” 5). Visual biopolitics enables a way to situate violence while representing Kashmir. Quoting Rony again, visual biopolitics: is the concatenation and web of imaging networks that systematize who is allowed to live and who is allowed to die and, by extension, who is allowed to be raped and who is not. . . . Visual biopolitics does not just produce empty signifiers: these visual myths contain the resemblances of the historical real. (Rony 5–7)

In a similar vein, Misri studies India’s occupation of Kashmir and calls it the “scopic regime” which she defines as “an exercise in perceptual management involving ‘techniques of ocular control through which the sight of Kashmiris and others is systematically overseen, neutralized, overlooked’.” (Misri qtd in 530 2019). This also amounts to a massive visual control on what one “sees” about Kashmir—“a systematic visual management of what Kashmiris see within Kashmir, what filters out of Kashmir through the media, and how Kashmir is seen from the vantage point of India and globally” (Misri 531 2019). Albeit in different contexts, both Misri and Rony ask how one can resist such regimes of sustained “visual biopolitics” and “scopic regimes” over people? It is here, that we turn to the new literature, art, and visual texts

6

Introduction

that create crucial sites of resistance and represent an aberrant neocolony (discussed below) in Kashmir, one that defies easy terminology within postcolonial discourses. They remind of Mir Umar’s lamentations of Kashmiri subjects as the “living dead” in which stasis becomes a representative condition. Along with the explorations of different cultural productions from and on Kashmir reflecting a unique neocolony of violence, this book also presents parallel questions of rethinking the other side of necropolitical Kashmir, the will to survive and resist.

LITERARY AND CULTURAL PRODUCTIONS FROM “KASHMIR” Kashmir has had an incredibly rich corpus of literature that has been shaped within varied linguistic traditions. Early Sanskrit works from Kashmir, with later literary greatness in Kashmiri language by Lal Ded, Nund Rishi, and Habba Khatoon form a vast realm of mystic and Sufi poetry in the region. Within the realm of anglophone writings, one cannot forget the significance of Agha Shahid Ali’s work that perhaps framed Kashmir alternatively for the first time and presented a glimpse of the conflict in a region overshadowed by violence. There also have been a wide variety of writings by Europeans on Kashmir that have framed Kashmir in colonial imagination. These writings are by European travelers like Francois Bernier who constructs Orientalist imaginations for Kashmir, which as I argue later, stick to public memory in creating a gaze on Kashmir from outside, even in our present moment. The last decade and a half has also seen a plethora of cultural, art, and music productions from Kashmir that have burgeoned in forms of novels, short fiction, poetry, artwork, graffiti, graphic novels, rap music, and songs like Kashmiri Bella Ciao have hauntingly reverberated against the larger popular discourse. My selection of literary, filmic, and visual productions stem from one main goal—to re-envision postcolonial conflicted spaces like Kashmir and return our gaze toward centering the Kashmiri subject. These novels, short stories, films, and photojournalism from/on Kashmir, point to a kind of a postcolonial conflict zone that is under continuous warlike situation—an aberrant space in which concepts of agency, violence, resistance, and horror all undergo unique transformations. These shifts point to unique formations and links between neocolonial, epicolonial forms of subjugation and violence in which biopolitical notions of power are reconfigured. The selected works also illuminate how this conflict transforms the Kashmiri body, the space, setting, and the relationship between the subject and its natural world, in which questions of agency, resistance, and resilience necessitate new poetics of looking at Kashmir.

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

7

Since 2008 there has been an explosion of exciting anglophone writing by Kashmiri writers, mainly from India-administered Kashmir and from diasporic spaces, that began to set a much-needed alternate narrative on the statist and hegemonic discourse on Kashmir. Rakhshan Rizwan in her incisive book Kashmiri Life Narratives discusses a “shift” in the representation and discourse on Kashmir since 2008 which notes the emergence of Kashmiri voices “in literary and cultural works” (Parthasarathy qtd. in Rizwan 23). Rizwan traces this shift during this year as a “moment of possibility” which initiates “new ways of protesting the Indian excesses in Kashmir” (25). Aaliya Anjum and Saiba Varma also note that the year 2008 becomes a threshold moment as a “second revolution” for Kashmiri people in claiming myriad ways of resistance against state techniques of domination and control (Anjum and Varma 106). Before I delve into this rich corpus of literary and cultural productions from Kashmir from around this time, I want to dwell on what the word “Kashmir” denotes in its geopolitical complexity and essence. In the book Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan Administered Kashmir, Anam Zakaria explains the shifts and complexities within the term “Kashmir.” According to her: Kashmir is referred to with different names and titles both locally and internationally, some acceptable in India and others in Pakistan. While India refers to Pakistan administered Kashmir, which comprises “Azad” Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan (formerly known as Northern Areas), as “Pakistan Occupied Kashmir,” Pakistan refers to India-administered Kashmir, known as the state of Jammu and Kashmir in India (constituting Jammu, Kashmir Valley and Ladakh) as “makbooza” (occupied) Kashmir. (7)

Zakaria also points out that “makbooza Kashmir” only refers to the Kashmir valley and does not include Ladakh or Jammu regions. For Zakaria, the terms “occupied” and “Azad” are loaded terms and she chooses to use the terms “Pakistan or India-administered Kashmir” “to explore what freedom and occupation mean for Kashmiris” on both sides (Between the Great Divide 7). I follow Zakaria’s terminology of distinguishing Kashmir in this way that clarifies the geopolitical space and the cultural productions emerging from either side. Among the very few books or literary narratives accessible from Pakistanadministered Kashmir, Zakaria’s work is one of the few that tragically points to the trapped status of Kashmiris caught up in tensions along the line of control (LOC). In this borderland along the LOC, about 285 border villages have seen lives upended with heavy shelling or firing from both India and Pakistani forces, in a “tit-for-tat battle” (Zakaria 10). These villages on the LOC “face the brunt of escalated Indo-Pak tensions” (Zakaria 11). Any discussion of “Kashmir” is usurped and subsumed by the India-administered side of Kashmir and

8

Introduction

books and literature by “Azad Kashmiris” “that [go]es against the dominant Pakistani narrative on Kashmir have also largely been banned by the state on the ground of promoting anti-establishment agendas” (Zakaria 16). As mentioned previously, it is important to note that the textual and visual productions traced in this book are primarily from India-administered Kashmir with some inclusions of Kashmiri diasporic writers along with one exception of a British novelist’s work. Here, it is also vital to clarify that it has been outside the possibilities of accessing or gathering literature and cultural productions from Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Literature from “Azad” Kashmir, especially anglophone works from the “other side” of the border in Pakistan controlled Kashmir are scarce and/or cannot be easily accessed. Of course, this does not necessarily conclude that one side is “better” than the other for Kashmiri people’s lives. Kashmiri activist Talat Bhat who hails from Pakistanadministered Kashmir notes that the “human rights violations in the Indian side of Kashmir cannot be compared to ‘Azad’ or PoK” (Pakistan occupied Kashmir), but he still notes that there is a large movement toward finding Kashmir’s own autonomous sovereignty beyond the narratives of the nation-state on the other side too (interview). The only piece of (Anglophone) literature I have been able to locate from Pakistan-administered Kashmir is a short story “A Doll from Muzaffarabad” by writer Hafsa Masoodi. Certainly, this does not mean there are no literary productions on the “other side;” rather, as Bhat explains, there are writers writing in local Pahari language in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, mainly in the “Azad” Kashmir region (Bhat interview). Such literatures also indicate the urgency to be included in future research, but without the required linguistic tools, access, and scope on my part to undertake them, they are not a part of this book. Thus, given the scope and research access, this book focuses on the literary and visual productions from India-administered Kashmir. A word on the selections of literary and cultural productions in this book: while the list of literary, visual, and cultural productions on and from Kashmir has tremendously thrived in the last decade, this monograph surveys a handful of them. Undoubtedly, the last decade has witnessed an urgent flourish in writing about Kashmir through stories, novels, and in representing the conflict in film. This monograph selects literary texts, film, art, and photography spanning the last two decades. It begins with the initial emergence of the iconic texts from 2010 to 2011 with Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night and Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude, and then considers new voices from Kashmir such as Feroz Rather’s debut collection of short stories, The Night of Broken Glass (2018), and the interventional film Haider (2014) that disrupts usual filmic portrayals on Kashmir. This book also includes the 2002 memoir The Tiger Ladies, a forgotten work from diasporic Kashmiri Pandit writer Sudha Koul. It also covers photography and women’s radical art on Kashmir to trace representational politics and

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

9

gendered agency, and it includes an “outsider” western perspective, a contemporary British novel on Kashmir that interestingly shifts a vision of the present conflict in Rosie Thomas’s The Kashmir Shawl (2011). In covering more than a decade of cultural productions from and about Kashmir, my selections inevitably present some gaps. There is an omission of poetry from Kashmir in this book. Some important poetry collections have been published on Kashmir during this time frame that includes Kashmiri writer Asiya Zahoor’s outstanding poems in the collection Serpents Under my Veil (2020) and Suvir Kaul’s Of Gardens and Graves (2017) that is a rich volume consisting of essays, autobiography, photo-essay, as well as translations of poems by Kashmiri poets from Koshur into English by Kaul. While these works of poetry and translations add to Kashmir’s bursting literary scene, they fall beyond the thematic scope of this project. The additions in poetry and newer short stories like Shakoor Rather’s Life in a Clocktower Valley (2021) and Nitasha Kaul’s novel Future Tense (2020), Rahul Pandita’s memoir The Moon Has Blood Clots (2017), and Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother (2014), to only name a few in this growing list, suggest the need for more pressing work on the rapidly emerging new literatures from Kashmir.

“KASHMIR’S NECROPOLIS”: NEOCOLONY WITHIN A POSTCOLONY This book owes heavily to the founding and interdisciplinary work on Kashmir by scholars like Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Suvir Kaul, Mohammad Junaid, Nyla Ali Khan, Inshah Malik and the pioneering group Critical Kashmir Scholars founded by Ather Zia, Deepti Misri, Mona Bhan and Haley Duschinski, only to name a few. Their works pave the path to remind us that the complexity in representing Kashmir is still significant in 2023, and that literature and art create a tremendous critical space for newer possibilities and modalities to understand Kashmir. Scholarly work in the field of postcolonial literatures in conflict zones like Kashmir and Northeast India is relatively new. In fact, as this book suggests, the term “postcolonial” does not appropriately represent the concerns and issues in conflictual spaces like Kashmir. As mentioned earlier, Kabir’s book Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir remains one of the first books to analyze Kashmir’s “fantastic” and “desired” representation in the Indian nation-state. Her work studies Kashmiri writers, poets, and artists photography by British colonialists in the nineteenth century, as well as Bollywood films representing Kashmir at different political junctures that rethink Kashmir’s conflict and representation. Following her, an incredible array of scholarship has emerged on Kashmir in the last decade. Co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies, anthropologist

10

Introduction

Ather Zia’s extensive ethnographic work on gender and militarized political disappearances in Kashmir (Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir 2020) merges the literary and the political by tracing gendered resistance by women in Kashmir in searching for the “disappeared” Kashmiri men by the Indian state. Zia studies alternative methods of mourning by Kashmiri women and presents a decolonial discourse that produces “counter-memories” to state narratives. In 2022, co-founders of Critical Kashmir Studies, Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, and Deepti Misri published their fascinating interdisciplinary compendium, Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies that creates an intervention in the field with multiple perspectives and theoretical prisms to question dominant power structures, representation, legality, and postcolonial forms of nationstatehood and showcase the limits of postcolonial frameworks in this space. Misri’s own work Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India (2014) studies different forms of cultural representations to trace the history of gendered and state violence since the inception of the Indian nation-state after the Partition in 1947. Her work is especially useful in thinking through the optics of violence in Kashmir, as she claims, “violence must be understood not merely as a phenomenal event that occurs out of time and place but as a historically and socially specific process that moves in the realm of discourse and helps construct it” (Misri 9). The section on Kashmir in her book also focuses on “countervisual practices” (Misri 24) by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons in Kashmir (APDP) through the use of cinema, graphic narratives, and photography to highlight the state violence in Kashmir and the unique agential techniques purported by Kashmiris. Following such influential scholarly trajectories, one of the main themes Kashmir’s Necropolis explores is Kashmir’s status as a neocolony within a postcolony and how to articulate the violence depicted in the literary and cultural productions from this space. Achille Mbembe discusses the term “postcolony” as—“The notion postcolony identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship, par excellence, involves” (3). Within the postcolony, “champions of state power invent entire constellation of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires, and powerfully evocative concepts, but they also have resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain” (Mbembe 4 1992). In this, it is key to also point out that Mbembe emphasizes the use of “visual imagery and discourse” on the “nature of domination and subordination” (4). Mbembe’s discussion of the postcolony applies to the Indian sovereignty in the way postcolonial India operates with state technologies of violence and occupation on its peripheries. Mbembe also reminds us that the regime

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

11

of violence within a postcolony has a “grotesque and obscene” (4) version of “raw power” that distinguishes itself from other regimes of violence (Mbembe 10 1992). Goldie Osuri also extends Mbembe’s use of “postcolony” toward Indian sovereignty defining it as the “coloniality of (post)colonial sovereignty” (2438). Osuri studies the relationship between formations of sovereignty with that of “imperialism, colonialism and postcolonial nationalisms” in the Indian context (2434) in its intricate interconnections toward the formation of a postcolony. Osuri’s argument takes Mbembe’s understandings of sovereignty beyond the “classic European colonial period” (2434) to the present postcolonial present. She also calls our attention to the “moment of the emergence/ independence of postcolonial nation-states as the expansion of sovereignty over territories not popularly ceded” (Osuri 2440). I, therefore, use the phrase neocolony within a postcolony to describe Kashmir’s unique status caught in such a manifestation of a postcolony. In using such a framing, this book sets out to show how representation and discourse intersect in myriad ways to perpetuate “forms of violence that are structural, symbolic, or systemic” (Falke et al. 2) as reflected in the selected literature, art, and film. These forms of violence produce Kashmir as a “necropolis” in which the “basic capacities of human life are under a threat” (Ferguson). Roderick A. Ferguson reminds that “freedom has to be the proliferation and multiplication of capacities, and not the military and corporation” (“Keynote” 2023). Kashmir as a neocolony lacks basic freedoms and capacities of life under an oppressive military control.

FORMS OF VIOLENCE: NECROPOLITICS AND BEYOND The concept of “necropolitics” used in the book, is borrowed from Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics,” that defines the term as the politics of death within a sovereign nation. In Mbembe’s words, it is “the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (Mbembe 11). While chapter 1 directly delves into the extensions of Mbembe’s necropolitical power from Foucault’s concept of biopolitics in unique concatenations of violence in Kashmir in studying two literary texts, I want to highlight the book’s title and its focus on Kashmir as necropolis. The Greek word necropolis, literally, means “city of dead” (necro = death, polis = city). To be sure, in calling the book, Kashmir’s Necropolis, I am not suggesting a lack of agency, passivity or categorizing Kashmir as a “dead space.” On the contrary, each chapter showcases how Kashmir has been created into a necropolis in an endless warlike state where fear, threat of life and violence in its manifold dimensions have constructed an aberrant space.

12

Introduction

Kashmir’s Necropolis is, thus, an interdisciplinary book about the literature, film, and visual texts that have emerged out from and outside of Kashmir roughly in the last two decades. The book highlights a conflictual space that exists between two postcolonial nations and the curious problematique in defining this space in terms of a “postcolonial conflict zone” that exists as a liminality between statist occupations and nationalist fervors for seventy-six years since the Partition of 1947. Certainly, this book is not about taking sides in the already heavily saturated discourses about the Kashmir conundrum and its historical causality, oppressions on different sides of religio-cultural realms, and a statist militarization encroaching on voices and subjectivities of Kashmiri people. Rather, this book is invested in asking a different set of questions: How do the newly emerging literary and cultural productions on Kashmir represent the conflict-ridden territory and its people? And what do these literary, filmic and visual texts say about Kashmir’s conflictual space within the arc of postcolonial studies? As traced through the selected literatures, texts, and films, I illustrate the taxonomical challenges when concepts such as neocolonialism and postcolonialism do not fully define Kashmir. Thus, the book makes a layered argument—it argues that the texts reveal a curious gap within our critical vocabulary and taxonomies when it comes to investigate questions of violence and resistance in newer literatures, art, and film on Kashmir. I focus on the different forms of violence represented in the literary and cultural and, how to rethink agency, survival and resistance amidst such aberrations of violence in Kashmir. Caught between the two arcs of a landscape of beauty and splendor, using Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s phrase for Kashmir as the “territory of desire” for India (see chapter 1 for more details) on one hand and a ‘conflict zone’ on the other, this book investigates selected works to highlight what is lost between those two representational indexes. Kashmir’s Necropolis is particularly interested in literary and cultural narratives that offer possibilities to “recraft humanity,” to use Deepti Misri’s phrase, of the Kashmiri people whose voices are often erased or relegated to dehumanized spaces and to seek transformative possibilities through the exploration of literature and art. As mentioned earlier, Misri focuses on visual productions in Kashmir to showcase how one can rethink and “claim the human, and indeed to recraft the category of the human itself” (Misri 529). Her work locates new ways to understand humanity in Kashmiri subjects, who have always been under a certain invisibility. The chapters in this book return to representation and its pitfalls because representations have a huge obligation in “fram[ing] and mediat[ing] horrors of violence in order to generate ethical and affective responses” (Matthews and Goodman 1). In Violence and The Limits of Representation Matthews and Goodman present the potential and intricate violence that representational politics can convey. They reinscribe the horrors of violence that are intricately joined in a

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

13

“complex interrelationship with representation” and inform attitudes, beliefs, and power equations (2) that also call for affective responses. This interconnection with violence and representation is key in reading the new corpus of literature from Kashmir. Works included in this book urge us to look at Kashmir from different forms of necropolitical violence and their impact on Kashmiri subjects, the limitations of necropolitics, its other side as alegropolitics alongside the complexities of visual politics on gendered subjects in Kashmir. These frameworks of critical analysis realign us as readers and viewers to decolonize the gaze on Kashmir and Kashmiris and put them back in the center. As mentioned before, this book presents two related aims—looking at selected literary and visual productions, I trace manifold forms of violence that are aberrant and anomalous within the conflict zone of Kashmir. Second, the book presents alternate modalities to look at resistance politics amidst the violence reflected in these texts that enables spaces for a radical reading. The selected works note an ambivalence within the varied forms of visual, physical, and covert forms of violence. They redefine concepts of horror, agency, resistance, and the impacts of postcolonial violence on Kashmir’s landscape and people in its unique forms. Reading these texts offer possibilities for reconfiguring our visions and understandings of Kashmir and its people and they create spaces for listening when they speak. In this, the aim is not to search for an “authentic” Kashmiri voice, when questions of authenticity are always problematic and fraught within frames of essentialism and power. Rather, the different genres of work capture the ramifications of the crisis and create new ways of informing about Kashmir, forging alternate poetics of resistance and survival. Recent critical scholarship on Kashmir’s new literatures do not form a monolithic narrative. Patrick Hogan’s work on Kashmir highlights the importance of stories and literature in Kashmir, away from “the sociological, political, military or historical discussion of the situation of Kashmir” (2). Rather, as Hogan argues, his study of Kashmir “bear[s] on the literature and film, or more broadly, imagination” (3). Hogan rightly points to the colossal complexity that is Kashmir—the land, space, people, and the culture are not a monolithic one, and there are multiple ways of analyzing the changing “causes and consequences of this tragic situation” (Hogan 7). Interestingly, Hogan pits Salman Rushdie’s representation of Kashmir in his novels against Mirza Waheed’s works and finds the latter “distorting the larger picture” (Hogan 38) that is invested in a “political agenda” (Hogan 39), whereas Rushdie’s Kashmir in Shalimar the Clown presents an “openness and honesty in the larger explanatory design of the work” (Hogan 39). It seems futile to partake into a debate on which writer or literary production is better in depicting literary veracity in a complex conflict-ridden space like Kashmir.

14

Introduction

Although Rushdie’s literary work on Kashmir is not within the scope of my investigation, perhaps it is more significant to note what these two texts are doing in terms of representing Kashmir, in what historical juncture and how.6 Rushdie’s novel was written in 2002 when the burst of Kashmiri writers writing fiction centered on Kashmir had not occurred yet. Waheed’s novel was published in 2011, and those in between years saw a rapidly shifting Kashmir, with protests and violence erupting that were often couched in the discourse of two nation-states and of azadi.7 Elsewhere, Kabir discusses Rushdie’s novel Shalimar the Clown, as one that loops back to the notion of Kashmir as the desired landscape: “one time paradise on earth, whose most salient feature was Pachigam village’s sanctioning of the marriage of the Pandit Boonyi and the Muslim Noman in the name of Kashmiriyat” (Territory of Desire 164). For Kabir, Rushdie’s text also offers a lament for the Pandit exile from the valley but “the questions regarding this most obvious manifestation of ‘Kashmiriyat’s breakdown, are, literally, unanswered” (164). Rushdie’s novel is, of course, one of the first few Anglophone literary texts on Kashmir after Agha Shahid Ali’s writings that encapsulated the Kashmir conflict and the crumbling of syncretic harmonies of Kashmiriyat. Yet, instead of questioning the veracity of Waheed’s The Collaborator or its “political agenda” perhaps it is crucial to seek a different path here—how does Waheed’s text shift the representation of Kashmir beyond idyllic versions of Kashmir and Kashmiriyat, and why it is significant to read it in the moment of “second revolution” after the year 2008. As explained before, a fascinating plethora of Anglophone literature from Kashmir emerges after this time period that is telling something beyond Rushdie’s Kashmir. The critique towards literature from Kashmir and its associations with politics is not something new; it is an old accusation that often charges literary studies in becoming too “political” or historicized. Terry Eagleton’s famous claim in “The Ideology of the Aesthetic” reminds that: the aesthetic is thus the first stirrings of a primitive, incipient materialism, politically quite indispensable: for how can everything that belongs to a society’s somatic, sensational life “experience,” in a word—be allowed to fall outside the circuit of its reason? (328)

In other words, Eagleton defines the aesthetic as the “political unconscious” (330). Of course, Eagleton’s larger thrust is on aesthetics linked to political hegemony, but there is the other side of it, which is the space of resistance, subversions, and possibilities. Literature from a space like Kashmir that has been ‘made’ into a conflict zone trapped between nation-states cannot simply reside in an apolitical space, and arguably no literature is apolitical as Eagleton reminds us. Prominent Kashmiri writer Nitasha Kaul also explains that:

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

15

There is a generation of Kashmiris in the 21st century and especially in the last decade, or decade and a half that have tried to use art as a way of expressing their resistance, their feelings towards the state, their own experience of their life and that includes Kashmiris who are in Kashmir, Kashmiris who are not there anymore, or people from Kashmir who are not able to live there anymore. So, there is this multi-faceted endeavor, and the reason for that is there are so few avenues for people to express how they feel, that art becomes a way in which people try and do that. (Interview with Kaul 2021)

Referring to her own fiction and literary writing on Kashmir, Kaul adds that the divide between political fiction and fiction doesn’t exist because: how can it not be political given what it is about and the kinds of lives and life experiences that I am trying to reference in that storytelling. How can it not be political . . . when the personal is political, everything is political, so is literature, so is all art; it is all a political endeavor. (Interview with Kaul 2021)

THE “IMPLICATED SUBJECT” AND ACTS OF READING Within the set rubrics that devour the discourse and politicization of Kashmir’s landscape, historical junctures, and people, what is once again at stake is Kashmiri people from all sides whose lives are weaponized by religio-nationalist politics that are embedded in ultimate polarization. Also, sadly, when “resistance,” has itself become so easily co-opted in our present times into deeper divisive politics, perhaps the question must shift to the act of listening with care to Kashmiri people’s stories. I also turn to Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak who speaks of an urgency in “epistemological care” toward forming new solidarities through an aesthetic training that enables an ethical relationship with others (Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization). Danny Butt explains that for Spivak “the importance of aesthetic education lies in training of the imagination of the progressive bourgeoisie to ‘realize that social movements are co-opted by state and elite, with different agendas ceaselessly’” (Spivak qtd. in Butt 6). In this context, it is also important to emphasize my positionality in ‘reading’ the selected texts on Kashmir in the negotiation of speech, voice, and ventriloquism that often shadow people’s agencies, especially when it comes to a conflictual space like Kashmir. As an immigrant subject from the interstitial spaces of three continents, negotiating a diasporic Indian American identity, Kashmir is far away—a conflict that is “not immediate,” and it can be argued that in some ways my positionality is fraught with Indian roots from the space that has created systemic neocolonial structures of oppression for Kashmiri subjects. To be sure, this book is not an act of “speaking for” Kashmiris in any way,

16

Introduction

especially when there is a clear divide about “insider-outsider” narratives and speech-acts. Yet, there is a larger question of ethical responsibility as an “implicated subject” (phrase coined by Michael Rothberg) about who should be speaking about Kashmir, with which I carefully undertake this task. Using Rothberg’s notion, I place myself within this frame of calling “us” all outside the Kashmiri realm as “implicated subjects” as this tragedy keeps growing every year. In Implicated Subjects Beyond Victims and Perpetrators Rothberg reminds us of a new “political responsibility” through the concept of the implicated subject, one that is not “directly an agent of harm” but we are all implicated in an interconnectedness that can create new modalities of collective “solidarity across borders of identity and nation” (xv). Co-writing together, Kashmiri anthropologist Inshah Malik and Bangaloreborn performance artist and research practitioner Manolagayatri Kumarswamy point to the difficulties in claiming easy alliances from outsider positionalities and state that “the difference between an insider and outsider positions need to be spelled out, in order to make a correct political assessment of attempted alliances” (369) especially in the context of witnessing (gendered) violence in Kashmir. They caution against easy alliances and negotiate the “difficulty in achieving a feminist solidarity” (371) when both subjects experience and witness the violence in Kashmir in completely different registers. Malik and Kumarswamy explain that an insider “is burdened with excruciating memory” (382) and Kumarswamy’s postionality enables an “empathetic relationality with the people and emotive responsiveness to the land” (387). Their work is also a vital reminder that violence itself magnifies this insider-outsider divide, marking duality and oppositionality (393). Michael Rothberg, similarly, reminds us of the fraught subject positions occupied by the implicated subject. According to him: Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. An implicated subject is neither a victim nor a perpetrator, but rather a participant in histories and social formations that generate the positions of victim and perpetrator, and yet in which most people do not occupy such clear-cut roles. (1)

This is especially crucial in rethinking our roles as global citizens and our “modes of implications” in the way they are entangled with the historical privileges or inequalities that perpetuate in present-day injustices which continue to unfold amidst us (Rothberg 2). I read the selected texts in this study as one such implicated subject to stand in “long-distance solidarity” (Rothberg 12) that allows new ways of political thinking and being engaged

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

17

in concurrent ways to enable spaces of reconfigured visions about inequalities and subjugations. But it is also extremely significant to remind oneself that: recognizing ourselves in the position of the implicated subject—even in the multiple positions of implication that many of us occupy—will not automatically make us better people; such self-reflexivity can indeed become a form of narcissism or solipsism that keeps the privileged subject at the center of analysis. (Rothberg 19)

Certainly, this book is not about centering my subjectivity, instead I am interested in rethinking my uneasy positionality and our own complacency and seek ways in forming solidarities across boundaries. Chapter 1 of this book begins with two important works by Kashmiri writers, Mirza Waheed and Basharat Peer from 2010-2011. Both texts, Waheed’s debut novel The Collaborator and Peer’s memoir Curfewed Night highlight the necropolitical Kashmir and how to analyze the discourses of power and violence that are beyond biopolitical structures of the state. This chapter scrutinizes the impacts of violence on Kashmiri bodies which results in a civic, social death. It also points to an uncanny presence of dead bodies in both texts suggesting that corpses possess a “symbolic capital,” an agency beyond the human life through which the dead Kashmiri subject still speaks. While the chapter illuminates the unique concatenations of biopolitics and necropolitics that configure the space of Kashmir, it also points to the different ways the resistance politics are foregrounded in these two texts against the structures of violence through the presence of dead bodies. The book’s title also comes out from this first chapter that looks at the necropolis of Kashmir in which the Kashmiri body, caught between life, death, loss and even symbolically erased, still hovers in an eerie presence, and “speaks” back. Chapter 2 studies a different kind of violence in Feroz Rather’s collection of short stories, The Night of Broken Glass (2019), a title that evokes the memory of Kristallnacht, when pogroms were launched that arrested or killed thousands of Jewish people in 1938 Germany. Using this reference, Rather creates a volume of interconnected stories that create a horror in which Kashmiri subjects live in a constant fear of violence that is aimed at erasing the human subject. This chapter argues how the concept of postcolonial horror is redefined in Kashmir through these short stories. Using Adriana Cavarero’s term “horrorism”, I investigate how horrorism becomes a representative condition for the violence in Kashmir, and why it is imperative to distinguish the notion of horror from terror in defining the violence. The chapter also illustrates how the understandings of the horror genre from gothic to postcolonial horror cannot fully capture the “horrific” violence in Kashmir and how such a

18

Introduction

horrorism goes beyond an anthropocentric universe in affecting the surrounding life, where people and nature are all implicated. Moving past literary texts, chapter 3 extends the necropolitical presence of “death-worlds” (Mbembe 40) to analyze the film Haider (2014) and the impacts of violence on people and space that create specters haunting Kashmir. In Haider, director Vishal Bharadwaj uses Shakespeare’s Hamlet to create an intervention into the sanitized and fetishized history of visual representation of Kashmir. The controversial film belongs to a hybrid category of Indian cinema that has emerged in recent years as a form of critique of the popular Bollywood films and its normative construction of a pan-Indian consciousness. I begin with an exploration of the adaptation of Hamlet into the provocative Haider and study the presence of ghosts in the film, transformed from the Shakespearean trope into an example of Derridean “haunting.” I analyze the notion of “haunting” in the film to reiterate a violence in which “ghostly” elements seek answers in a direct indictment of the sovereign state; in this way, Haider shifts from Hamlet’s inner conflict to a political one in which Kashmiri subjects exist in interstitial spaces of life and death. While the first three chapters illustrate how the violent postcolony creates its neocolony in Kashmir, chapter 4 shows how the former colonial power is not yet done. In this chapter, I turn the focus beyond Kashmiri writers to study an interesting phenomenon. As the year 2011 sees a surge of literature from Kashmir, European interest in writing about Kashmir also emerges during the same time, blending familiar tropes of “exotic Kashmir” with superficial inclusions of the present conflict viewed from a western perspective. Using Subramanian Shankar’s concept of “epicolonialism” I focus on British writer and romance novelist Rosie Thomas’s novel Kashmir Shawl to show a certain kind of representational violence within the text. Shankar’s concept of “epicolonialism,” becomes especially valuable to trace the layers of in-betweenness from colonialism to postcolonialism and points to unique continuities between the colonial and postcolonial that are distinct from easy categorizations of “neocolonial” in the text. The chapter also reveals that behind “benevolent” representations of Kashmir and its people, the text enacts a kind of “epistemic violence” for the global audience. It is even more troubling that the novel was awarded “Best Epic Romance Novel of the Year” prize (2012) by the U.K. Romantic Novelist Association while extending problematic representations of Kashmiri children, artisans, and laborers in Kashmir that echo similar discourses presented in the state tourism video on Kashmir in 2017. The chapter unravels colonial discourses in Kashmir to study the relationship between the colonizer and the Kashmiri subject in the novel and what it means in the twenty-first century global market. It may appear that the study of Thomas’s novel moves beyond the ambit of violence and resistance followed in the last three chapters, yet I argue for the dangers

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

19

of a textual “epicolonial violence” that comes as a full circle toward maintaining the dominant and damaging representation of Kashmiri people within the postcolonial Indian nation and beyond. Caught between Eurocentric and “epicolonial” subtexts, Kashmiri people’s voices get fused into once again being co-opted within imperial frames as subordinate, benevolent and “misguided” subjects that even questions the legitimacy of the everyday struggle by Kashmiri people. Chapters 4 and 5 move toward questions of rethinking resistance and agency in two separate subtexts and look at the themes of survival and what emerges on the other side of necropolitics in Kashmir. Chapter 4 focuses on the poignant and catastrophic event of the Kashmiri Hindu Pandit exile in the early 1990s, when the entire Pandit community was forced into an exodus from Kashmir due to increasing militancy. I consider two texts, Siddhartha Gigoo’s novel A Garden of Solitude and Sudha Koul’s memoir The Tiger Ladies in their representation of the loss of homeland in Kashmir and the shift to refugee camps8 within the Indian nation. I study these two narratives within the frame of alegropolitics, defined by Ananya Jahanara Kabir as the politics of joy as resistance over crisis. If the book begins with the focus on necropower in Kashmir, this chapter shows an alternative existential mode, that are alegropolitical ways in which the Pandit subjects create life narratives of survival and resistance to overcome loss, mourning and to reminisce a homeland couched in the narratives of remembering versus not forgetting. These two works also become significant in a way that the story of Kashmiri Pandit exile is presented through complex, nuanced lens which illuminate possibilities of reconciliation and hope against the stark divides that are hegemonically amplified. Ultimately, this chapter also moves into the realm of resistance politics and how “alegropolitical” means become unique ways to show resistance through creativity, art, and memory. Chapter 5 turns to the gender question in Kashmir: it focuses on visual cultures, art, and photojournalism and how certain visual discourses present Kashmiri women as mourners and victims of the Kashmir conflict in the larger global visual domain. The coverage of Kashmir as a conflict zone has emerged as a critical tool of social witnessing in visual productions and the photojournalistic field. Images of and on Kashmir have undergone a slow transformation from exoticized images of glorious landscapes to the changing space of Kashmir as a turbulent and suffering conflict zone. In this transformation, the representation of women of Kashmir in images has undergone a transformation too. Post the Partition, when nation building becomes a larger project for the fledgling Indian nation-state, women in essentialized traditional garb have been used to uphold tradition. Especially when it comes to Kashmir, post independent India has used Kashmiri women in exotic optics to create a certain seamless discourse that forecloses resistance or fractures within the space

20

Introduction

of Kashmir. In almost all visual representations from the 1950s and 1960s, Kashmiri women become reified as the exotic “other” devoid of subjectivity in mainstream Bollywood. This chapter traces the women of Kashmir in images from the time of Indian independence till the present moment and argues that there is a triad within which Kashmiri women get locked: as victims of the conflict, as agents with direct political subjectivity with (for the lack of a better term) a voice, or as fetishized objects selling exotica. Against this kind of structure of representing women in Kashmir, this chapter argues for a nuanced understanding of resistance and agency beyond the standards of victimhood and invisibility for women in Kashmir’s conflict zone. By looking at photojournalistic images and art work, this chapter reconfigures ideas of postcolonial witnessing and agency through the notion of everydayness in precarity, what Veena Das calls “a descent into the everyday” which provides a glimpse of the quotidian of gendered existence within Kashmir’s conflict zone. In the afterword, I turn to India’s culture and creative industry in the present moment and locate how the presence of Kashmir has returned within the diasporic and postcolonial nation-state’s imaginary in disturbing ways legitimizing the nation’s violence in Kashmir. I consider blockbuster films like Pathaan (2023) and recent nondescript films like Dhoka: Round the Corner (2023) on OTT platforms to emphasize how they impact people with their “soft power” in maintaining control and producing consent toward continuing overt and covert violence in Kashmir. The following chapters seek to create transformative possibilities and spaces to “see” Kashmir. They point to different modalities and understandings of violence and agency in unique concatenations of power, biopolitics, necropolitical, epicolonial, and alegropolitical frames. Kashmir’s Necropolis, thus, addresses how we can shift our visions toward Kashmir and its people. Paulo Freire calls reading a radical act that involves resistance, and elsewhere Anne Meis Knupfer explains that reading can be a way to challenge oppressive structures (Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism). These works on and from Kashmir thus implore us to radically read with a gaze that situates the Kashmiri subject in the center so that we can look toward hopeful futures and possibilities to rethink the conflict and its violent consequences on people for over seventy-six years.

NOTES 1. Suvir Kaul explains the history of Article 370 and notes, “This was a constitutional arrangement, and the framers of the Indian constitution were fully aware that the history of [Kashmir’s] accession [to India] is fraught and needs to be respected and marked by a special constitutional arrangement and that is how Article 370 came to being.” (“Kashmir: A Postcolony” August 21, 2020). Kaul also points out that this

Kashmir and the Optics of Violence

21

arrangement of special status was not just given to Jammu and Kashmir but ten other Indian states were granted a special constitutional arrangement. The Act which had given Kashmir special semi-autonomous status for more than seventy years, including a separate flag and constitution, was abrogated in a siege-like manner. 2. Nina Masih et  al. explain that Kashmir accounts for more than 60 percent of communication and internet blackouts in India. For instance, in 2016, the internet was suspended for more than four months after violent protests erupted in the region. (“India’s Internet Shutdown in Kashmir,” Washington Post, December 16, 2019). 3. James Griffiths covers the blackouts in Kashmir and records that only in 2019 there were a total of fifty-nine blackouts of internet and communication. He traces the effects of blackout in Kashmir and explains that “a blackout is the most blunt tactic for online control, completely severing communications at the core level.” “An Internet Blackout,” CNN, August 9, 2019. 4. I borrow the term “scopic-regime” from Deepti Misri’s work on Kashmir, later discussed in the chapter, to explain how a certain kind of ocular attention is paid or denied when it comes to Kashmiri subjects. I add ‘necro-scopic’ regime to denote a violence that is a dangerous repercussion of such a structured “scopic-regime” on Kashmir. 5. In 2017, the Jammu and Kashmir’s state department of tourism released a film titled, Kashmir: Warmest Place on Earth aimed toward boosting tourism in Kashmir. This short film showcases the role of Kashmiris in the Indian sovereignty as one of serving the Indian tourists. Kashmir is reduced to a space of colonial fetishization, limited to stereotypes of Bollywoodian romance landscape, where the locals are ready to serve. The narrative of servitude is also stark in which all kinds of historical and political contextualization are missing. That Kashmir is the world’s most heavily militarized zone with ‘crackdowns,’ bunkers, or barbed wires is not even a reality in this kind of representation. For more, see: https://www​ .youtube​ .com​ /watch​ ?v​ =QYnHwzMTwqo 6. Sreyoshi Sarkar writes an article that is critical of Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown because of the way the text “elides stories of suffering, survival of people’s struggles to rebuild, heal homes and communities” against the reduction of Kashmir as a “tragic story of loss and violence” (23). Sarkar refers to Rushdie’s problematics in “worlding” the Kashmir conflict which valorizes “spectacular” kinds of terroristic violence, and the central love story reproduces the same fetishistic narrative of Kashmir as a space of adventure and romance (24). For more details see, Sreyoshi Sarkar, “Shalimar the Clown and the Politics of ‘Worlding’ the Kashmir Conflict,” Commonweath Essays and Studies 39, no. 1 (2016): 23–22. 7. Call for freedom for a free Kashmir. 8. As of March 2020, hundreds of militancy affected families continue to wait for government flats in Jammu. Ashutosh Sharma also reports that “In Jammu, the majority of the displaced Kashmiri Pandits now live in cramped, two-room flats comprising a room, a small lobby, a kitchen and a washroom, at migrant townships built by the UPA government at Jagati, Nagrota, Purkhoo, Muthi and Butta Nagar.” “We’re Worse Off than Orphans: Tales of Displaced Kashmiri Pandits,” Outlook India, March 29, 2022, https://www​.outlookindia​.com​/national/​-we​-re​-worse​-off​ -than​-orphans​-tales​-of​-displaced​-kashmiri​-pandits​-news​-188890

Chapter 1

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics Reading Violence in The Collaborator and Curfewed Night

“Don’t tell my father, I have died,” he says And I follow him through blood on the road and hundreds of pairs of shoes the mourners left behind, as they ran from the funeral, victims of the firing. From the windows we hear grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall on us like ash. Black on edges of flames, it cannot extinguish the neighborhoods, the homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers. Kashmir is burning1

Agha Shahid Ali This chapter2 begins with a homage to the great Kashmiri writer Agha Shahid Ali, whose lines from the iconic poem “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight” form the epigraph. I connect Ali’s poem in its representation of violence in Kashmir through the images of death and loss to the violence captured in The Collaborator (2011) by Mirza Waheed and Curfewed Night (2010) by Basharat Peer and analyze the discourses of power and covert and overt forms of violence that the two works present. The chapter first begins with a contextualization of events from the last decade that have occurred in Kashmir to present forms of violence Kashmiri subjects undergo in the quotidian of life. It, thus, argues that these two texts, one novel and another memoir, represent Kashmir as a unique postcolonial conflict zone that defies an easy terminology to understand the onslaught of violence and the varied forms of power. The violence represented in these texts merge biopolitics and necropolitics in which characters become the “living dead” within this 23

24

Chapter 1

emergency zone. To showcase this, I have undertaken a mapping of the theoretical trajectory to show the transition from Foucault and Agamben’s idea of biopolitics to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and use these theoretical frames to study violence in the two texts. The chapter, thus, concludes that within the two texts Agamben’s notion of the bare life is not enough to understand Kashmiri subjects living in this unique “postcoloniality.” The presence of death and the dead bodies go beyond bare life and shows how bodies become critical signifiers that construct a varied notion of agency. The origins of this chapter go back to 2015, when sixteen-year-old unarmed Suhail Ahmed Sofi was caught protesting against the Indian occupation of the Kashmir valley in the Nabral district and shot dead by the Indian paramilitary forces on April 18, 2015. He was suspected to be a terrorist by the Indian state which has since the late 1980s, reportedly killed more than a hundred thousand Kashmiri Muslims in encounters, “shoot-at-site,” torture, detention, custodial killings, and enforced disappearances.3 A Kashmiri tweeter tweeted after the slaying of Suhail stating, “Kashmir, once known as the paradise on earth has become a hunting ground for trigger happy Indian hunters.” Every year sparks a new and more brutal violence and as of April 2017, there have been reports of the use of a “human shield” by the army, when twenty-six-year-old Farooq Ahmed Dar was tied in front of an army jeep and paraded during the Parliament constituency election in the Budgam district of the Kashmir valley. Ironically, Dar had cast his vote that day and was later randomly picked up, beaten by the army and forced to be a human shield, a cautionary reminder to all stone-pelters who engage in protesting against the militarization of Kashmir. He was later released and continued to ask in shock, “What was my crime?” and why he had to undergo such dehumanization by the army, who till this date have stood by their decision to use him as a shield, despite violating Geneva Conventions and human rights. I select these two incidents as ugly reminders of the ongoing conflict with Kashmiri Muslim subjects seeking the end of Indian occupation in the region, a conflict which intesified in the mid-1980s and peaked in the 1990s and continues in this war-torn space. The spark of fresh violence and conflict ensuing from Suhail’s body that was mourned publicly amid hundreds of mourners, also acts as a reminder of the inanimate corpses looming in the two selected texts. These bodies are not impassive; they want to signify something and “speak” of the violence which ultimately reconfigures the idea of sovereign power and agency in emergency zones. The two texts ultimately also question the idea of a “legitimate” sovereign subject in postcolonial India and represent the space of Kashmir suspended in an onslaught of macabre and violent necropolitics. As mentioned in the introduction, in the book Territory of Desire, Ananya Jahanara Kabir reveals how the tragic history of Kashmir has been framed

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

25

within a discourse of fantasy and desire in which Kashmir becomes the postcolonial nation’s “fetish of desire” in the construction of a narrative of paradise that dwells in the nation’s imaginary but one that is starkly denied by ground reality. This “fetish of desire” is challenged by the two Kashmiri texts—namely, Mirza Waheed’s novel, The Collaborator and Basharat Peer’s memoir, Curfewed Night. As the two works reveal, the relationship between the state and the subject becomes based on state technologies of violence and a panoptic gaze of surveillance. I explore the after-effects of a continuous war and mass violence on the Kashmiri subjects in the narratives and show how a relentless intrusive violence seeps into the psyche of a society and forms a “gaze of violence” (Kaul) constructed by the state apparatus. The two texts illustrate the space of Kashmir caught in a unique necropolis, one in which Kashmiri subjects firstly become reminders of bare life, borrowing Agamben’s phrase, to denote subjects that may be killed with impunity in the war-torn region. Using the genealogy and trajectory of biopolitics from Foucault to Agamben, I illustrate how I use the concept of biopolitics in Kashmir and how the notion of bare life becomes a limited one to analyze postcolonial spaces like Kashmir. Thus, the theoretical trajectory in this chapter begins with Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics, shifts to Agamben’s use of the term and his idea of the homo sacer, (briefly defined as the figure who can be killed with impunity by the state). The article then makes a final shift to Achille Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics to show how “deathworlds” emerge in the Kashmiri politics and how we understand Kashmir within the frame of the politics of death, emerging from biopolitics and bare life. These theoretical shifts are, therefore, present to emphasize this idea of curious “postcoloniality” that captures Kashmir, one that denotes an impoverishment within our vocabulary to study terror and violence. The chapter also points out the limits in the specific context of Kashmir, if bare life becomes the only operative terminology there. As the texts reveal, a curious concatenation of ideas of biopower and necropower constructs the Kashmiri space that moves beyond the figure of the homo sacer to focus on dead bodies and their effect on this space. Caught between India and Pakistan as a territorial conflict, Kashmir saw a gradual rise of armed militants in the late 1980s calling for azadi (freedom) from the Indian state. The turbulent 1990s also witnessed the forced mass exile of the Hindu community, with a section of people claiming Kashmir to be merged with Pakistan. Since then, Kashmir has become one of the highest militarized spaces in the world. Nitasha Kaul rightly argues how Kashmir has evolved into a space that defies easy framing between just the two nation-states. According to her, Kashmir is not just caught between “India versus Pakistan, Hindus versus Muslim, or China-allied-with-Pakistan versus India” (189) and cannot be simplified in such a narrative of

26

Chapter 1

nation-states only. Instead, Kashmir has historic significance in the Himalayan mountainous chain, and the place and its people are not a monolith that can be confined to be identified with Pakistan, India, or China (Kaul 189). It is now a violent war-torn suspended space, which as Kaul reminds us, continuously erases the identity and unique history of the Kashmiri people. It is now a space that is defined primarily by state machinery and laws like Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and Disturbed Areas Act (DAA), which allow for any kind of policies of impunity to raid, arrest, and open fire on subjects that the state deems “suspicious” or “harmful” in order to maintain public order. Thus, the conflicted space of Kashmir may seem analogous to the camp, but one of the main goals in this chapter is to show how the selected texts reflect a space which has varied understandings of violence and politics of death. Peer’s memoir Curfewed Night, divided into two parts, gives a glimpse of Kashmir from the nostalgic years of a “fairyland” devoid of any tumult. Peer weaves his memory of a childhood in the idyllic times with the rich history and cultural fabric of “Kashmiriyat”4 that constitutes of Sufism, a strand of Islam that spread through Iran in the fourteenth century and which uniquely merged with Hinduism and Buddhism. The text showcases a gradual rise of insurgency and constant conflict between India and Pakistan across an arbitrary line of control to a shift in popular ethos toward resisting the Indian state’s brutalities and relentless episodes of torture and killings of Kashmiri youth. Through the horrifying violence, the text also becomes an elegy of a “paradise lost” of the author’s past reminiscences of Kashmir. Published in the year after Peer’s memoir, Waheed’s novel, The Collaborator is a disturbing account of the escalated conflict in the 1990s when the Indian state created ‘collaborators’ within the Kashmiri population to help the army gain information about the potential militants or ones who crossed the border into Pakistan to train and fight the Indian forces. Both texts become testimonies of Kashmir as a space of exception ridden with crackdowns and curfews where life and death are constantly under the necropower of the state. They also uniquely represent a violence over the Kashmiri people that push them toward a liminal space hanging between life and death.

FROM BIOPOLITICS TO NECROPOLITICS In this section, I am interested in what forms of postcolonial subjects in their corporeal life and death become excesses of sovereign power, so that they are abject not only in life, but also produce an abjection in death. Agamben in Homo Sacer argues that the camp is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

27

of the West in its construction of sovereignty, but in the case of Kashmir as a “space of exception,” a different figuration of sovereign power is being framed here, as a constant state of violence where life and death both become a “game.” The body is within the horizon of a certain form of symbolic meaning and exists under a “necropower,” a “death in life” (Agamben 20)—that ultimately creates a third zone for the colonized subject, here the Kashmiri Muslim subject under Indian-occupied Kashmir, who exists in a weird liminal zone between life and death. On the one hand, there is the presence of biological life, and on the other hand, their existence is in a permanent state of exception that can always potentially reduce them to a state of civic or social death. As mentioned earlier, the two texts reveal peculiar configurations of the two, biopolitics and necropolitics constantly merging together to construct the “living dead” (using Mbembe’s term in “Necropolitics”). One may thus ask, where does biopower end and necropower begin in this case within the politics of Kashmir? Here, it would be worthwhile to view this as a concatenation of a unique type. Before I delve into an analysis of the selected texts in how they present an understanding of these theoretical shifts to reveal Kashmir as a unique space, it would be important to chart the theoretical trajectory from Foucault’s biopolitics to Agamben’s notion of bare life. Michel Foucault used the term “biopower” first time in his The History of Sexuality, to focus on how disciplinary institutions exercise power to control and regulate human subjects. He explains how the politics in the modern state exert control over entire populations, and not just over those who threaten the state. Alex Murray also explains that “Foucault identified the body as the site where this power was exerted” (59) and this is how the modern state becomes a sovereign power. Some of the ways he mentions this happens is through separation, surveillance, and organization of disciplinary regulations over bodies through which the idea of a sovereign power is established. For Foucault, this exercising of a sovereign power over populations is not all bad—for instance, use of vaccination, prevention of disease, all mark the sovereign power “concerned at the site of the body” (Murray 59). But this same biopower can cast great evil and create a Holocaust, as Foucault maintained. Taking this strand from Foucault, Giorgio Agamben is also concerned with the limiting of human life by biopower. However, Agamben takes the biopolitics to another extreme where he sees the camp as the “biopolitical paradigm of the modern world” and he attempts to “complete” Foucault’s theory of biopolitics (Homo Sacer 9) Thus, Agamben extends the Foucauldian notion of biopower and explains that modern politics of the state is not a break from classical idea of politics but identifies the figure of the homo sacer as the paradigm of modern politics, as mentioned above. Agamben’s ideas were heavily influenced by Carl Schmitt, who analyzed Germany in 1930s and stated that the exception was the rule.5

28

Chapter 1

For Agamben, this becomes the key to understand the notion of bare life and homo sacer. He explains that the state can declare emergency, which he calls the “state of exception,” a “threshold” space in which normal functioning of law is suspended, and it thus becomes a space outside law—this space is occupied by the homo sacer. According to Agamben, modern sovereign power is intrinsically linked to the production of the figure of homo sacer, a figure that can be killed by impunity by the state without any punishment. Thus, the logic of sovereignty is the production of the homo sacer, a subject reduced to bare naked life, erasing all of his/her/their legal status and rights. He locates such a figure in the camp, as an example of a space of exception and modern sites like Guantanamo Bay. One of Agamben’s most controversial and incisive arguments is that in the modern state construction of sovereign power, anyone has the potential to become the exceptional figure of the homo sacer. This next section moves from Foucault and Agamben’s understanding and shifts in the concept of biopolitics and modern sovereign power, to the idea of necropolitics, as explained in the introduction. Achille Mbembe in his essay, “Necropolitics” discusses the extreme form of biopower that is unceasing and relentless and causes maximum destruction or death of populations. Necropolitics causes “death-worlds,” a severe space of exception. Thus, it is important to see the shift from Foucault and Agamben, and why this chapter moves to the use of Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics for Kashmir. I read the two texts in this frame of necropolitics and illustrate how it manifests as the severest form of violence used by the state over Kashmiri people. In “Necropolitics,” Mbembe emphasizes not on the exceptional figure that can be killed by the state, but the focus is on death as the central mechanism in certain postcolonial spaces. One of the crucial differences from Foucault and Agamben’s versions of biopolitics to Mbembe’s necropolitics is that within biopolitics, the central focus and analysis is life, or what kinds of life are controlled or killed; whereas, the central emphasis in necropolitics is death and not life. In the essay, Mbembe goes back to the idea of sovereign power and Agamben’s the space of exception and traces such spaces under colonialism. He analyses the figure of the slave in the plantation fields, living in a liminal state of life and death, a zombie-like figure who is constantly under the terror to die. Mbembe also presents examples of modern spaces under necropower like Palestine and explains that necropower constructs “death-worlds” “where large populations are the target of the sovereign” to erase their life, to kill (“Necropolitics” 29). Everyday life is under a constant “state of siege” (Mbembe 30) where land, water, air every space is under a power that is employed to spread maximum violence. He includes the covert and overt practices of necropolitics by stating that “daily life is militarized” by necropower, movement is restricted, and nonoperational local institutions lead to a slow death. According to Mbembe, this becomes a form of “invisible killing”

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

29

(“Necropolitics” 30). This kind of necropolitics goes beyond the biopolitical space in the way violence and “right to kill” is legitimized over large masses. This becomes an enactment of sovereign power, where biopolitics and necropolitics have a unique concatenation for the production of terror (Mbembe 22). This is precisely the kind of terror formation and state of siege that is important to locate in the case of Kashmir, as reflected in the selected texts. The Collaborator Mirza Waheed’s debut novel, The Collaborator focuses on the unnamed protagonist at a border village in Kashmir, named Nowgam, close to the ceasefire line between India and Pakistan. Three of the narrator’s close friends cross the border into Pakistan to join the freedom movement against India. The narrator is left behind in the village, musing on Indian army, Captain Kadian’s decision, to make him a mukhbir6 to stop uprisings for freedom within the valley against India-administered Kashmir. The narrator goes through an internal turmoil with this forced role of an informer of the state and reminisces a tranquil childhood that was without the “pressing fear” (The Collaborator 6) of security check-posts interspersed through the region like a menacing presence. Summing up the emerging conflict around him, the narrator states: In the years after I grew up, some of the boys either became guides and clandestinely scouted city boys across the border, into training camps into Pakistan, or became militants themselves to relieve their parents of their yoke of shepherds’ lives and give them proper homes when Kashmir would gain its independence. Many disappeared like that from time to time; I guess those who went to the city were luckier. My friends, all my friends, went away too, and God only knows if they will ever come back. Not many do, you see, and those who do, don’t live very long here. Because the army people, the protectors of the land, have decided that there is only one way of dealing with the boys: catch and kill. (The Collaborator 7 italics mine)

The above extract underscores the machinery of death that situates every Kashmiri subject within the fold of a “catch and kill” policy. Here, eradicating a sense of human subjectivity becomes a norm, an aberrant one that turns the entire of Kashmir into a zone of “living dead.” Herein, lies the difference between a Kashmiri life and that of the figure of the homo sacer. Giorgio Agamben explains that the human subject is reduced to become the very embodiment of the mysterious figure of the homo sacer, who may be killed but not sacrificed since the logic of sacrificing is to elevate the subject from the profane to the realm of sacredness. One of the main characteristics of the homo sacer is that such an accursed subject dwells in extreme otherness from human

30

Chapter 1

society, and it is in this very exclusion and abandonment by the state, it manifests its sovereign power. Agamben’s work is, indeed, important to understand Kashmir’s aberrant space, how it exists as a space of exception, a space beyond ordinary law and devoid of any human rights. In Agamben’s words: The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. In the camp, the state of exception, which was essentially a temporary suspension of the rule of law on the basis of a factual state of danger, is now given a permanent spatial arrangement, which as such remains nevertheless outside the normal order. (169)

In this context, Kashmir does become a space outside regular jurisdiction. It is a space of exception where all regular legal functions are suspended but what remains is the army’s “catch and kill” policy. Waheed’s text shows us that in the Kashmiri state of exception, the subject goes beyond the construction of the bare life, an exceptional figure reduced to the vestiges of life that can be killed without any retribution; rather, all subjects in this space are potential targets to be killed that constitute larger “death-worlds” (Mbembe 40) in this aberrant space. The unnamed collaborator’s aforementioned excerpt also literally matches Mbembe’s words to describe a space in which the sovereign power exercises technologies of destruction on subjects, “catching and killing” them, thereby “conferring upon them the status of living dead” (Mbembe 40). People are eternally under the fear of death that negates life. Interestingly, Mbembe’s concept of necropower becomes an indirect critique of the homo sacer, where in postcolonial spaces of exception the rise of necropolitics produces a sovereign power whose sole objective is a “maximal economy” of destruction and massacre (Mbembe 40). Thus, the Kashmiri subjects find themselves not only under a Foucauldian sense of biopower that exerts control over “life” and the population through certain technologies of power like bodily searches, checks and curfews, pellet guns and human shields as earlier explained, but in fact, this notion of biopolitics becomes “insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe 39–40). They now inhabit the third zone of the “living dead,” a necropower under which the sovereign power negates the possibility of any cessation of war. It is a space of exception in which the war is continuous and cannot end. In Waheed’s novel, as the collaborator sits at night listening to the firing of shells on his village, he ponders, “Why can’t they just have another war instead—proper, proper war—and get it over with” (The Collaborator 129). A “proper war” would mean an end, a limit to the constant onslaught of fear, violence and death of the Kashmiri people, instead Kashmir turns into an uncanny space and the only way sovereignty can make its presence felt is by the sheer

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

31

destruction of turning the living into dead bodies and throwing them into the borderland spaces. In the novel, the collaborator’s job, as directed by the ruthless Captain Kadian, is to scour the hundreds of bones and corpses lurking in mountains and valleys where Kashmiri bodies lie unclaimed. The collaborator investigates them to locate an ID card, or a weapon that would then incriminate these bodies as dead terrorists. One of most haunting moments in the text is when the narrator visits the Kashmir valley’s hidden area for the first time and witnesses piles of bodies thrown around and is suffocated with the eerie presence of corpses around him: There are probably six of them ahead of me. Ugly grins, unbelievable, almost inhuman postures and a grotesque intermingling of broken limbs make me dig my teeth deep, and hard, into my clenched fists. What an elaborate litter! There are bare wounds, holes dark and visceral, and limbless, armless, even headless, torsos. . . . It’s not easy, collecting identity cards and whatever else you can find on dead bodies. Bodies after bodies—some huddled together, others forlorn and lonesome—in various stages of decay. Wretched human remains lie on the green grass like cracked toys. (The Collaborator 8)

These corpses are a reminder of a terror which becomes intertwined in the production of sovereignty. The staged massacres further reduce the lifeless bodies to the status of skeletons, ghoulish presences, mangled limbs, but the lifeless bodies represent something beyond the bare-naked life of the homo sacer. These masses of bodies strewn over the Kashmir valley enact a strange tension between life and death. These bodies are not even provided graves or any kind of ritualized passing into the domain of the “dead.” On one hand, they share an identity with the slain who once was alive, which becomes the basis of ritualized mourning, parading, and the claiming of the body by the families from state authorities, and on the other hand, they also embody a troubled effect on the occupier and on the Kashmiri subjects, which derives a certain kind of significance pointing toward agency. The presence of these bodies in the valley time and again, thus, becomes the iconic face of the Kashmir conflict—they possess a certain agency coded within the lifeless corporeality and are also reminders of life, that poses a threat to the idea of sovereignty. Thus, Captain Kadian might want these dehumanized Kashmiri bodies to become “dead meat, that’s how we prefer them” (The Collaborator 3). Yet, the abjection of the corpse has a certain meaning which has the power to unsettle and terrify. The collaborator, sitting beside river Jhelum, watching these mangled bodies, once again observes: Macabre, horrid ghouls, on either side of the brook watch me from their melancholic black-hole eye sockets. Carcasses with indefinable expressions on what

32

Chapter 1

remains of their faces—I hope I don’t recognize anyone. This is what we get? They seem to ask. (The Collaborator 8)

Ironically, these bodies even in their death account for a certain agency and are not passive abject bodies lying in the valley. It is precisely why they are covered, hidden away from the general population in the hinterlands. Besides, these ghastly presences of the carcasses and corpses in their varied mutilated states are not mere specters that are buried into forgetfulness. They bear testimonies to the sheer brutalities and violence perpetrated on dehumanized subjects. Margaret Schwartz in her interesting piece “An Iconography of the Flesh” argues that corpses and “dead flesh” are “vibrant matter” (4). She studies the dead body as an “object in transition” (2) that “dynamically and diversely organizes the cultural, representational, biological, the subjective and the objective, the ritual and the metaphysical” (1). According to Schwartz, this dynamism of the dead body enables a “nuanced and materialistic notion of agency” (1). Schwartz locates a certain non-human agency in the dead body that refers to the memory of someone human but also points to a departure (4). Especially in the context of enforced disappearances and encounter killings, these bodies become vibrant manifestations of the statist torture and abuse and exist as collective unconscious of Kashmir, seeking to know if “this death is what [they deserved]” (The Collaborator 8 my italics). In the “iconography of the flesh,” the dead flesh signifies a liminal space between the living and the dead in its state of decomposing materiality that creates a sense of legacy that, according to Schwartz, in its grotesqueness mocks and seeks to know “whether we understand, whether we can decipher” (8) what the dead wanted. The collaborator’s surreal task to visit these corpses to sift through them feels like “conducting some sacred ceremony over the carcasses” (The Collaborator 48)—and ironically, even if the collaborator works for the state, he plays a key role to create a space to understand what the bodies demand in the identification of the injustice perpetrated. In a fascinating study on the economy of dead bodies titled The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery also focuses on bones and corpses that according to her, became political symbols in Eastern Europe since 1989. She reads them as “symbolic vehicles” (27) that transcend time connecting the past with the present. Verdery further argues that dead bodies have the ability to become effective political symbols and can affect socio-political changes. She calls it the “symbolic capital” (33) by which a political change of some kind is possible through the corpse. This signification of the corpse with a value or a capital to say something beyond the gruesome death and disappearance of the life also marks the narrative in The Collaborator. It illustrates two key points—first, that while Agamben is unclear about the

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

33

notion of agency in the homo sacer, there is something beyond the death of subject that still carries meaning within the body in the corpses which the collaborator exhumes and locates in the valley. In their death, their corporeality says something more, and the specter of the once dead haunts the necropolis of Kashmir. As Verdery states, the bodies and the bones not only challenge the past meted out to them but also rewrite history by their restless presence, “demanding accountability,” and thus, they are not “dead” (111). Toward the end of the novel, the collaborator subverts Captain Kadian by making graves for three days continuously for the bodies strewn in the valley. Instead of collecting the photo IDs for the Indian security camp, he carefully wraps each artifact found from the corpses and buries them with each body in makeshift messy graves with the thought that perhaps “someone may discover them some day—there will be some record, some evidence, of what they have done here” (The Collaborator 290). The collaborator’s leaving the bodies with connections to their past identities embodies a gesture that negates a sense of finality to these bodies. It gives the bodies a certain power and subjectivity to speak and record the atrocities done to them. Mbembe, once again in his explanation of necropower points out that the existence of a permanent state of exception in the occupied space produces a discourse of terror and a state of siege—a highly militarized state, (30) which kills the living-dead whose bodies exhibit a “strange coolness on one hand, and on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something” (Mbembe 35). Mbembe locates this change from the living-dead to the dead body under necropower and notes that the bodies and skeletons may be impassive, but they do not have any ataraxia, the state of tranquil calmness and serenity. Instead, they represent an “illusory rejection of a death that has already occurred” (35). They also become a spectacle of the necropower unleashed by the postcolonial state in a situation of constant aggression against an absolute enemy. Similarly, in the novel, the bodies unraveled by the collaborator, instead of a slow decomposition into nothingness and ataraxy, almost bear a sense of dynamic afterlife in constant tension with the past. One may argue that the collaborator’s final act of burning the entire “dumping ground” much later in the novel goes against this idea of the bodies producing agency in death and in fact destroys the evidence. However, it must be remembered that the collaborator after marking the final rites of these dehumanized bodies, returns to the scene to burn the desecrated space in an act of purging. He calls it the “last rites” (The Collaborator 297) and lighting the graveyard becomes the collaborator’s only act of resistance that he can claim as his own. In the collaborator’s words: I light the fire. There’s a buzz in my ear. It’s early evening. . . . Flesh, bones, hair, clothes, leather, rot, blood, combs, photographs, letters. Boys from the city,

34

Chapter 1

boys from the villages, boys from towns, boys from saffron fields, boys from the mountains, boys from the plains; rich boys, poor boys, only-child boys, and boys with sisters at home; weak boys, strong boys, big boys, small boys, singer boys, thinker boys, lonesome boys, naked boys, scared boys, martyr boys, brave boys, guerrilla boys, commander boys, soyeth wannabe sidekick boys, orphan boys, unknown boys and famous boys, boys—they all burn in the big fire I’ve cooked up, the fire I watch now, my fire, my only act, my only decision in years, my fire. (The Collaborator 298)

This fire becomes the unnamed collaborator’s only act in the entire text where he burns Kadian’s graveyard and despite the previous act of recording and marking their graves, the burning of the whole place symbolizes the act of claiming his agency and a defiance against the likes of Kadian. As the fires gulp down the entire valley of dead bodies, he claims, “I am burning death, itself” (The Collaborator 299) and this cremation against the burials, ironically, becomes his last “solution” as he knows that the unmarked graves would never get the final respect of the bodies from the state. The idea of the dead body’s afterlife and “use” is also highlighted by Costica Bradatan’s work, “Uses of a Dying Body” who explores the effect the dying body has on contemporary politics and culture. As he states: Under extraordinary circumstances, however, a dying body comes to perform political functions that a living one cannot even dream of. In such cases, the sheer act of dying can generate among those who witness it an uncanny mix of awe, repulsion, and fascination, which could be best described as a form of power. (Bradatan)

Similarly, these unclaimed and burned bodies in their brutal deaths enact a certain kind of “transcendence” (Bradatan) that performs a resistance that perhaps is not possible in the living subject. As mentioned before, Mbembe’s analysis of necropower doesn’t entirely push in the direction of exploring the “agency” of the dead body but his assessment of the bones reflecting a “willful” significance denotes the remarkable presence of the dead body as a haunting call for the return of the dead to say something in exceptional spaces. Curfewed Night If Waheed’s text shows a dimension of necropolitics and its effects on the Kashmiri people, Basharat Peer’s memoir represents the effects of necropower on people inhabiting the third zone between subject and object positions. As earlier mentioned, Peer’s memory of Kashmir fleets between a land with golden autumns and wintry nights with people warming themselves with

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

35

kangris7 and the muezzin’s call for prayers, to one where mornings in Kashmir clamor with calls for azadi. Kashmir becomes a grotesque space with rapid deaths of his school friends in raids by the Indian army, and schools turn into army camps. The first section of the memoir is important in setting up the mnemonic space of Kashmir that is mottled with “season of green mountains and meadows, blushing snow and the expanse of yellow mustard flowers in the fields” (Curfewed Night 4). The narrator reminisces about nightingales on willow trees and Kashmiri songs playing on the radio that celebrate the flowers of the season (Peer 4). This establishment of an idyllic Kashmir is starkly different from the memory of a homeland soon to be jarred by an endless war. As the memoir describes, daily life in Kashmir is quickly reduced to a series of “crackdowns” as more and more Indian military camps are set up in interior parts of the valley. In one of the chapters titled “Bunkeristan”8 Peer remembers, “Military vehicles, armed soldiers, machine guns poking out of sandbag bunkers were everywhere; death and fear became routine, like going to school or playing cricket and football” (Curfewed Night 46). Elsewhere, he remembers waking up to the mosque’s calls, not for prayers but for emergency announcements of arbitrary crackdowns: Aslam-u-alikum! This is an urgent announcement. The army has cordoned off the village. Every man and boy must assemble on the hospital lawns by six. It is a crackdown. Every house will be searched. The women can stay at home. Kashmir was rife with stories of soldiers misbehaving with women during crackdowns. But there was nothing we could do. (Peer 49)9

Foucault’s notion of biopower is useful here to understand how it manifests a control of disciplining and surveillance of life in order to establish sovereign power. The aforementioned depiction of Kashmir also represents terror as a way of life, as Peer notes, “death and fear” were the only norms of survival and existence. Kashmiri people are subjected to a constant “state of injury”— “a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty” where the occupied subjects are in a state of “death-in-life” (Mbembe 21). Thus, biopolitics and necropolitics fuse and merge to present a “unique formation and infliction of terror, as a way of life becomes a concatenation of biopower, the state of exception, and the state of injury” (Mbembe 22). The daily reminder of the mosque’s call turning into a call for crackdowns, and identity searches on the streets with the potential to be killed, or the daily raids on homes, all reflect a specific kind of terror formation in this space. It is crucial that Peer’s text reminds that Kashmir is not only a space of exception where all normal law is suspended, but it becomes a space where peace is not possible. As noted in The Collaborator, this memoir also emphasizes how the very project of necropower is against the ending of war.

36

Chapter 1

It must be remembered that Mbembe’s vision of modern necropolitics is based on his analysis of the occupation of Palestine. Although the “logic of martyrdom” in Palestine works differently in the Kashmiri context, the framework of necropower and the modality of killing in the emergency zone of Kashmir work precisely in the same way. Here, the sovereign power also cuts off Kashmir from the rest of the world in its daily militarization of life and its specter of terror. Kashmir’s social and cultural psyche undergoes a change and Peer remembers ten-year-old boys playing games on streets called “army-militant,” in which their cricket bats had become guns and tennis balls had become “hand-grenades” (Curfewed Night 79). This kind of acute domination over the psyche of the Kashmiri subjects also leads to the destruction of all civil and social institutions, and what remains is only the haunting specter of death. Not surprisingly, Peer recalls the post 9/11 world of Kashmir going through another series of changes when the Indian state establishes the “The Armed Forces Special Powers Act” (AFPSA): a law introduced by the Indian government, [that] gave all Indian soldiers posted in Kashmir the power to shoot any person to shoot any person suspected of being a threat. It also provided them immunity from prosecution in a court of law. (Peer 100)10

Post the establishment of this law, Peer recalls an incident about passing a rickshaw without a bulb at night that raised enough suspicion for a fatal response from the patrolling army (Peer 100). Even marriage celebrations undergo a change under this terror. As Peer writes, the age-old Kashmiri rouf tradition, a circular singing and dancing ritual at the groom’s house before he leaves for the bride, is ultimately eliminated from Kashmiri customs “after the evening of May 16, 1990, when Indian paramilitaries fired upon a marriage party and raped the bride” (Peer 106). This is particularly telling of an emergency zone where civilian life becomes a series of abnormal occurrences that become the norm. Discussing the effects of emergency conditions on everyday life Suvir Kaul indicates that the Indian army in Kashmir are there “not to police” the space but they are there to “shoot to kill in Kashmir: [and] not to warn, not to disperse” (“To Walk Past a Threatening Gaze”). Elsewhere, in another article “Diary of a Summer” Kaul also describes the capital city of Srinagar as “a city of shutters, with virtually no civilian traffic on the streets” (17). He concludes that his city and neighborhood are shrouded by a pall of silence that reminds him of the “silence of a mausoleum” (Kaul 19). This relentless violence seeps into creating terror formations within the Kashmiri pysche, even when it is not directly killing.11 Almost uncannily similar is Peer’s depiction of Srinagar in the memoir as a “city of bunkers” and a “city of absences” (Curfewed Night 124) where within the fortified city, the presence of violence

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

37

looms its oppressive gaze marked by sudden neighborhood graveyards where “martyrs” of the rebellion lay buried. It is also telling that the age of the dead in almost all tombstones are not more than eighteen, a haunting reminder that such violence aborts Kashmir’s next generation from life. Peer writes about a “rubble of a destroyed home” (Curfewed Night 67) lying derelict at one corner amidst the paramilitary trucks named Mahakal (literally meaning agent of death in Hindi) sprawling all over the city. This fear of death or potential killing by the paramilitary presence is what Kaul explains as an “intrusive violence” that perpetually becomes an embedded sense of terror in the minds of the people. This nonstop “intrusive violence” is also emphasized by the narrator in Curfewed Night as he reflects on the ongoing terror in the daily lives of the people—“Men and women who left for home for the day’s work were not sure they would return: thousands did not. Graveyards began to spring up everywhere” (Curfewed Night 30). In such a geography of oppression, everyday life is under the strictest control, producing a manifestation of extreme biopower over life, and as noted in the two texts, one notices a construction of “living death” through the militarized mechanisms. Peer describes one scene of a crackdown where soldiers “bark” to see identity cards and ask the queue of Kashmiri people to raise their hands, and new rules at schools create watchtowers and bunkers at the school fence to observe people and students. As the text explains, people almost become normalized to a Kashmir under siege (Curfewed Night 50–55). It is, however, important to clarify that biopower is not contiguous with surveillance and control, just like necropower is not contiguous with the massacre. Peculiar configurations of the two constantly keep forming and reforming in Kashmir to establish sovereignty. As noted in the two texts, extreme technologies of surveillance are allied with the “economy of the massacre” (Mbembe 40)—that is in this case, varied forms of biopower and necropower fuse in peculiar ways to construct the postcolonial sovereign power over Kashmir. Finally, instead of exploring the Kashmiri subjects as bare life unilaterally, these two works provide a glimpse in the ways where the notion of bare life perhaps denotes an impoverishment within our vocabulary to study terror and violence and limits the specific context of Kashmir, if bare life becomes the only operative terminology there. Agamben’s idea of the bare life is predicated on the idea of abandonment, on life exposed to death in a space of exception. However, as seen through the two texts, not every manifestation of the sovereign politics of death can be reduced to abandonment. Mbembe’s analysis calls into question the politics of death and the lifeless body, in which sovereign power does not establish itself with abandonment as its primary driving force. In many cases, the question of abandonment is not necessary for the production of killable bodies. Thus, the way sovereign power is forced and established in certain postcolonial conflicted spaces like Kashmir is varied.

38

Chapter 1

Waheed and Peer’s works situate new Kashmiri literature in English in a space where violence and terror become the way of life. Through these two texts, the chapter maps out how violence and power work in Kashmir in its daily life, and in death, and emphasize the need for better taxonomies when we study a conflict zone like Kashmir. As analyzed in the two works, Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, including Agamben’s extension of the concept and his idea of bare life provide significant theoretical grounds to read the forms of power and biopolitics and the reduction of Kashmiri subjects; however, the chapter shifts to show how necropolitics works as a constant formation of violence and terror within the two works that sets Kashmir’s conflict zone in a curious liminality, constantly hanging between life and death. Ironically, a Kashmiri militant once interviewed by Victoria Schofield stated, “They have no love for the Kashmiris, only for the land” (285). And that is precisely what this liminal space of Kashmir has come to mean within the existing political discourse. A Kashmiri life is just not abandoned to its barest form but is constantly under the threat of death.

NOTES 1. Ali, “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight.” 2. This is a modified and revised version of my essay that was previously published in the journal Review of Human Rights (RHR) in 2018. 3. Randeep Singh Nandal reports in Times of India that “the contemporary Kashmiri narrative is incomplete without the citing of unattributed 100,000 killed in the last twenty years of conflict. The same narrative also has an unattributed number of those who’ve disappeared: 10,000.” “Govt Never Addressed the Issue of Thousands of Missing Kashmiris,” Times of India, June 25, 2011, https://timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/india​/govt​-never​-addressed​-the​-issue​-of​-thousands​-of​-missing​-kashmiris​/ articleshow​/8987741​.cms (accessed October 2, 2019). 4. Chitralekha Zutshi explains the concept of Kashmiriyat as one that characterizes” religious harmony, secularism, a Kashmir’s uniqueness in the subcontinent.” This notion of distinctiveness was also marked by the ancient “Sanskrit and Persian narrative tradition through the centuries.” “Kashmiriyat: The Death of an India,” Scroll, September 16, 2019, https://scroll​.in​/article​/937512​/who​-killed​-kashmiriyat​-it​ -wasnt​-just​-the​-bjp (accessed July 12, 2022). 5. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 6. Mukhbir literally means an informant, here referring to the secret government informant for the Indian state. 7. Earthen mobile fire pots carried by Kashmiri people as a means to be warm in brutal snowy winters.

From Biopolitics to Necropolitics

39

8. “Stan” is the Urdu word for place—thus, the word is an ironical twist on the name of a place associated with bunkers (The place of bunkers). 9. In one of the most heinous and infamous crackdowns on February 23, 1991, in Kunan Poshpora village of Kashmir, all men and children were driven out of their homes during a night crackdown and Indian soldiers brutally raped women of the village. Asia Watch and Physicians for Human rights Watch (PHR) organization have claimed between 23 and 100 women had been raped in this incident. There have been series of investigations of the army regarding this incident; these cases are still impending resolutions till today. The Indian authorities have repeatedly dismissed all charges. 10. This law originated from the colonial era, emerging from The Armed Forces Special Powers Ordinance of 1942, promulgated by the British colonial government on August 15, 1942 against the Quit India Movement, that was spreading protest and resistance widely. 11. Ravi Nessman reports that Kashmiris are acutely traumatized by this unending war and the “rate of suicide, once unthinkable in this Islamic society, has gone up twenty-six fold. Nessman also reveals that depression and mental illness has become widespread in India-occupied Kashmir. Nessman, “The Wounds of Kashmir’s Neverending War,” 153.

Chapter 2

Narratives of “Horrorism” Postcolonial Violence and Horror in The Night of Broken Glass

There is a moment in Feroz Rather’s short story Souvenir in which the Kashmiri youth Mohsin undergoes brutal violence for asking monetary remuneration for tasks he performs for an army officer referred to as Force 10. Rather poignantly emphasizes the horrific moment of helpless horror in the lines: Mohsin had washed the car. He handed him the keys. “Two hundred rupees, sir,” he said. Force 10 took the keys. Using his long, bony fingers as pincers, he gripped Mohsin’s jaw and stared into his eyes menacingly. Then he slowly released him and at the last moment he slapped Mohsin. (Souvenir 135)

This passage epitomizes the enactment of such brutal violence on the Kashmiri body and how to determine intersections of horrific physical and symbolic violence on the subject. The last chapter studied two literary texts from Kashmir written by Kashmiri writers in the early phase around 2010, which then propelled a cascading of writing on Kashmir’s necropolitical space and life under violence and surveillance. If the last chapter rethinks questions of violence and agency in Kashmir, this chapter turns to a fairly recent collection of thirteen interconnected short stories, The Night of Broken Glass (2019) by Feroz Rather and returns to the question of violence over the Kashmiri body in a different way. Through Rather’s short stories I investigate the notion of horror and how it plays out in rethinking postcolonial violence. The Night of Broken Glass as a collection of intersecting stories presents narratives of horror that redefine the concepts of postcolonial violence and also horror. It articulates how “horroristic” violence transforms the body and questions the ontology of the human subject. Using Adriana Cavarero’s concept of “horrorism” I first discuss why I call these stories, “narratives of horror” and their distinction from the trope of terror. I also intersect and interrogate the 41

42

Chapter 2

concept of postcolonial horror which gets transformed in the stories, showing once again, the limits within the taxonomy in how we understand violence in conflict zones such as Kashmir. As Adriana Cavarero explains in her book Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, violence in our present time needs a different framing than terror, and she situates it as a kind of horror that has opposite characteristics from the feeling of terror. Cavarero explains that terror comes from the Latin root word terreo, or tremo, meaning the act of trembling in fear, which leads the body to flee from the source of terror (4). According to her, terror moves bodies. Panic is also an essential figure of terror. In Cavarero’s definition, collective panic from earthquakes and hurricanes brings the ambit of terror to fulfilment. Horror on the other hand, comes from the Latin word ‘horreo’ meaning “bristling sensation” that causes a feeling of frozen, “a state of paralysis” (Cavarero 4). Death in this trope of horror is part of the picture, lurking in the horror, but not the central part. Rather, according to Cavarero, this kind of horror is not interested in the content of killing, but rooted in human vulnerability, destruction of the body and its disfiguration. So ultimately, what is at stake is not the end of human life, death, but the human condition and its slow gradual deterioration, internal dissonance toward the “nullifying” of the human subject through violence, torture, “even more than killing” (Cavarero 9) the human being. I use this notion of perpetual “horrorism” to read Rather’s short stories. As previously mentioned, the quote at the beginning of this chapter is extracted from the story titled “Souvenir” in which Rather depicts an oppressive horror surrounded by stasis and helplessness in Kashmir’s conflict zone. The trope of horror within postcolonial inquiry is not a new one—as Ken Gelder states, horror has been defined broadly in two ways that is important also for the field of postcolonial studies (35). In “Global/postcolonial Horror” Ken Gelder states that firstly, “horror enters into postcolonial discourse when borders and boundaries are denied the sanctity” (35)—this takes into account horrors of merging boundaries that are open contacts between bodies, national, hybrid spaces, “infection and inhabitation” of identities (Gelder 35). The other kind of horror is that of the “return of the repressed,” (Gelder 35) what was thought to be over returns to haunt and claim in a form of postcolonial haunting. Shiv Ramdas also explains that “a large category of postcolonial horror fiction consists of those stories that directly engage with their colonial heritage, confronting its legacy and contemporary impact-head on” (“Super Natural or Super Unnatural”). For Ramdas, postcolonial horror is a “resurging genre” that needs attention and exploring in our present. Indeed, the neologism “postcolonial horror” also looks at writers utilizing elements of horror—including supernaturalism, gore, ghosts or spectral entities—to question power, gender, and hierarchical relationships in everyday life. Another kind of postcolonial horror looks at demons, witches, and “othered” beings

Narratives of “Horrorism”

43

symbolically forming a resistance and agency against the colonial structures of power. In such cases horror creates a space for the decolonizing possibilities and imaginations. Investigating the growing field of postcolonial Asian Gothic, Faustina Paustin explains: Postcolonial and Asian Gothic is a growing genre of literature and film that takes the Western Gothic narrative and subverts it to reclaim the voice that was denied it in the Western canon. Postcolonial and Asian Gothic literature uses the same tropes as those found in Western Gothic narratives, but uses it to decolonise and dismantle imperialist narratives. (4)

These framings of horror and gothic elements do not necessarily cover or expand to the narratives of postcolonial violence and the horror experienced in the precarity of life in the new literature on Kashmir. In the mentioned short story “Souvenir” by Rather, the central figure is an old man habituated to pray and feed gathering pigeons at a shrine close to his house. The story reminisces back to a moment in the 1990s, when warlike conditions sieged Kashmir and the narrator remembers the impacts of a covert violence on the lives of Kashmiri people. As the narrator states: When the war came to Srinagar eighteen years ago, his visits to the shrine were followed by long walks through the city. He picked up the shells of the bullets from where the guns had been fired by the soldiers. He brought these shells home and hid them in a cache. . . . “I don’t want Tariq to see the bullet shells when he goes out to play,” he had replied. (The Night of Broken Glass 68)

Tariq, his son, on the other hand, a child living through conflict and violence has no faith left; he refuses to pray at the shrine and only goes there to feed the pigeons because it pleases his father. His world is perforated by moments of violence and hiding from an impending horror constantly lurking in his daily life. Their downtown house is often in the crossfire of bullets between insurgents and the military, and he lives through “reek of gunpower and charred flesh” (Rather 70). In a poignant moment in the story, he collects the bag of shells from his father’s room and strings them in a rosary, hanging them in his room. Two things emerge in the lived world of this family: First, the state of continuous warlike conditions in Kashmir presents a complex phenomenon of variable forms of covert violence. Second, the narrative in “Souvenir” is one of horror and not of imminent death from which one flees; it is a state of impending violence in the dailiness of life and the horror of living amidst conditions that target the vulnerability of the body. Killing and death are not any more the “elementary goals” (Cavarero 12) but there is an emphasis on horror that perpetuates a feeling of choking and recognizing the “fragility

44

Chapter 2

of life” (Cavarero 101). Adriana Cavarero explains that for contemporary violence, the phenomenology of horror has changed—horror depersonalizes and destroys the human subject’s sense of selfhood. For instance, the story “Souvenir,” captures another moment in which Tariq is asked to show his ID to the military because he has come to the shrine to feed pigeons. He is later grabbed by the soldiers, forced to use their gun and shoot the pigeons that he had come to feed. It is a moment of macabre humor performed by the whim of soldiers and underscores the horror in the moment—“playing” with the gun ends in the death of the pigeons that Tariq had come to feed, his only moments of normalcy and solace in the day punctuated by horrifying violence enacted through his own hands. As Tariq blindly presses the trigger and kills two pigeons, the gruesome moment makes him search for something “that would give [him] assurance” (74), and he looks inside the shrine not too far away. His searching eyes fail to find it. Later, in another interconnected story, “The Miscreant,” Tariq is picked up again, this time arrested by the army, and the only thing he remembers is the “wide open eyes” of the dead pigeons haunting and traumatizing him. This embedded violence Tariq lives with reduces his selfhood to a space of extreme vulnerability where death is not the only source of fear. Homi Bhabha recently states that the “postcolonial predicament is in extremis” as we are in the “era of vulnerability” (267). Stories like Tariq’s become a reminder of such “extremis” and present a glimpse of precarity of self under horror. Young Kashmiri men like Tariq reveal not just an existential horror within the necropolis of Kashmir but also one of ontological horror. In the book, Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative, Ruthellen Josselson et al. examine how stories and narratives create a certain framing of identity for people. They use the phrase “narrative identity” (4) referring to the selfhood people construct through stories. According to Josselson et al., constructing the selfhood through narrative also reflects the surrounding world and the building of the everyday self in it. Rather’s stories reflect personal and collective spheres of construction of selfhood that ultimately point to “writing the self in social practice” (Identity and Story 154). If storytelling and narrativizing construct a certain selfhood and subjectivity, these interwoven, often fragmented stories also present the effects of violence on the construction of self—that is the subjects narrating the stories represent a condition in which they are the “living dead”. The precarity of horror is a state they exist in relentlessly. In writing this notion of a “horrified” selfhood frozen in stasis, I am not arguing that Rather is limiting Kashmiri subjects into a register of horror by “writing this self” that lacks agency within the cloak of violence surrounding it. Instead, my adoption of horrorism in Rather’s stories points to an articulation of violence by a postcolonial nation at its margins that reduces Kashmiri subjects to a state of devastated disfiguration of self.

Narratives of “Horrorism”

45

Rather’s work is, thus, significant in the way it provides a different modality of understanding the violence in Kashmir. In a recent study, Violence in South Asia, Anindya Purkayastha et  al. argue that “the characteristic of contemporary violence in South Asia lies in the implosion of violence within the realm of nation-states, as opposed to its external geneses of earlier forms and years” (8) from colonial era, Partition, and post-independence violence. While their work and specifically, Idreas Khandy’s discussion on violence in Kashmir are important to highlight the causality and need for reimagining insurgency and violence of the Kashmiri people’s movement towards “azaadi”, the state mechanisms of violence, torture and their effects on the everyday are not within the parameters of their study. Khandy discusses state technologies of violence as “repression in the form of massacres and torture, and the dazzling lights of neoliberal progress” (Khandy 204). My reading of Rather’s stories asks us to return the gaze on Kashmiri people and on what happens to questions of selfhood and human dignity swept by such violence. Writings and stories like Rather’s present an alternate view of statist violence in the ways it impacts the construction of Kashmiri life in the everyday. Aroosa Kanwal’s work also uses “horrorism” to study Rather’s fiction and she applies Francois Debrix’s notion of “pulverization the body in pieces” to relate to what happens to the Kashmiri subject under such ongoing horror. Her study of Rather and Mirza Waheed’s works not only uncovers the state’s violence on the Kashmiri being but also how the subject’s “dismembered condition nullifies them as humans and civilians” (Kanwal 15). Kanwal’s article rightly frames the Kashmiri body within the locus of contemporary violence wrought by the state. This chapter agrees and follows a similar argument to Kanwal’s, but it also takes a different direction through horrorism located in the text. It argues how sociality and relational capacity of subjects are completely transformed within such a matrix of horrific violence. The human body, the subject and its relationship with nature, people and surroundings shift in this extreme horrorism. Let us consider a moment in the aforementioned story “Souvenir,” as Tariq and his friend Mohsin are picked up by Force 10 and taken to the “camp” where torture ensues. The story ends eerily with Tariq singing and repeating a haunting song that he creates with the refrain, “Bring me back my moment/Bring me back my pair of pigeons” (Night of Broken Glass 124). The story with its winding narrative, depicts characters fleeting in and out, all depicting a stasis, a frozenness under a continuum of violence. The emphasis on “bringing my moment” back in Tariq’s song is also a reminder of the breakdown of the subject’s physical and bodily relationship with time. The feeding of the pigeons at the mosque becomes the last act of human meaning that Tariq remembers before violence takes over and breaks down every understanding of time, space, and meaning.

46

Chapter 2

Characters like Tariq’s father and mother, who wait for their son’s return every day, catching every sound in a state of horror, wondering if their son died, or the prematurely aging half mother of Mohsin in the story “The Stone Thrower,” whose husband Hamid disappeared seventeen years ago, when she was twenty-four years old (137) all become haunting reminders of a complete breakdown of the human subject’s association with everyday societal and human acts of meaning and shared space. In one of the most poignant gendered narratives, Rather’s focus shifts to the women of Kashmir who live in a different kind of horror. Mohsin’s mother waits “Holding her husband’s photograph, framed in glass and wood, she had picketed in the public parks along with other women who had lost their menfolk to the unrest that had broken out in 1989” (“The Stone Thrower” 137). The status of married women in the patriarchal setting changes to what is labeled as “half wives”—women stuck in a limbo, as they eternally wait for their husbands to return, husbands who have been “made” to disappear, picked up for questioning by the army, or in worst cases, killed, but in either case, their imminent condition suggests death. Yet, without any physical record of death, the women keep waiting pushed to shadowy existences. Mohsin grows up not knowing his father at all but hears of his “disappearance,” constantly wondering if he is dead or alive. Another story titled “Summer of 2010” revolves around the sick baker Rahman who slowly perishes away in the looming horror of boys killed daily in the summer conflict of 2010 in Kashmir. The story crisscrosses timelines and goes back to the 1990s with the emergence of violence and militarization in Kashmir, as Rahman and his wife Nagin experience the changing times around them. The story recalls instances of local people stopped and slapped by Indian soldiers because the “identity card did not have a stamp” (Rather 99). One of the local doctors states, “We live in a different time now. It is all the same . . . whether we live or die, what difference does it make?” (“Summer of 2010” 99). All these characters such as Tariq, Mohsin, the halfwives, Nagin and Rahman represent life under a violence that transforms their selfhood and bodies to a new register, one which breaks down all social communication, meaning, time, wakefulness, and sleep. Even sleep becomes a source of dread and not regeneration. Rahman who continues to languish in his mysterious illness tells his wife Nagin, “I’m afraid of sleep. . . . When I fall asleep, I feel I’m falling through darkness” (“Summer of 2010” 111). Horroristic violence seeps into the lives in a perpetual breakdown of everything that is familiar and meaningful. The question of a “changed time” or a relationship with temporality is what I want to draw our attention to in these stories and its relationship with the Kashmiri subject. The catastrophes initiated by violence lead to the space

Narratives of “Horrorism”

47

of “unheimlich” or the unhomely, where each of these characters’ corporeal relationship to time and everything known shifts. In “The Summer of 2010” Nagin’s connection to everything mundane and spiritual transforms. The narrator states: At the end of a long day in mid-July, hot and exhausted, she came out of the house and sat on the veranda. She looked westward, beyond the twist in the road, at the searing roofs of the houses. A strange restlessness overcame here, as though the gloaming contained an invisible demon of weight swelling inside her. It was then that Ali Mohammad began to give the azan. His voice had always been a smooth stream. But of late, as the curfew continued, it had begun to quaver. The soothing, graceful notes were missing and the recital sounded cracked and raspy. (108)

This “invisible demon of weight” is the pervading horrorism that takes over life’s minutiae and Kashmiri subjects become the Other within an aberrant time and space. The impact of violence on a human subject’s association with temporality has been studied by anthropologist and physicist, Eric J. Haanstaad who focuses on the notion of tachypsychia or the “distortion of perceived time that often accompanies violent or traumatic encounters” (72). Haanstaad’s scope of investigation is broader, and he is interested specifically in how “the lens of violence [can be] a method of interpreting the subjectivity and relativity of time itself” (76). He is also interested in how the “temporal malleability occurs” (76) under violence. His reiteration of tachypsychia becomes a crucial reminder of how the perception of time alters under the onslaught of violence. In the above extract, Nagin’s experience of the mundane every day, something that is a source of potential relief with moments spent on the veranda and listening to the azan prayers, shifts to one of restlessness, fear and an “invisible demonic weight” on her. The sounds of prayer lack the “graceful notes” and fail to offer her repose amid the swelling ethos of violence around. Rosalyn Diprose’s incisive work on violence also argues for a symbolic form of violence and explains that violence is not just located when a knife or hand reaches the skin (“Community of Bodies: From Modification to Violence” 382). According to Diprose, our bodies are “formed and transformed through the sharing of social meaning in community with other bodies”... “It is from the sharing of meaning in community with other bodies that a dynamic sense of belonging to a social world arises, a sense of belonging without which we could not live” (382)., Thus, Diprose explains that it is beyond just the shared sense of sociocultural meanings that we identity ourselves or recognize each other. It is a distinct kind of “familiarity located in the body,” and our “perceiving of the world” through bodies. Thus, bodies also construct or share “social meaning” in communities in which “they dwell” (Diprose 382–383). This kind of meaning shared by bodies in communities is transformed by the

48

Chapter 2

violence. The mode of belonging with space also changes with the effect of such horrorism. For instance, in 2019 Kashmiri bodies literally underwent violence signifying the body, when people were bodily “marked” with an official “pass” stamped on hands for traveling on the national highway in Kashmir. The incident occurred after an already controversial civilian movement ban was reserved on certain days for the security of service convoys.1 This militarized stamping of the body as a sign of statist approval is yet another example of how “horrorism” enacts on bodies. It is a reminder of a symbolic negation of the “other” as a subject, erasing its meaning. It is a form of violence as “horrorism” that deprives bodies of meaning, and it is here, when the symbolic and physical violence meet and become real. The feeling of palpable horror then is a form of violence that deprives bodies of meaning—bodies are stripped of the ability to define a subjective meaning in the shared community with other bodies. They are weakened. These narratives, thus, present an unnamable horror that permeates through bodies in a larger symbolic violence. Rahman languishes away from an “illness” that has no diagnosis from the doctor, but is said to be a “sick in [his] heart” (Rather 110), and Ali Mohammad’s azan that used to be beautiful and had now “begun to quaver” with “soothing, graceful notes . . . missing” and Nagina’s feeling of “fear crawl up her skin” while peeping from her window are all moments of horrorism that shifts the understanding of violence beyond the focus on the mutilated body and the “aesthetics of flesh” (Kanwal 10). It is a kind of horrorism where real and physical violence merges with a psychic one toward the complete “violation of the being” (Diprose) and annihilation of the Kashmiri subject. It is interesting that Rather’s collection of stories borrows its name from the titular historic Kristallnacht (‘The Night of Broken Glass’ in translation) pogroms marking the night of November 9–10th in 1938, Germany, when violence took over the streets and Jewish homes and streets were covered by shards of broken glass, marking the devastating violence around. Kristallnacht, of course, does not mark one night but serves as a reminder of a series of wave of violent pogroms which lingered on and had far reaching after-effects on what was to come in Germany after 1938. It can certainly be argued that the two events and their comparison are problematic, that the Holocaust and Kashmir’s conflict are entirely different in nature and magnitude. While that is true, Rather’s use of the title and reference to the Kristellnacht conveys something interesting. It points to the edgy premise that Kashmiris live through the violence of lingering, continuous nights of horror. Perhaps, instead of a direct comparative reference, we can also read Rather’s title as a plea for human empathy and identification for Kashmir by a Kashmiri writer toward a larger global arena, located beyond Kashmir and the Indian state.

Narratives of “Horrorism”

49

As traced so far, Rather’s stories, thus, bring to vision the violence on people, and their daily livelihoods transformed into a macabre metamorphosed existence. One story stands out, that seemingly poses no outwardly manifestation of violence, but performs an allusion of the catastrophic Bijbehara massacre of 1993. In “The Cowherd,” Rather strategically uses the Kashmiri name Bijbyor and unravels the story of Gulam and Halim’s lost son Jamshid, who is taken by the powerful and prophetic Syed Anzar. On the surface, the story reflects the caste tensions and hierarchies existing in Kashmir between Pirs, Syeds, and the tannery laborers, or the “watuls” as the story indicates, who are at the bottom of the caste chain. But along with its critique of caste, Rather uses this story as an allusion to the night of October 22, 1993, when Border Security Forces opened fire on civilians for protesting the siege of the holy Hazratbal shrine, and killed as many as thirty to fifty people, including children2. The tragic incident occured in a children’s park where Ghulam Qadir Shah, a woodcutter’s son was killed in the firing. Inarguably, Rather uses the characters in “The Cowherd” as reminders of that dreadful night, but the story also exposes caste tensions within Kashmir when Gulam’s family is ostracized as “impure” and “contaminated” because of their work with dead animals (Rather 149). The underlying caste dynamics is clear as the narrator reminds, “If Syed was at the top of echelon among the castes in Kashmir, Sheikh lurked somewhere near the bottom. If pir signified knowledge, purity and culture, watul denoted the stink of faeces, scavenging and raw leather” (Rather 146). The story’s focus on food, hunger, and the dead cow creates a slightly ­different ambience in the collection. Jamshid, the son of Gulam and Halim, is adopted by the upper cast Syed Anzar Shah. Jamshid’s grandfather, the cowherd Sultan Sheikh, goes mad in anger and perpetual hunger. The story casts a disturbing reflection of the metamorphosed existences of doubly minoritized Kashmiri people. As hunger and an eternal wait claw through Sultan Sheikh and his family, it becomes a metaphor of Kashmir in the present. A dead cow, from a rich neighboring family of Rafiq Galwan lies frozen in the snow, a possible source of food for the family. Desperate in hunger, it is struck by an axe, blow after blow by Gulam and his father Sultan Sheikh. Sheikh, strikes repeatedly at the dead animal till the entrails and insides spill out in a macabre moment, and he begins to hurl the dead animal’s chopped carcass on the trees and nature, amidst a fit of hellish laughter and tears. The story ends in this absurdist moment, encapsulating the crux of Kashmir’s present. Nature, food, eating, father and son relationships, everything has metastasized into an absurd disarray negotiating between the living dead and the extreme abject—the flux of decaying flesh of the dead cow. Lisa Guenther, in her work on racial and colonial violence on prisoners, explains that such structures of violence have an effect on psychic and lived

50

Chapter 2

experiences of subjects. Similar to Diprose’s emphasis on social meaning and the body under violence, Guenther “highlights the manner in which one’s mode of being becomes undermined or distorted through the systematic deprivation of or exclusion from generalized patterns of social relations” (Body/Self/Other 5). Guenther’s work points to that sense of collective breakdown that occurs under extreme systematic violence, although she also emphasizes on the possibilities of a collective resistance (Dolezal & Petherbridge 6). “The Cowherd” evokes a certain unspeakable horror and breakdown of meaning. There is a silent resignation in Halim and her husband Gulam, after losing their son. All they care about is to manage the gnawing hunger and search for food. I want to draw our attention to the ending of the story with the dead animal’s flesh thrown around in nature. Here, Rather’s language is haunting, emphasizing the vulnerability of human bodies but also the blurring of boundaries between the human and the animal. The cowherd Sultan Sheikh’s family are members of the lower rung of society and depend on the animal, its hide for their daily wages. They also question the village condemnation of their “eating dead animals” as food, when they must kill the animal for hide. The focus of the story shifting to the human bodies in hunger, Halim lying on the floor with “eyes sunken . . . her hips narrowed and her skin became dry and desiccated” (150) to the cow’s corpse and carcass lying in the riverbank, “the shriveled old beast” chopped for food, creates a chilling moment when the horrorism of the stories has turned to something else. The focus is on both Halim and the cow’s corporeal ontology in the flesh, with the question of how to reimagine existence in Kashmir in the onslaught of everyday violence. “The Cowherd” especially breaks down this centering of human subject and evokes a blurring of boundaries between human, non-human and nature within Kashmir’s necrotopia. As Gulam looks toward Rafiq’s house with smoke wafting from the chimney, he imagines the “sumptuous dinner being cooked” (150) with pangs of hunger gnawing in his stomach as “a dog howl[s] in the distance” (151) and a snow-laden bough breaks off with a loud crack. The story’s refigured attention to the body, nature, and flesh in the end determine a “corporeal relevance of every being” as Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues in his ontology of the flesh in The Visible and the Invisible. This story brilliantly hints at dynamic possibilities in differing ways of “seeing” and the question of “corporeal ontology” that breaks down hierarchies, and a certain centering of human subjectivity, in which the focus is on “flesh that maintains an intercoporeal levelling” (McBlane 186). Angus A. J. McBlane studies Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh and his emphasis on the body. He extends the thinking toward the “corporeal ontology” of human life which “is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend on our continued survival” (Hayles qtd. in McBlane

Narratives of “Horrorism”

51

187). Cavarero’s notion of horrorism, of course, is locating the corporeal vulnerability of human bodies, and what happens when extreme violence is aimed at not just killing the human subject but also in disfiguring the corporeal dignity and the unity of the body. As Cavarero states, this is a kind of violence that is not content merely to kill because killing would be too little, [it] aims to destroy the uniqueness of the body, tearing at its constitutive vulnerability. What is at stake is not the end of human life but the human condition itself, as incarnated in the singularity of vulnerable bodies. (Cavarero 8)

However, “The Cowherd” points to something beyond horrorism of this kind in its attention to the disfigured body of the dead animal, the chopped body parts of the cow, intended for food. It, instead, emerges a scene of disgust and horror with Sultan Sheikh throwing the flesh at the trees. The narrator toward the end of the story observes: Sultan was deaf to his son’s calls. His eyes filled with tears and he threw the axe away. He picked up the pieces of meat he had shredded and hurled them at the trees. With his bare hands, he dug out the guts from the cow’s belly and flung them on to the branches of the surrounding trees. He scampered about, yammering to the trees, laughing and crying simultaneously as night fell. (Night of Broken Glass 152)

As aforementioned, this kind of focus on decapitated body parts of the animal has something beyond horrorism. Here, the target is not just the breakdown of the wholeness and integrity of the human body anymore, but the nonhuman body, its decaying flesh, that is a potential source of food. The ending signifies a grotesque and unspeakable moment in which this horror denotes a complete breakdown of everything. Francois Debrix in Global Powers of Horror, also emphasizes on Cavarero’s idea of horror in the camps and studies violence of the Holocaust on the victim’s bodies, as a “pulverization” to “undo” the body from the human image of it. Debrix states that amid such a horrorism, “logocentric cravings for meaning and narrative coherence” collapse (77). The ending of “The Cowherd” denotes such a collapse of meaning, but it also becomes a moment beyond what contemporary horrorism in violence can present. It is a moment when corporeal ontology of beings, beyond the human, becomes a focal point. In the last few stories of the collection, Rather’s attention is on the Bijbyor massacre, and a materiality of death emerges in them which focuses on the corporeal ontology of both the human and non-human. In the story titled “Boss’s Account” the narrator is a journalist of a local tabloid called

52

Chapter 2

Informer, and he is covering the mysterious killing of a local man Showkat of Kanelwan. As he enters the funeral home filled with sounds of wailing, he smells funeral food and he is nauseated by it. It is “inauspicious food” which “evok[es] the smell of the dead” for him (Rather 200). The narrator starts running away from the funeral and is chased by a group of stray dogs, “their mouths agape” (200). The narrator panics stating, “I’m fairly sure that the dogs would have slain me that day and I would have become fodder for the pasture had the boatman not advanced with his oar and struck at the head of the dog” (“The Boss’s Account” 200). This is another interesting moment the collection offers in which the question of death and food reemerges similar to “The Cowherd.” The human imagination of an anthropocentric stability and sense comes from the premise that humans can eat other beings as food but cannot be eaten ourselves. “The Cowherd” underscores the “inauspicious” food that the dead carcass of the cow potentially becomes for Sultan Sheikh and his family, whereas, in “Boss’s Account” the narrator himself is threatened with the prospect of becoming “fodder for the pasture” for the dogs, in a sense a “pulverization” of the human body itself as a source of food for the other non-human animal. Thus, Rather’s stories bring out another notion of horrorism in the way human exceptionalism is broken and the attention is drawn toward the body’s vulnerability in becoming meaningless flesh. Val Plumwood in her study on the rethinking of death and food states that “Horror movies, stories and jokes reflect our deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life: horror is the wormy corpse, vampires sucking blood and sci-fi monsters trying to eat humans” (324). Yet human beings are positioned outside the food chain, “not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity” (Plumwood 324). In this context, Rather’s story extends and enacts Cavarero’s horrorism in which the corporeal identity of the human subject is itself in question and draws on an ironic connection between imaginary stability of the human body and the supposed meaninglessness of the body parts pulverized to flesh. If “The Cowherd” evokes questions of supposed purity and impurity of a certain caste of people and the prohibition of eating a dead animal, the story “Boss’s Account” reverses the focus on flesh and food to present the horror and frailty of the human body that can potentially become “fodder” to other life forms. But the larger question is what does this mean in terms of the overarching frame of horrorism in Kashmir that this chapter suggests? Horrorism’s ultimate emphasis is on the vulnerability of the human body, the violence that can amputate the body into body parts and its subsequent negation of the human subject. In the case of “The Cowherd” and “The Boss’s Account” the violence can transform the human body into meaningless flesh. Sushmita Chatterjee and Banu Subramaniam also argue that in our current politics, “meat” or flesh becomes a signifier or fetish of multiple meanings and is “a fierce conduit

Narratives of “Horrorism”

53

for biopolitics” (Meat: A Transnational Analysis 2), which contains within it “configurations of political economy, identity, and technologies of power” (Chatterjee & Subramaniam 2). Chatterjee also notes that “politics is entangled within a curious body maze” (97) and the human body: cements politics through an imaginative ‘meat,’ which through perfect synchronization, within itself, is able to ensure stability and life. . . . A body composed of meat, and of functioning or productive meat, is given the recognition of life and it/they become political actors. (107)

But there are those within the state imaginary who only exist as “meat” without representation and rights (Chatterjee 107). Rather’s latter stories zeroing in on the flesh of the human subject in Kashmir, potentially becoming food for another life form, or the “impure” lower-caste community seeking “impure” flesh as their source of food, point to the ultimate collapse of this “social ontology” in which a human body can derive meaning in sociality (using Butler’s term). According to Chatterjee, what drives the formation of a social ontology is flesh—“the way meat is framed determines its social ontology” (107). Thus, toward the end, Rather’s collection rethinks the violence as horrorism into a wider context in which the space, setting, human, and nonhuman subjects are all implicated within it. April L. O’Brien also broadens Cavarero’s definition of horrorism to “include both human and non-human subjects” (2), as she argues “spaces experience horrorism” too (O’Brien 2). Stories like the two above mentioned ones, create a space in which the imagined unity of the human body is not just decentered and destroyed, rather, the corporeal ontology is denied; as Chatterjee et al. point out, “Certain bodies are ever socially alive” (107). The tension of human life over non-human animal life is no more retained. Rather’s stories deconstruct an anthropocentric universe; here both human and other bodies are killable, and they act as a reminder of the frailty of bodies under such violence. As a cautionary statement, this chapter is not arguing for an anti-anthropocentric worldview in light of Merleau-Ponty’s ontological relation between beings, so that “we will finally be able to feel the corporeal relevance of all beings” (McBlane 189). Rather, my interest in the idea of corporeal ontology that emerges in Rather’s stories is one in which the violence over Kashmiri subjects is studied through Cavarero’s lens of horrorism, but Rather articulates a violence that defies the frames of horrorism in its human register, as something else takes its space beyond it. Interestingly, the titular story for the collection The Night of Broken Glass, itself reminiscent of the violence of Holocaust, contains this inexpressible horror of violence. As the story proceeds, one is reminded of the historic Kristallnacht violence and massacre through the events portrayed in Bijbyor.

54

Chapter 2

Gulam looks for his missing son, shot among the many youths of the town, and enters the mosque that was brutalized by the soldiers, all its windows, lights, chandeliers “smashed to smithereens” to “a spectacle of destruction” (Rather 215). The comparisons of the Kristellnacht violence of 1938 with the brutalized spaces of worship in Kashmir along with killings of Kashmiri youth in 1993 creates a register of pain that intersects memory in unique ways in this story. It recreates a same mnemonic effect seeking solidarity and emphasizing the kind of quotidian of violence that the people live through in their everyday. This final story in the collection also enacts the horrorism where death ceases to become the only dread. Instead, the destruction, the vanishing of the bodies of the murdered Kashmiri boys, the horror of rape and the bloated, disfigured body of Jamshid’s lover Rosy, frame the narrative of violence. Gulam who searches for his son’s dead body realizes that even his son’s body will be denied to him—“Although most of the other bodies were found and buried, only Jamshid’s body was not found on the highway outside the camp” (Rather 213). Gulam’s search for his son’s body becomes another extreme of horrorism, which is not satisfied with the killing but in refusing to grant burial, it refuses the body dignity in passing and leaves the horror of violence over the family for eternity. Jamshid’s ontological dignity is denied, and therefore, reclaiming his body is not even important. O’ Brien, once again, discusses Cavarero’s horrorism and explains that: human beings are unique as we expose ourselves to others and “consign our singularity” (Cavarero 20). Second, as a result of exposing ourselves to others in our daily lives, as unique beings, we are inherently vulnerable. Ontological dignity is composed of both our uniqueness and our vulnerability. . . . Horrorism is an act of extreme wounding that erases the individuality of humanity. (O’Brien 2-5)

Jamshid’s death is not the focal point here. He is already erased by this kind of violence. The Bijbyor massacre depicted in the story, also, does not remember the slain youths in memory of their lives. Their killings by the state are a horror, in which Gulam only finds their unidentifiable, mass of shoes lying heaped on the road, and “As long as Gulam lived, he would guard them and polish them religiously” (Rather 213). If on one hand this is a kind of violence that is “an offence against the material body” (O’Brien 2) of the human, Gulam’s protecting the shoes of the dead, the last signifier of the human life, becomes a moment of quiet resistance against this horrific violence. Gulam also recalls the horrific moment of Rosy’s brutal rape by army Major S in front of her mother Hasim. Rosy is not just killed after the rape, but her body is “bludgeoned to death” as if she had been beaten blue with a saucepan (Rather 216). Gulam’s own memory of shoe polish smeared over his face and shoved into his mouth by the same Major S is narrated as “an act

Narratives of “Horrorism”

55

of pure misanthropy and sadism that defied comprehension and nearly drove Gulam insane” (Rather 213). These acts of violence desecrate the human subject to a sub-human status stripping not only their dignity but also impinging a violence on the body in a way that breaks down all human codes of meaning and understanding. Toward the end of the story the narrator looks at his niece Fatima, a young child of six, and only sees the images of her mother Nuzhat and Rosy’s faces superimposed on each other. It is a sad reminder that this horror is potentially possible for anyone, at any time in Kashmir. In this kind of horrorism known codes of sociality break down, and every touch is suspect and does not provide endearment. The story ends with the narrator taking a step towards Gulam in an attempt to hug him. Gulam writhes to free himself in protest: “Let me go,” (Rather 218) he says. It is a moment that reminds how everyday life and human codes of bonding and meaning have been transformed. The collection of stories in The Night of Broken Glass provides a relentless glimpse in the ways violence transforms Kashmir and its people. These stories unravel the politics of death and the body and the precarity these “bodies” are reduced to. Extending the focus of biopolitics and necropolitics from the last chapter, this section looks at violence and its impacts on the human subject’s ontological and corporeal meaning and along with the way it transforms the human subject’s relationship with the surroundings in an unusual state of being. The stories reflect that a Kashmiri life is just not abandoned to its barest form of life but is constantly exposed to a continuous form of vulnerability that goes beyond just the fear of death. Horrorism strikes at the very roots of the human condition, where the human subject suffers an inexplicable, ontological level of vulnerability.

NOTES 1. Nisar Ahmad Dharma reports that this “stamping of the man’s hand” had caused a lot of outrage, and the issuing deputy executive magistrate had said that it was done because they had run out of security passes to give to civilians. Many people including former chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah expressed their criticism of the degrading and inhuman treatment of Kashmiris. “Kashmiri Man’s Hand Signed,” The Wire, April 11, 2019, https://thewire​.in​/rights​/kashmiri​-man​-hand​ -stamped​-highway​-ban (accessed October 14, 2019). 2. The number of official dead has been debated from thirty to fifty, along with hundreds who were injured in the incident.

Chapter 3

Haider Rewriting Shakespearean Ghosts into Postcolonial Specters in Kashmir*

On February 14, 2019, an army truck carrying security personnel in Kashmir was attacked by a suicide bomber on the Jammu-Kashmir highway, killing forty army members and the bomber. This spiraled into a tense political crisis between India and Pakistan, who have already fought three wars over the disputed territory of Kashmir. At one end, the Kashmir Valley is entrenched in continuous war, where statistics suggest over 70,000 people have died since the insurgency peaked in Kashmir (this estimate is dated and the numbers are likely more now).1 At another, the mainstream sociocultural politics of India assumes a sanitized front when it comes to Kashmir. As explained in the introduction, within the dominant representation in Indian films Kashmir has always been depicted as a space of romance, an exotic locale that Ananya Jahanara Kabir as termed as “a territory of desire.” Kabir’s work traces how Kashmir exists as the “othered space within the postcolonial nation” (15). Almost all “Bollywood” films that involve Kashmir foreground “the Valley’s landscape . . . it prefers to eliminate Kashmiri people, monuments in use, and homes” (Kabir 17). This chapter turns to a cinematic intervention in director Vishal Bharadwaj’s film Haider (2014) which creates a subversive space in representing Kashmir for the first time in the larger historiography of Indian popular films coming out of Bollywood. My interest in Bhardwaj’s film Haider stems from the fact that it intervenes in this sanitized and fetishized history of visual representation of Kashmir by creating an alternative optic to Bollywood films using Shakespeare’s Hamlet to present the world of death, torture, and decay in Kashmir.2 The controversial film belongs to a hybrid category of Indian cinema that has emerged in recent years as a form of critique * This chapter is a slightly mod­ified version of the previously pub­lished essay. “Rewriting Shake­ spearean Ghosts into Postcolonial Specters in Kashmir” in ReFiguring Global Chal­lenges, Eds. Minervini et al. (Brill 2023).

57

58

Chapter 3

of the hegemonic Bollywood movie and its normative construction of a panIndian consciousness. Haider is arguably a multilayered, nuanced narrative that adapts Shakespeare’s Hamlet but is set in Kashmir in the 1990s, when the insurgency began to peak, leading to the eventual state militarization of the land. On its release, a Twitter movement (#BoycottHaider) accused the film of supporting “terrorists,” and right-wing activists proposed a ban on screening the film in India.3 This chapter explores the adaptation of Hamlet into the provocative Haider and studies the use of the Shakespearean trope of “haunting” and the presence of ghosts in the film. It studies Haider as a “cinema of subversion,” partly because Haider is the first film in the genre of Bollywood cinema to move beyond the depiction of Kashmir as an exotic, essentialist tale, and also because it portrays torture and the failings of a postcolonial nation-state in the form of Kashmiri subjects who are “ghost-like”—dead, disappeared, or returned from the dead. Extending from the first two chapters, I study the film’s portrayal of Kashmir, its spectral figures and tortured “ghosts” in a necropolitical landscape, to borrow Achille Mbembe’s term4 and turn to the politics of agency and resistance within this violent landscape. These ghosts become subversive, macabre figures seeking answers in a direct indictment of the sovereign state, but the film also strategically uses haunting, liminal figures and Haider’s madness to speak “truth” to a nation that reduces the Kashmir conflict as a means to justify state mechanisms of brutal oppression. Through the realm of “haunting” and “ghosts” in Kashmir, the film creates spaces of resistance and locates agency in the liminal figures of the living dead who speak of a violence. Thus, Haider reconfigures Hamlet from the psychological conflict to a political one in a frame of critical resistance that creates postcolonial specters of Shakespeare’s ghosts in Kashmir. There is a vast realm of critical studies on adaptations that focuses on the relationship between films and the original literary texts from which they are adapted. Adaptations, according to Linda Hutcheon, are “deliberate, announced and extended revisitations of prior works” (xiv) to make new meaning or construct a new frame to “see” or read that work. Reading Haider in this light, Bhardwaj rewrites Hamlet in a dynamic exchange with the Shakespearean tragedy that goes beyond the original text, and yet retains some of its devices to construct the hauntological world of Kashmir. The trope of the ghost and haunting exists beyond the classical Shakespearean trope as the entire Kashmiri experience in Haider becomes one that is crowded by spectral figures, presenting a different language to speak about the modalities of violence in Kashmir. This chapter is not about the aesthetic and technical aspects of adapting Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Haider. Instead, I closely analyze the film in its political ramifications and how it represents the violence and its impact on people. Yet, when the premise of the text is “a play within a play,” to borrow

Haider

59

from Shakespeare’s Hamlet—that is, when the story of Haider cannot be extricated from Hamlet’s plot and premise—lingering associations between the two remain and their analysis is warranted. Shakespeare adaptation studies is a vast and burgeoning field, and Shakespearean adaptations in India and their impact on the understanding of postcoloniality in Indian cinema have been a thriving niche of study. Despite the country’s colonial history, Shakespeare has always had a revered position in India and, in the past, there has been a sense of sacrilege when it comes to modifying Shakespeare’s plays into something else, making a strong case for purity. Lately, there has been a rise of experimentation in Bollywood, bringing forth a crop of films that defy its old, formulaic tendencies.5 Shakespearean adaptations have been an interesting trend in Indian cinema (not just within Bollywood) and have been used to impart messages that might be considered too radical in another form. The earliest Shakespearean adaptation in pre-independent India dates back to 1935, when Hamlet was remade as Khoon Ka Khoon (Blood for Blood),6 directed by Sohrab Modi and often called the “first Indian Shakespeare talkie.”7 Amrita Sen traces Shakespearean adaptation studies in India and explains that Parsi theater impacted the early celluloid productions of Shakespeare in India and included Urdu language and Indian names that highlighted “syncretic elements shot against Victorian settings” (90). Regional Indian cinema also has a history of recreating Shakespearean dramas on screen. The highly successful Telugu film Gunasundari Katha (The tale of Gunasundari)8 was an adaptation of King Lear that included elements of Indian folklore into its narrative, in the form of a bear who later transforms into the prince.9 The film married patriarchal thought with Lear’s tale, but also created an intervening space of affective human-animal relationships at its core through the subtext of Telugu folklore and through reimagining human and animal subjectivities in this intercultural retelling of the original story. Thus, Shakespearean plays have always enabled a certain kind of alternate space and subversive rewriting of current Indian sociocultural politics. Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer, who wrote the screenplay for Haider, says in an interview: We tried to show a different Kashmir, one that has often been ignored by mainstream cinema. When we looked at the story that we were trying to tell, Hamlet presented itself to us. It felt like the perfect plot. We weren’t consciously thinking of the authorities or how to make the story more agreeable by using Shakespeare, but it helped in smoothening the process, of clearing India’s largely draconian censorship regime. . . . You could make a great adaptation of Shakespeare today, but if it touches on subjects that are somehow critical of the present political establishment, you’re in trouble. (qtd. in Parathasarathy 19–20)

Peer also explains that “there is an element of high culture to using Shakespeare”—that is, Shakespeare brings a certain credibility even to controversial

60

Chapter 3

matters (21). Of course, as many critics like Sen have pointed out, Shakespeare’s popularity in the Indian imagination emerges from a colonial education and an elitist audience or readership that would naturally be well-versed in Shakespeare’s plays (90). Peer also makes the point that the use of Shakespeare heightens brand value; it is “a clever device to tell uncomfortable stories” (qtd. In Parthasarathy 21).10 Shakespeare’s Hamlet does serve as a device to allow the Kashmir counternarrative to emerge in Bhardwaj’s film, as Haider rewrites Hamlet from the classic Shakespearean tropes toward a commentary on the political landscape of Kashmir through the trope of haunting to make the invisible “seen.” During the Elizabethan era, many of the stage specters and ghosts originated from the Middle Ages, which also had characteristics of Senecan plays, in which spectral entities were obviously angry.11 In her work on Senecan ghosts, Susanna Braund explains that they are tyrannical figures of cruelty with no uncertainty about them (425–426). Shakespeare transforms his ghosts into less emotive melodrama. They come with a purpose, usually to seek revenge or to warn a character. Shakespeare modifies the Seneca-influenced ghosts into something new and creates an “ambiguity” with the spectral entities as they symbolize internal as well as social and political disorder.12 As is already well known, the trope of the ghost in Hamlet is an important one— Hamlet’s father is dead, killed, and his ghost haunts Hamlet and triggers a set of denouements in the play. The ghost also signals that Hamlet’s father’s death was aberrant and emerges as both a shadowy presence and a driving force in the entire play. This is the point of departure in Haider in its use of “haunting.” The trope of the ghost does not work in the exact same way in the film, rather Shakespearean ghosts change, reconfigure, and take on different forms in Haider. While the eerie figure of Roohdaar (Irrfan Khan) in the film is the direct equivalent of the ghostly figure of Hamlet’s father; ghosts and deathliness also emerge in other central ways: the specters of dead bodies, photos, houses, loss, death, and the absence of people whose deaths are imminent or have disappeared, all become haunting elements. These haunting figures and elements turn Kashmir into a space of uncanny postcolonial specters. Ghosts and humans linger in an in-between space, questioning their life and death, witnessing and speaking of unspeakable violence by the sovereign state. In narrative hermeneutics, every text, broadly speaking, has an external and an internal field of referentiality. Dino Felluga explains the external field of referentiality, or “extra referentiality,” as the text referring to the material reality outside of it, even if it is an imagined one. For Felluga, “interreferentiality” is the diegetic inner field of the text, which marks “individuals and their actions,” and which also includes the dialogic contexts of the characters in that text (“The Road is Clear”).13 From this perspective, the larger

Haider

61

distinction between Hamlet and Haider is that Shakespeare’s ghost in Hamlet gets its meaning from internal references in the world of the play, whereas the “ghosts” in Haider derive their meaning from external references within the larger reference to Kashmir itself as a conflictual space. Interestingly, this means the ghosts in Haider “speak” to the audience in a way that the ghost in Hamlet does not, because the latter is limited to the structural world of the play. Here, Haider not only rewrites Shakespeare to “tell” a radical story of Kashmir but it also rewrites the postcolonial conceptualization of life and death, subjectivity, and corporeality, in Kashmir’s necropolis. The film is set in 1995 Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, at the peak of insurgency and the beginning of the azadi movement that had been rumbling along for years since the ascension of Kashmir to India in October 1947, following the Partition. The film follows the same trajectory as Hamlet with the preplanned murder of Haider’s father, Dr. Hilaal Meer (Narendra Jha). However, departing from the Shakespearean storyline, Meer first becomes a “disappeared person” in the political space in Kashmir as he is picked up by the Indian military for sheltering and aiding a militant, Ikhlaq Latif, and performing surgery on him. Hearing the news of his father’s disappearance, Haider (Shahid Kapoor), the Hamletian protagonist, returns from Aligarh Muslim University, from mainland India to Srinagar only to find his mother, Gazala (Tabu), becoming intimate with his paternal uncle Khurram (Kay Kay Menon). Thereafter, Haider determines to search for his father in the “camps” (the name given to the place where disappeared people are kept) in Kashmir. It is only an hour into the film that Roohdar, an eerie figure whose identity is questionable and suspicious, comes to give Haider a message from his father, “inteqam lo, mere maut ka, mere bhai se” (“Take revenge for my death, from my brother”).14 I will delve into the “ghost identity” of Roohdaar in more detail later; here I want to highlight the ghostly presence of death, specters, and “disappeared figures” before Roohdar’s shadowy entry in the film. After the initial exposition of the film is established with scenes of “crackdown”15 and the politics of Kashmir depicted through the story of Meer, Ghazala, and Khurram, Haider exclaims, “All of Kashmir is a prison.” Immediately after this, the camera reveals a succession of quick, stunning shots of the landscape, in which the entire Kashmir Valley is enveloped in a pall of gloom. Trees look eerie like apparitions with wily branches reaching upward like arms stretched out in despair. The landscape isn’t clear; it is shadowy, and the background music that permeates this haunting landscape resembles a low, melancholic humming of humans. In some shots, the Kashmiri people are also not clearly visible, they are shadowy figures. The human figure is not distinctly discernable as the camera pans through this landscape. In his work on fiction from Northeast India, Amit Baishya explains that certain fictional narratives from

62

Chapter 3

the Northeast contain “hauntological landscapes that show the effects of terror on the subjects” (117).16 The conflictual space of Kashmir depicted in Haider is one such “hauntological landscape,” in which a shroud of violence veils the Kashmiri subjects. Judith Misrahi-Barak and Mélanie Joseph-Vilain explain the concept of “postcolonial haunting,” in which the ghost becomes a “manifestation of the violence of colonization, whose impact continues to inhabit every dimension of the postcolonial world” (17). They describe two kinds of postcolonial ghosts—native ghosts seeking revenge and the “colonizer’s ghosts manifesting the collective guilt of the victors of history” (16). For Misrahi-Barak and Joseph-Vilain, the ghost in the postcolonial world can be textual and linguistic and can even impact the understanding of a postcolonial space. Thus, in the postcolonial context, haunting is significant because of its disruptive and subversive potential. Michael O’Riley also notes that “the disruptive quality in postcolonial haunting” is important because it is through this haunting that “the repressed colonial scene returns” (1). According to O’Riley, the use of haunting in postcolonial contexts indicates the emergence of resistance. Haunting in Haider, as we shall see in the next section also uniquely speaks of resistance through its spectral metaphors of violence embedded in Kashmir’s space. This theoretical backdrop is important to locate the slightly different approach I take in using the notion of haunting and ghosts as a premise in this chapter to speak of the violence in Kashmir. Firstly, why use the term “postcolonial” when it comes to define haunting in Kashmir? This term traces back to the complex history of Kashmir, deriving from the colonial partitioning of land into India and Pakistan, which led to a dispute between the fledgling nation-states over the territory. With the problematic history of Partition and the independence of the subcontinent, the two nations technically became “postcolonial,” although the term comes with its own pitfalls and puts the centrality of imagination on European colonialism.17 However, as charted out in the first two chapters, the current state technologies of violence, surveillance, and policies in Kashmir are reminders of (neo)colonialism. Second, for the concept of haunting, I turn to Derrida’s Spectres of Marx in which he explains the notion of “hauntology”: where the figure of the ghost is central because it replaces the dominant ontology of the human being; Colin Davis explains the figure as “neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent” (373) and it forces us to rethink the conventional narratives of our past and present.18 Couched within a dystopia of violence, Kashmiri subjects, as portrayed in Haider, form a part of such an in-betweenness—between life and death, between spectrality and corporeality. Here, it would also be important to clarify what I mean by “ghosts” in the framing of the film and Kashmir. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ghost comes from

Haider

63

the old English word, “gāst,” meaning spirit or soul. A ghost refers to “an apparition of a dead person manifested in the living, or appearing to the living, usually in a shadowy, nebulous state.”19 In the context of the film, I refer to the word both in its literal sense as well as to the haunting by shadowy, hidden elements—pasts and histories that expand our imaginations and shape our meanings of the present. In her foreword to Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters, Janice Radway uses the book’s titular phrase to explain that there are many different ways in which the past haunts the present and “those ghosts . . . tie present subjects to past histories” (viii). Gordon’s definition of “ghostly matters” as “the tangled exchange of experience where the personal and social, presence and absence, feeling and thought” (200) come together to create spaces for “seeing the unseen” (197) is significant in reading the film. Haider presents a Kashmir that is haunted by embedded violence: disappearances, loss, and absences all harken back to the present, and these different modalities of haunting offer us new ways of knowing and seeking to know. As mentioned earlier, the cinematography in the film sets the tone of haunting by showing an eerie and spectral landscape. There is an in-between space between life and death that is constantly interrogated in the film—one such harrowing scene is when Haider reaches one of the “camps” searching for his father, or at least his body. A truck filled with dead bodies arrives at the mortuary and Haider takes a peek inside in search of his father. As the camera pans over the heap of mangled, bloodied bodies, one of the “dead bodies,” a boy barely fifteen years old, stirs. With his body and face dripping with blood, he slowly opens his eyes, looks around, and in an indescribable moment of recognition, realizes that he is not one of the dead, yet. He is still alive. The boy climbs out of the back of the truck, wrangling himself free from other corpses, and starts screaming, flailing his arms, “Thank God, I am alive.” It is a disturbing moment that doesn’t bring any reprieve to the viewers, but rather evokes a terror that the nature of selfhood itself has become severely reconfigured. This moment of recognition of life is also unnerving for the viewers because it heightens the frailty of human subjectivity hanging between life and death. The boy may still be alive, but the horror of death hangs over him. The awareness of that makes death loom like a spectral, inert presence in the film constantly. These ghastly presences in the film lack “full” human ontology; they are stripped to their bare-naked life and exist in a strange liminal zone and raise questions to rethink selfhood, corporeality, and time. Gordon once again notes that the phenomenon of haunting complicates the usual understandings of life as we know it, and provides a newer way of knowing (7–8). For Gordon, ghosts, or matters that are “ghostly,” “speak in the interstices of visible and the invisible” (24). But how/when we learn to understand or know what the ghosts of the past or present tell us creates a critical language for a new

64

Chapter 3

way of thinking. For instance, in the film, the body of this boy awakening and left to the rawest form of life presents to the audience also a way of recognition of the unimaginable horror pervading life in Kashmir. Roohdar, the character that comes closest to Hamlet’s father’s ghost, is a ghostly figure of indeterminate nature. Through exposition, viewers learn that he was in the same torture camp as Haider’s father, Hilal Meer. They were together during their time in the camp and as Roohdaar emphasizes, “Since that day, Doctor and I were always together, like body and soul” (italics mine). The name Roohdaar itself signals the character’s ghostly presence: “rooh” in Urdu means soul or spirit, and “daar” means the carrier. The first time Roohdar appears, he seems a non-human specter. Dressed in a white shroud, Roohdaar limps, his face is scarred—with one eye gouged out— and he possesses a non-human aura as he walks around the city following Haider’s girlfriend Arshia (the Ophelia figure in the film, played by Shraddha Kapoor) to pass on a message to Haider. He is not clearly visible, turns up in a hazy gloom, and the image is out of focus when we “see” him first appear on screen. Later, we learn that Roohdaar survived the torture camp, indicating the spirit has survived, whereas Meer, the body has died in the camp. In one of their exchanges in the camp, when Hilal asks Roohdaar whether he is a Shia or a Sunni, he replies: Dariyaa bhi mein, darkhat bhi mein. Jhelum bhi mein, chinaar bhi mein. Dair hoon, haram bhi hoon. Shiaa bhi hoon, Sunni bhi hoon. Mein hoon Pandit. Mein thaa, mein hoon aur mein rahoongaa. Varnaa kaun sunaayegaa yeh sacchi kahaaniyaan vakt ko? (Haider 2014) I am the river and the tree. I am the Jhelum and the poplar. I am the temple, I am also mosque. I am a Shia and a Sunni. I am a Pandit. I always was, I am, and I will always be. Who else will relate these true stories to history? (Italics mine)20

Derrida’s deconstructive turn in hauntology is especially useful to read Roohdaar’s words here. They are a reminder that he is the spectral force; he was and will be, because he is the spirit, unaffected by the sovereign power and history that renders Kashmiri subjects invisible and silenced to tell these stories. Davis also reminds us that if the specter can be allowed to speak then it becomes more significant than the living, who betray us (Jameson qtd in Davis 373). Roohdar comes to speak of Haider’s father’s disappearance and the truth behind it. Here it is significant to note that “disappearance” and disappeared people, in the context of Kashmir, indicate something beyond death. Gordon explains that “disappearance is a state of being repressed” (114) and removes people “from their familiar world . . . and transports them

Haider

65

to an unfamiliar place” where social reality as one understands it, doesn’t exist (Gordon 112–113). Roohdaar as a “ghost identity” coming to speak of Meer and the systemic violence and torture he was subjected to renders meaning in two registers. On one hand, the notion of the disappeared people terrorize the whole population: anyone can meet the same destiny. On the other hand, Gordon explains, the presence of the disappeared haunts the present, urging resistance, “goading us to fight” (Gordon 113). In Haider, one sees both in one particular scene—Haider sits with scores of people, holding a photo of his father and waiting; beside him is a mother who holds a photo of her teenage son, another of the “disappeared” in Kashmir. Haider exchanges a glance with her, she silently stares back at him—a stare that reveals the agony and a bond they both share waiting for information and justice. Such disappeared bodies are symbolic that “the exercise of state power through disappearance involves controlling the imagination, controlling the meaning of death, involves creating new identities, involves haunting the population into submission to its will” (Ghostly Matters 124). Yet, that filmic moment of showing the kin of people who are disappeared by the state, as they wait holding photos, also creates what Ather Zia calls “counter memory” using Foucault’s original phrase (Zia 10). In her book Resisting Disappearance, Zia unravels the specter of the disappeared people and the subaltern resistance through counter memory in the way people use their kin’s existence and create pockets of “subaltern power” and resistance against the state (149). The scenes of the families of disappeared people waiting for their sons, brothers, or husbands, holding photographs attesting to their human identities, become poignant reminders of an absence that is the perpetual state of the living dead. They aren’t declared dead, and continue to live through their absence in this strange liminality. Footage of real protests and families waiting for their missing, disappeared kin and children are also merged into the narrative of the film. Thus, Haider, within the filmic space of Bollywood, becomes radical in its depiction of disappeared people. Their waiting with documents and photos creates an “affective site where the disappeared becomes ‘present’ and the disappearance is established” (Zia 149). Here, there is a unique kind of haunting in this space of affective resistance through the once-erased people reminding the state of their memory. As Zia explains, “While the government is in the process of thwarting through repressive erasure, we see countermemory materializing” through these means (Zia 153). If Derrida’s specter is a deconstructive figure hovering between life and death, presence and absence, then it is not just Roohdaar but also the boy who survived and the corpse-like existences piled together who are outside the “normal” understanding of life and corporeality. Halfway through the film, as Roohdaar makes his entrance, there is a scene in a residential area of

66

Chapter 3

Srinagar, where a man (played by Basharat Peer) stands in front of the gate of his house, stupefied. He does not speak, barely moves, and seems like a “zombie,” an uncanny presence. A woman from inside the house urges him to say something. Roohdaar approaches and starts interrogating the man, asking where he is coming from and where he is going. Roohdaar checks his ID card, and frisks him for weapons, before giving him permission to proceed. The man then enters his house. It is a brief but telling scene, exposing what “living dead” Kashmiri subjects look like. Roohdar explains to Arshia that this is a “new disease,” a new normal, in which the subjects cannot go about their daily lives without being stopped, interrogated, or frisked. Although not a ghostly figure in the strictest sense, this unnamed character signifies something crucial: he is a lifeless body, not registering any human contact or social reality, suffering from extreme dehumanization, and existing in an abject psychological disorder. The scene is not really necessary to the larger plot and story of Haider, but it underscores the condition of the “living dead” in Kashmir, where even the safe space of home has become unfamiliar and uncanny. The Kashmiri people represented in the film, vacillate in an in-between space. Like the disappeared people, they become ghostly figures in the aberrant space of Kashmir, trying to retell something in their daily onslaught of survival. In the film, as Haider gradually descends into madness, or “performs” madness to plot revenge on his uncle Khurram, his “mad” speech at Lal Chowk Square in Srinagar is an acute reminder of the spectral existences of Kashmiri subjects. His speech begins with a mockery of the 1948 UN resolution to conduct a plebiscite in Kashmir as India and Pakistan gain independence, and it also refers to Article 2 of the Geneva Convention that calls for humanitarian treatment during conditions of war, even in spaces of armed conflict where war has not been formally declared: UN council resolution no. 47 of 1948, Article 2 of Geneva Convention, and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution bas ek sawaal uthataa hain, sirf ek: Hum hain ki hum nahi? Hum hain, toh kyon hain aur nahi to kahaan gaye? Hain to kis liye aur kahaan gaye toh kab? UN Council Resolution No. 47 of 1948, Article 2 of the Geneva Convention, and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution raise only one question, just one. Do we exist or do we not? If we do, then who are we, and if we don’t, then where did we go? If we do exist, then why, and if we went away, then when? (Italics mine)

The focus here comes down to the very existence of bare-naked life: Does this life exist in the first place; is it a human existence at all? Who are we? The Hindi/Urdu dialogue has a more interesting emphasis—“hain ki nahi”— literally, are we there or not? And if we do exist, then who are we? Haider’s speech stresses that any form of dependable life and existence is denied to

Haider

67

Kashmiri subjects. Their ontological status is uncertain. This is emphasized a second time, when Haider delivers a shorter version of the “to be or not to be” soliloquy after Arshia expresses her doubt if Haider is really mad. Haider states, “Hai ki hai nahi, bas yahi sawaal hai” (Is it or is it not, that is the question). As a classic reference to Shakespearean “To be or not to be” speech, these lines spoken by Haider connote a curious problem. While the context reveals the indeterminate nature of truth and who or what Haider can believe, he also ends the question with a larger thrust on the uncertainty of being. In direct translation, the lines focus on being and existence—“is it, or is it not?” Like the many people grappling with life in death and death in life, Haider reveals the same tension in his words. “Ghosts” lurk everywhere in the Kashmiri necropolis. “For Derrida, the ghost’s secret is not a puzzle to be solved”; what is significant is the “address directed towards the living” by the specters speaking of the unformulated “possibilities of the future” (Davis 379). Davis, discussing Derrida’s concept of hauntology, says, “The secret is not unspeakable because it is taboo, but because it cannot not (yet) be articulated in the languages available to us. The ghost pushes at the boundaries of language and thought” (379). In Haider too, that is what viewers are able to finally “see”—a necropolis haunted by ‘real ghosts’ emerging out of tortured killings, the disappeared, or specters of people hanging between being and not being. These ghostly figures in the film help us question our relationship with the living and seek ethical positions from within us. Interestingly, the exile of the Kashmiri Pandits also remains a subtext of lost and “disappeared” people haunting Kashmir’s spectral landscape. In one scene, Pervez Lone (Lalit Parimoo), Arshia’s father, a major force in Kashmir Police, uses the derelict house of the Kauls, a Pandit family, for his secret operations and “encounter killings.” He casually remarks that the Kaul family now resides in a refugee camp in Jammu, referring to the exile of the entire Pandit community in the early nineties. Khurram responds saying he thought the family had moved to Mumbai. The comment remains unanswered and leaves a momentary silence in the scene. The Kaul house, standing empty in ruins presents another instance of “othered spaces” that haunts Kashmir. The film meticulously represents an atmosphere in Kashmir, rife with hauntings of lost people, disappearances, pasts that question the present and demands to know what is being repressed. Even the detention camps depicted in the film to which the disappeared people are taken have been the “real ones,” known to be some of the everyday spaces transformed by the Indian army. As noted in the film, one of the torture camps, Papa-2 (called Mama-2 in the film), used to be an old hotel. Basharat Peer writes about the history of Papa 2 as the most “infamous torture center run by the Indian forces in Kashmir” (133). As he explains: “The center was closed down in 1998. A top government official renovated the Papa-2 building and turned it into his residence. Before moving

68

Chapter 3

in, the Oxford-educated officer called priests of all religions to pray there and exorcise the ghosts” (Peer 133). In such a “hauntological landscape,” where ghostly matters construct social imagination, the gravedigger’s scene at the end of Haider shows how haunting creates “something more” (Ghostly Matters 194). According to Gordon, haunting and ghosts matter because they signify a place “where meaning— comprehension—and force intersect” (194). An instance of this is the gravedigger’s song, which constructs a final space in which audiences are shown the interstices of worlds where the Kashmiri subjects live. The landscape is starkly white, shrouded in snow. Three gravediggers dig pits in the snow, and the sounds of their metallic shovels on the hard ground creates a deathly cadence. They mournfully sing, “Aao naa, ki jaan gai, jahaan gai, so jao/ na shaam naa saveraa, andheraa hi andheraa/ hai roohon kaa baseraa, so jao” (Come your life has ended, the world has ended, sleep/ There is neither evening nor morning, only darkness abounds / This is a house of spirits, sleep). These lines are followed by an iconic scene in which Haider joins in the digging. He finds a skull and, holding it in his hand, says, “The dead know that they never lived fully, and that it never stops with death” (Haider, translation from the film’s subtitles). The scene, a rewriting of Shakespeare’s famous gravedigger scene in Hamlet, enacts a threshold space between life and death that strips off all normative relations through a reminder of haunting performed by the song and the gravediggers. It is an unsettling scene, reminding the audience that Kashmir is a prison house of spirits where life and death are mingled. The ending of Haider has been harshly criticized because Haider doesn’t die, nor does he kill his uncle, Khurram. Scholars and film critics like Mukul Kesavan argue that the marrying of Hamlet and Kashmir just doesn’t work because: Bhardwaj tries to turn Hamlet’s famous incapacity into a moral choice: the rejection of revenge. It’s an inspired idea, but Bharadwaj does nothing with it and it ends up as a tacked-on-lesson. Nothing in the action of the film or in Shahid Kapoor’s performance leads up to it.

Kesavan is also skeptical of the ending and criticizes the weak climax: Haider is a gorgeously mounted film, made by a gifted film-maker. Its trouble is that it is a revenge melodrama featuring a suicidally reckless hero who neither kills the villain nor dies in the end. It doesn’t supply the climax the genre demands and it departs from the original to make a moral point, which makes no sense given what’s come before. (“Hamlet in Hindustan”)

Amrita Sen is also critical of marrying Hamlet to Haider’s Kashmir and, like Kesavan, she questions Bhardwaj’s use of Shakespeare. Sen’s contention

Haider

69

arises from the fact that the space of Kashmir and the central protagonist, Hamlet, are conflated in a way that becomes problematic because it turns the politically charged space of Kashmir into a “consumable theatrical object” (87). This chapter departs from the arguments on the viability of merging Hamlet and Kashmir or whether it works in the film’s larger political and ethical goals. Perhaps the point is also not to stay completely true to the revenge tragedy that is Hamlet. Granted, the moralistic ending that revenge is futile detracts somewhat from the film’s radical politics, but Haider as a rewriting of Hamlet works because it illuminates spaces, things, subjects, photographs, ruins, and torture camps that are otherwise invisible and erased, and speaks of a liminal space that Kashmir and its subjects inhabit. Roohdar’s character sums up Haider’s truest moment in the film. While checking Roohdaar’s official files, Khurram exclaims, “Every identity of his is a ghost identity.” Interestingly, “ghost identity” is said in English and this moment highlights the metanarrative of the Kashmiri condition. Syeda Afshana also refers to this spectral state of Kashmir: This is Kashmir . . . populace doomed to death and raspy moans giving way to shell shocked numbness bordering on disbelief. Kashmir continues to remain mired in obnoxious reality long after the headlines fade away. The eyes of evil; the hands of injustice; and the face of tyranny—all this gets immortalized. . . . We quickly forget the facts and details, the precise names, dates and places. But we recall the images: the blood smeared dead bodies; the pedestrians fleeing a violent scene; the injured rushed to the hospital; the dwellings gutted into ruins; the vigil under the shadow of a gun; the commonplace identification parades and cordons; the shutdowns and desolate streets; and much more. (“Pitiful Prison”)21

Afsana laments the “eerie silence” that shrouds Kashmir after a spell of violence—“the only real sign that tells it’s not all okay”—and emphasizes the corpse-filled ruin of Kashmir. The film’s biggest achievement is that it rewrites Hamlet to highlight this ghost-like identity of the Kashmiri people, whose ontology is not fixed; they are postcolonial specters who speak from an aporia of the unspeakable. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet acts in a way to avenge the political violence weighing on the obligation he has to the past, which ends the denouement of the play in the death of most characters. However, Haider goes beyond this Shakespearean structure. Haider cannot act in the same way be cause he exists in a space and place of irresolvable ambiguity: Kashmir. Ultimately, Haider shows the viewers that Kashmir is itself the death-driven specter here; it holds manifold representations of the ghostly that are trying to speak and witness the repressed existences and absences, and allows a radical shift from invisibility towards knowing, intervention, and transformation.

70

Chapter 3

NOTES 1. Jason Burke explained in his 2011 article, “Kashmir Unmarked Graves Hold Thousands of Bodies,” that in the twenty-two years of insurgency in Kashmir since 1989, an estimated 70,000 people had died. Burke also recorded that over 2,000 bodies had been found in unmarked graves on the Indian side of the Line of Control, the de facto border with Pakistan. Jason Burke, “Kashmir Unmarked Graves Hold Thousands of Bodies,” The Guardian, August 21, 2011, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/ world​/2011​/aug​/21​/kashmir​-unmarked​-graves​-thousands​-bodies (accessed January 20, 2022). The US Department of Justice in 2014 put the number of dead at 77,000; US Department of Justice, “Armed Conflicts Report: India – Kashmir,” https://www​ .justice​.gov​/sites​/default​/files​/eoir​/legacy​/2014​/02​/25​/India​_Kashmir​.pdf (accessed January 20, 2022). 2. Haider, dir. Vishal Bhardwaj (Mumbai: UTV Motion Pictures, 2014). 3. “Boycott Haider: Twitter Rages Over the Controversial Movie,” Firstpost, October 2, 2014, https://www​.firstpost​.com​/bollywood​/boycott​-haider​-twitter​-rages​ -over​-the​-controversial​-movie​-1740651​.html (accessed January 20, 2022). 4. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40, https://doi​.org​/10​.1215​/08992363​-15​-1​-11. 5. Filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj is an iconic figure in Shakespearean adaptations and has made two films before Haider—Maqbool (India: Kaleidoscope Entertainment, 2004), an adaptation of Macbeth, and Omkara (India: Shemaroo Entertainment, 2006), an adaptation of Othello—using the Bollywood genre and reconstructing the stories within the Indian context. Other Indian directors have also made Hindi adaptations of Shakespeare’s works—for example, Angoor [Grape], dir. Gulzar (India: A. R. Movies, 1982), an adaption of Comedy of Errors, and Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, dir. Mansoor Khan (India: Nasir Hussain Films, 1989), an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Shakespearean adaptations have also been made in regional languages such as Bengali in the past. These films showcase the Indian social fabric by adapting Shakespearean stories to Indian settings. 6. Khoon ka Khoon [Blood for blood], dir. Sohrab Modi (India: Stage Film Company, 1935). 7. Shruti Narayanswamy, “Khoon Ka Khoon: The Great Indian Film Hunt,” Mahal Movies, June 10, 2014, https://www​.mahalmovies​.com​/film​-hunt​/khoon​-ka​ -khoon (accessed April 5, 2022). 8. Gunasundari Katha [The tale of Gunasundari], dir. K. V. Reddy (India: Vauhini Studios, 1949). 9. For more on this adaptation and the myth, see M. L. Narasimham, “Gunasundari Katha (1949),” The Hindu, September 12, 2012, https://www​.thehindu​.com​/features​/cinema​/gunasundari​-katha​-1949​/article3948788​.ece (accessed May 30, 2019). 10. Parthasarathy, “The Bard Meets Bollywood,” 21. 11. Susanna Braund, “Haunted by Horror: The Ghost of Seneca in Renaissance Drama,” in A Companion to the Neronian Age, eds. Emma Buckley and Martin T. Dinter (Chichester: Wiley, 2013), 425–443.

Haider

71

12. There is a lot of scholarship discussing the Senecan influence on ghosts in Shakespeare’s plays and the latter’s shift toward ambiguity. See Robert H. West, “King Hamlet’s Ambiguous Ghost,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 70, no. 5 (1955): 1007–1017, https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/459890; Brian Arkins, “Heavy Seneca: His Influence on Shakespeare’s Tragedies,” Classics Ireland 2 (1995): 1–16, https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/25528274. 13. Dino Felluga, “The Road is Clear: Application,” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, July 2002, Purdue University, https://cla​.purdue​.edu​/academic​/english​/ theory​/narratology​/application​/app​licT​nsma​infr​ameRoad2​.html (accessed August 25, 2019). 14. All translations, unless noted otherwise, are mine. 15. Crackdown is a term prevalent in Kashmir for random calls for intense raids and searches of people’s houses by the police or army. Often men line up, holding their ID cards, to be searched and identified when authorities are looking for a militant in Kashmir. 16. Amit Rahul Baishya, Deathworlds, Terror and Survival: Contemporary Literature from North-East India (New York: Routledge, 2018), 117. 17. For details see: Anne McClintock. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism,’” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 84–98, https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​ /466219. 18. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994). 19. Oxford English Dictionary Online. https://www​.lexico​.com​/definition​/ghost 20. Translation and italics, mine. 21. Syeda Afshana, “Pitiful Prison,” Greater Kashmir, March 13, 2015, https:// www​.greaterkashmir​.com​/gk​-magazine​/pitiful​-prison (accessed April 5, 2022).

Chapter 4

“This Is a Troubled Place” The Kashmir Shawl and the Violence of ”Epicolonialism”

The year 2011 emerged with a big flourish in the Kashmir literary scene with major works by Kashmiri writers (Waheed and Gigoo’s debut novels) appearing in the same year.1 Online journals like Kashmir Lit, Kashmirwallah also became important spaces to represent what was happening on the streets and everyday lives of Kashmiris. As the literary and cultural scene unraveled in Kashmir, the popular Western literary market turned to Kashmir as well. British novelist Rosie Thomas’s novel The Kashmir Shawl (2011) was published in the same year, and reflected a different kind of representational violence in the text. The novel is deemed as an epic tale on Kashmir and is almost 400 pages long. It became a popular Western novel on Kashmir circulating in the global scene during the same time when Kashmiris were adopting new and unique ways of resistance and protest. Thomas’s novel not only promotes a colonial vision, but as a popular “romance novel,” it furthers serious epistemic violence that has the potential to question the very struggle of Kashmiri subjects it poses to treat “benevolently.” The Kashmir Shawl is a mammoth intergenerational text that is set across a time period of seventy years, first set in colonial Kashmir when the last vestiges of the British empire was struggling with the independence movement growing strong in India in the backdrop of World War II. The novel then shifts to the present time with glimpses of Kashmir’s conflict seen through the narrative of the central protagonist Mair Ellis. Alternating between the two time periods, readers also encounter a Kashmir in which British colonial memsahibs and missionary wives form benevolent relationships “saving” local Kashmiris. While the novel uses usual colonial tropes depicting Kashmir in its stunning beauty and shimmering lake, there are some strands in the narrative that are of particular interest. This is a rare occasion when a Western novel narrativizes the current conflict in Kashmir. 73

74

Chapter 4

I frame the text’s hermeneutics through the concept of epicolonialism, a neologism that speaks of a different kind of violence. As mentioned earlier, Thomas’s novel casts a wide frame that spans colonial Kashmir to the present moment and the latter sections on the conflict lead to the protagonist Mair’s exclamation—“This is a troubled space” (The Kashmir Shawl 84). I use this utterance and a reading of the Kashmiri characters in the novel to show how it produces a textual violence. The text thus posits a precarious epistemological formation of Kashmir that echoes the dominant narrative of Kashmir coming out of statist discourses. The Kashmir Shawl begins in contemporary Wales, as the protagonist Mair Ellis sorts objects and old heirlooms in her parents’ house with her two siblings after the death of their father. Among her grandmother Nerys Watkins’s old collected things, Mair finds a stunning shawl that opens a trail of mysterious connections to India ultimately leading her to Kashmir. After finding her grandmother’s Kashmiri shawl, she decides to travel to India to track the shawl’s origins because “uncovering some family history might help her to feel her place again” (The Kashmir Shawl 9). Later when she meets another traveler Karen Becker in Ladakh, their response to India is that “one never encountered such spirituality and divinity in Europe or USA” (Thomas 33). So far, in the early stages of the novel, there is little different from the Hollywoodian staple of “Eat Pray Love” kind of orientalized discourse with the Western female protagonist traveling East in search for meaning and a sense of self. Beyond the clichéd simplistic narratives, the parts of the text that depict stories of Buddhist Leh and Christian missionary history of Kashmir are perhaps the most exciting and complex sections of the text. Parts of the novel also focus on the half-English, half-Kashmiri young woman Zahra, whose mother is Caroline Bowen, a colonial missionary wife, who had a clandestine affair with the Kashmiri royalty, Ravi Singh, nephew to the Maharaja of Kashmir in 1940. The rest of the text becomes a search for Zahra and to return the Kashmiri shawl to its rightful owner, even if she herself does not remember the exact origin of the shawl nor her complicated identity and lineage. Zahra’s only identity is that of an orphan found in Kashmir. The novel crisscrosses Mair’s present-day travels in Kashmir tracking the shawl’s origins and her grandmother Nerys Watkins’s life in early twentieth century, who lived in Kashmir for her husband’s Christian missionary work. Javaid Bhat studies the Kashmir English Novel (or KEN as Bhat creates the acronym) in his work, “Romance, Freedom and Despair: Mapping the Continuities and Discontinuities” and explains that these are novels “written by people who are not from Kashmir and who do not speak the Kashmiri language” (Bhat). Bhat categorizes fiction on Kashmir broadly into three groups: The Anglo Kashmir novel, Indo Kashmir Novel (IKN in Bhat’s terminology), and novel’s written by native Kashmiris, the Kashmiri English Novels (Bhat).

”This Is a Troubled Place”

75

Bhat includes Rosie Thomas in the first group of Anglo Kashmir novels, further branched into the earlier stage of writing by British writers such as Molly Kaye (1908–2004) and H. E. Bates (1905–1974) and the “current phase” where Thomas is grouped. I would even contend that Thomas’s novel is an interesting deviation that not only forms a part of the Anglo-Kashmir novel but also goes beyond that group in its delving into the representation of the conflict in the current time. I, thus, call The Kashmir Shawl an epicolonial novel. Subramanian Shankar coins the term “epicolonialism” in a different context to analyze colonial law and the discourse on Thugees and states the term “convey[s] the persistence with postcolonial social formations of colonial structures which often lie dormant until activation” (Shankar 98). Epicolonial conditions, according to Shankar, emerge a way to understand an “epicolonial state,” not necessarily under the direct colonial state, but one in which the same structures of stereotypes, prejudices, governance, and ideas of criminality of certain social groups are extended in the same way that the postcolonial state holds certain figures, communities or factors threatening to the national imaginary (Shankar 98). But why is the term “epicolonial” necessary to understand the novel, rather than the neocolonial or postcolonial state? Shankar clarifies that “epicolonialism is caught between disjuncture and continuity . . . that accompanies the historical and ongoing (non)transcendence of the colonial” (115). He argues epicolonial becomes a sharper tool in this larger postcolonial condition to bring into focus the particular aspects of the non-transcendence of the colonial. It serves as “a secondary elaboration of the colonial” in which it persists in a kind of a “half-life” and thus epicolonial becomes the way “to direct attention of the disjunctive continuities between the colonial and the postcolonial” (Shankar 115). The Kashmir Shawl, thus, operates as an epicolonial text, which has significant ramifications presenting Kashmir in a global literary market.

COLONIAL KASHMIR AND SUBALTERNS Andrea Pas in her work on the British Women Missionaries in India c. 1917–1950 explains that “Missionary work in India began in early nineteenth century” in 1813 and at first British women followed their husbands as missionary wives (1). Pas’s work underscores the colonial structures of such missionary work as she points to the language of the missionary workers who “stressed the ignorance, backwardness and simplicity” (Pas 176) of the native enquirers. Pas also maintains that the relationship of the women missionaries to the British empire was a complicated one (257) and points out that “women missionaries subverted the ideal of a white woman in India” (260)—rather,

76

Chapter 4

they were first in God’s service and not the Empire’s. Missionaries often found themselves within contradictory frames of being an imperialist, or a sympathetic figure to natives, often attempting to find a dialogue and mutual connection, and yet that relationship had underlying asymmetrical power relations that cannot be denied. Sajad Ahmad Mir in his exploration of missionaries in Kashmir titled, “Organizing Missions into Distant Lands: Medical Missionaries and the Politics of Health in Kashmir,” explains that the first Christian missionary set foot in Srinagar in 1854. Mir’s work is focused on investigating the medical missionary work in Kashmir and its repercussions, and he states that they had the same framework of Christian mission in Kashmir—in “perpetuating Christianity” and “civilizing the uncivilized” (Mir 41). Mir gives an insight into the time span when Christian Missionary Society (CMS) was established in Kashmir by the British Empire, a time that intersects the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the same historical setting that the novel is situated in. According to Mir, the Dogra state shared a hostile relationship with the Europeans in Kashmir and treated them with suspicion. On the other hand, the missionary workers, whether medical or Christian, improvised some health care changes in Kashmir but had a larger and more significant interest in the “hegemonisation of the natives” (44). Mir also points out, “These colonial travelers who came into Kashmir at different periods of time have praised its scenic beauty but were highly cynical of Kashmiri people” (47). Eventually, the Dogras submitted to the British government, and the Empire slowly brought forth large socio-political-economic shifts in Kashmir (Mir 47). This backdrop of Christian missionary and medical work in Kashmir and India is useful to frame Nerys Watkins. In the backdrop of Nerys and her granddaughter Mair’s travels in Kashmir, certain subaltern figures in Kashmir reside in the shadows serving the Western subjects in both temporalities of the text. These figures in the form of camp-servants, bearers, cooks, coolies, laborers, perform household help and menial jobs that aid the everyday lives of the British and Scottish community in Kashmir. Nerys is a complex figure in the novel. She shows a fractured and complex response to the missionary work and the empire. As the narrator points out, she did not share the same ideals as Evan Watkins to bring the “Word” to the natives: “But Nerys didn’t share her husband’s absolute conviction that the Word was the only truth, and bringing it to the heathen the only thing that really mattered” (The Kashmir Shawl 51). Perhaps one of the most revealing moments in the text about Nerys’s relationship with the subaltern natives is when she is ready to travel from Leh to Srinagar with Myrtle McMinn, another missionary wife. Diskit, her personal helper and housecook, stands at the gate in tears and the only parting note Nerys has for her is a reminder of the reified social order. Nerys’s last words stress on Diskit’s identity and role of serving her and

”This Is a Troubled Place”

77

Evan—“Nerys put her arm round her shoulders, inhaling the ripe smell of her hair. ‘Don’t forget your scarf. Always when you are working. Look after Sahib for me’” (The Kashmir Shawl 85). Elsewhere too, when the Watkins begin their mission in Leh and Diskit becomes their household server, Nerys reminds her that her hair must always be covered when she was working (The Kashmir Shawl 65). Here, the same reminder reinstates what Diskit means for her. The boundary is clear: the “ripe smell” of the help’s hair becomes a space of otherness, and Diskit’s subjectivity is locked as a servant and does not inhabit a space of equality. She remains in the shadow silently serving her “memsahib.” Historically, as Andrea Pas’s study shows, there was a difference in the way colonialism and its structures percolated in the socio-cultural and political orders within the direct descendants and agents of the Empire and the missionary workers. Mostly, the mission stayed away from being directly commenting on the politics or decisions of the British regime and kept to their goal of the Christian mission. Yet, the connection between the imperial ideas and the social hierarchy between the native subjects and the missionary was not devoid of similar imperial structures. Certainly, Nerys’s positionality is one of kindness, but it is not one without positing an alterity from a vantage point and in bringing “proper” civilization to the native subjects. Every other subaltern character in the novel: Sethi the caravan in-charge who helps Nerys and Evan make their journey from Manali to Leh, the cook-boy who cooks meals diligently to keep the missionary couple well fed on their caravan journey to Leh; Hari, the rest house caretaker for Archie McMinn at Lamayuru, who never forgets to make cocoa for Nerys every night; Majid, the caretaker of the Srinagar houseboat, Garden of Eden, who never fails to note when Nerys needs masala chai or breakfast in bed and also learns to wait patiently, “silent in the shadow at the far end of the room” to replenish their drinks or serve “their” Christmas cakes and alcohol for parties (The Kashmir Shawl 148, 259); Farooq, the “baroquely obstructive manager” of Nerys’s granddaughter Mair’s shikara boat named Solomon and Sheba in Srinagar knows when to retire to the kitchen boat connected to the main houseboat (188); Mehraan the “karkandar,” or the manager of the wool factory in Srinagar who provides information on the history of shawl-weaving and disparages Kashmir’s own turmoil and the concept of azadi, and the shikara men—all exist as subaltern figures in the shadows of the central characters of the text. Subaltern labor becomes crucial for running the everyday lives of the European subjects smoothly. A novel centered on Kashmir and an iconic shawl symbolizing the land and its people has all Kashmiri and Ladakhi characters as shadowy figures receding in the background, cooking, cleaning, aiding, begging, abetting the smoothness of English lives, or children needing “saving,” and yet not one of them is worthy of having a mutual

78

Chapter 4

relationship. The only time a relationship is established in the text, it is through Caroline Bowen and the Kashmiri royalty Ravi Singh, nephew to the king. Ironically, it is one of deceit, illegitimacy, and one where the Kashmiri subject is the villain, ready to harm his own child and possibly Caroline until she escapes from his power. In the novel, when local Kashmiris become a focal point of attention in the English ladies’ circle, they are associated with devious and damaging behavior. As the unscrupulous Ravi Singh comes to inquire about the pregnancy, Caroline and her friends wonder how the source of this news spilled to him when all the English women had taken care to hide it. It is quickly assumed that “The dhobi-wallah, someone, maybe the yard-boy, has told a story to another servant, and the news has passed all the way up to Ravi Singh” (The Kashmir Shawl 291). The potential of a local Kashmiri doing harm is quickly assumed, even in a conjecture, more than any English gossip revealing the news of Caroline’s pregnancy. The shadowy subalterns in the novel are, thus, projected as peripheral figures of little value but in a space of potential harm.

ENCOUNTERING KASHMIR: CHILDREN AND THE KASHMIRI BODY Kashmir, as a space and symbol in the colonial imaginary, occupies a space of adventure in the novel. As the Watkins family settles down in their missionary role in Leh early in the novel, there are some comparisons of Kashmir to Switzerland. The first time Nerys and the McMinns make the trip from Leh to the Kashmir valley, Myrtle reminds her that Kashmir would be like “nothing you could imagine” (The Kashmir Shawl 92). She likens Kashmir to paradise. Nerys’s first glance of Kashmir is also interesting—she comes up on a pony and stops to look—“Spread beneath her feet, unrolled like the most magical of carpets, was the Vale of Kashmir” (93). Of course, literally Nerys does look onto the valley from a vantage point, but what is interesting is the choice of words in describing Kashmir, that it lay “beneath her feet,” a curious colonial slippage, not to mention the exotic reference to the idea of a magic carpet. Nerys takes in all the colors and richness of the landscape that the valley offers in front of her and concludes “it was the most beautiful place [she] had ever seen” (94). Nerys’s exclamation is reminiscent of the first European, Bernier, who upon entering Kashmir in 1665 states, “the kingdom surpasses in beauty all that my warmest imagination anticipated” (Bernier qtd in Younghusband Chapter 1). Francis Edward Younghusband’s 1909 book titled Kashmir is a short book from the colonial ethnographer’s gaze that acts as a travelogue with pictures, but also as an assemblage of Kashmir’s nature, scenery, sport and residency garden, and of all the popular places

”This Is a Troubled Place”

79

to visit in and around Srinagar. Younghusband also makes the comparison between Switzerland and Kashmir and concludes that Kashmir offers what Switzerland cannot, in scale and in the stupendous beauty of the mountains (Chapter 1). This optics of a colonial Kashmir speaks of a complex narrative of the effects and representation of Kashmir trickling from colonial times to the present and recreates reverberating echoes of “looking” at Kashmir in dominant discourses. The novel thus regurgitates the consumption of the fetish of Kashmir, one that continues to haunt the Indian dominant discourses of Kashmir, and one that also decenters the people. As Kabir states, “there is an undeniable continuity between their [colonial] Kashmir views and the frames of fantasy still imposed on the Valley in contemporary India” (Territory of Desire 79). Colonial Kashmir in Thomas’s novel is a bifurcated space—one couched in the safety of barricaded colonizer’s residency clubs, bars, and residences where life carries on with sports, shooting parties, cricket, occasional evening gatherings, magic shows with exoticized natives, or a native “other” dancing in native costumes. The other Kashmir is impoverished, on the “other side” of the line that divides the colonizer’s space and the local subjects. This Kashmir is represented with dirt, disease, hunger, violence, and suspect native figures. The two worlds only meet when the native subaltern figures, both Muslim and Hindu subjects wait on the colonizers, as aforementioned in their readily available servant roles. I want to turn to this section of the novel, in which Nerys hints at the extremely impoverished conditions of the Kashmiri people and children. In his 1875 memoir, William Jackson Elmslie writes that Kashmiri people’s oppression under the Dogra king was unimaginable—“A poor Kashmiri can call nothing his own” (Seedtime in Kashmir 108). Elmslie documents layers of oppression the Kashmiris underwent under the Dogra king during 1875. Seeing the Kashmiri people at close hand he writes about the peasants and the shawl weavers, the worst hit in this oppressive regime. Elmslie’s memoir narrates the plight of Kashmiri Muslims but sees it as a justification for “Christian faith and responsibility,” (Seedtime in Kashmir 156) and the need for medical missionary work in the region. As Nerys visits Srinagar for the first time, she is exposed to the world of colonial Kashmir. On the third day in Srinagar, Nerys gathers with other colonial wives at the Residency Club flashing colonial flags, but she is lured by downtown Srinagar exhibiting Kashmiri local artifacts such as rugs, shawls, papier mâché, and silk hangings (The Kashmir Shawl 134). Nerys feels automatically drawn to explore this other part of Srinagar and is “struck by the incongruity of the juxtaposition” (The Kashmir Shawl 135) that the two clashing worlds of Kashmir offer. She looks ahead and views the “amethyst and silver” lake, dragonflies, boats and Kashmiri kingfishers. Set in colonial times and written in 2011 this is the same kind of visual representation that

80

Chapter 4

enacts a double epistemic violence toward the imagination of the Kashmir landscape. The Kashmiri body, the local subject, is largely ignored or often erased in the larger focus on the exotic landscape. Yet, even as the Kashmiri body does return to the landscape in the text, the relationship is a problematic one in excess to the landscape, often threatening to the European subjectivity. For instance, Nerys takes a walk beyond the boundaries of the Raj to the local spaces in Kashmir. She sees a “veiled women brush[ing] past her” (The Kashmir Shawl 151), and “a file of bearded men in red skullcaps march[ing] towards her and she flatten[s] herself against the wall to let them by” (The Kashmir Shawl 153). The local subjects stare blankly at the lone European woman who is lost from the secure spaces and in unease (153). Here, the pristine landscape of Kashmir with its nature and lakes is almost jarred with the Kashmiri presence. However hard Nerys tries to disassociate herself from the “cocktail sipping and nail paint” obsessed colonial women of Kashmir (138), she cannot wrench herself free from her own selfhood that is entrenched in becoming a “Lady Sahib,” the address determining the hierarchy, the local subjects use to pay respect to her and other colonial women. Also, significantly, Nerys’s encounter with the local Kashmiri subjects is also one of fear of the Other, a poignant reminder of the iconic character of Adela Quested in A Passage to India in her encounter with the local subjects of Chandrapore.2 Jenny Sharpe in Allegories of Empire discusses the framing of the encounter between the colonizer woman and the colonized subject and argues that it is never free from the constructed hierarchies of otherness in the consolidation of the “memsahib” role or as addressed in the novel as “lady sahibs”. Despite all the doubts, Nerys’s transformation to a memsahib is complete at this moment, when she finds herself lost in the by-lanes of Srinagar’s downtown and cringes every time local passers-by walk past her. Sharpe clarifies the term memsahib and states that the word is a “class restrictive term of address meaning lady master, which was used for the wives of high-ranking civil servants and officers” (Allegories of Empire 91). The concept usually meant a snobbish Englishwoman, with a household of servants not wanting to associate with Indians (Sharpe 91). On the surface, Nerys Watkins is nothing like that. Thomas carefully constructs her as someone who is keen to see the humanity of the local other. At the same time, Nerys is an ambiguous figure manifesting what Jenny Sharpe calls the “colonial benevolence” of the memsahib figure of colonial India. The moment of “bearded men marching towards her” and Nerys flattening herself against the wall to let them pass, becomes an acute reminder of what Sharpe calls the “deployment of the memsahib identity in the colonial discourse” (Allegories of Empire 122). Evidently, Nerys is scared and underlying this fear is an assumption of danger from the Kashmiri natives. Much like Forster’s A Passage to India’s iconic character Adela Quested, Nerys too

”This Is a Troubled Place”

81

“consolidates the identity she would rather deny.” In this encounter with the Muslim men, and the quick brushing with the veiled Muslims women before, Nerys only “reconfirms the racist assumption, that given the slightest opportunity, the native men can be dangerous to her” (Sharpe 122). When Nerys gets lost in Srinagar, away from the English residential section, she finds herself in an unsafe zone and “peers behind” (The Kashmir Shawl 153) to check if she is followed by the native “Other”. She receives a “violent tug” at her skirt that almost makes her fall, and realizes that children with “dark and dirty faces with bright eyes” (153) had grabbed her skirt. This is a significant moment in the text which betrays itself, as Nerys’s whole fear stands on the precipice of an English woman who could be assaulted when alone and lost in downtown Srinagar. Nerys, thus, betrays herself with the ideological position of the English woman in colonial Kashmir. Tragically, the text comes a full circle projecting this underlying fear of the local Kashmiri when Nerys’s granddaughter, Mair, seventy years later exhibits the same fear of the Kashmiri subject. As the novel shifts to the present time, Mair visits a shawl store in Bund area of Srinagar in search for information on her grandmother’s kani shawl. She walks out of the store and looks around for food: “She whirled around tightening her grasp on the bag that contained her shawl, to see an old woman, her face covered with a white scarf” (The Kashmir Shawl 195). “What is it? What do you want? Mair blurted” (195). It is the same kind of heightened alarm and fear that Nerys exhibited, set apart by another era. Mair’s tightening of the bag is also reflective of her fear of the local other, the potential stealer of her belongings, and what is especially tragic in this moment is that the old woman had only come to help her provide information regarding the shawl. As the novel crisscrosses timelines shifting between past and present-day Kashmir, it returns to the moment of Nerys meeting a destitute children’s family and finds the mother in a dark shack in a deplorable condition. This, ultimately, leads her to find the shawl and knowing about the Kani tradition, which is an important segment in the text. I want to dwell on the problematic representation of the native children here that makes Nerys’s stance as one of the central figures extremely dubious. The first time one hears of the native children is when Nerys and Evan are in Leh trying to set up the mission school and teaching the children in Leh. Nerys assumes that education or food are not available to them. This is the second time readers encounter the children in downtown Srinagar, represented as poor and destitute and attempting to sell their mother’s woven shawl to Nerys. This moment also leads to Nerys and the children being manhandled by a group of rowdier older children, who take away the little money Nerys offers to the young children. These older children fulfil what Nerys has been scared of from the beginning—they “jostled Nerys close up against a wall. She

82

Chapter 4

tried to slap away their hands as they grabbed at her pockets” (157). The oldest of this group even attack her and tear off her pearl necklace and the brooch she wore on her blouse. As Nerys screams and tries to run from this menacing young man, “to her horror” she sees a man’s shape blocking them from the other side in the alley and feels “trapped” (157). It is significant that up to this point Nerys finds herself afraid, faces hostility, and knows she is trapped by the group of young native boys. But as soon as the figure of the man turns out to be a European speaking English, she is relieved. Nerys is “saved” instantly. These series of events are important in the larger scheme of the text’s representation of children. The local Kashmiri children are represented in very poor light—for money and food they are capable of even attacking her and violating her private space. Secondly, as soon as Rainer Stamm, the savior appears, these same children are presented as foolish, taken by his magic and the text almost forgets everything that appeared as a menacing juvenile crime. Even Stamm’s only question to her after the “rescue” is whether she was robbed by the “little devils”. The text creates a tragic assumption of the children having deviant minds and being untrustworthy thieves. Later in the novel, Stamm rescues the stolen brooch from the boys and presents it to Nerys, a savior’s act fulfilled. In this context, Sarada Balagopalan’s work on the impacts of colonialism on non-Western indigenous childhoods is crucial for analyzing the construction of native childhoods (“Constructing Indigenous Childhoods” 19). According to Balagopalan, studies on children of the “Third World” are mostly constructed on the Western ideals and norms, and she critiques several Western ethnographic studies to point out how indigenous children are already locked into “traditional” unchanging “culturalist” “politics of representation” (20–22). Although Balagopalan frames her discussion on the ethnographic experiences of the street children of Calcutta, what is significant is the notion that poor indigenous children are different in the ways the Western family imagines or idealizes the “protected child” (26). This framing of the poor “third world” children also helps in understanding the representation of children in Kashmir in the text. Toby Rollo also extends the same notion that indigenous children are perceived as feral children who are “sinful and bestial” (60). Thomas’s text repeats this misrepresentation of the poor children who, without a “proper” civilized education, have turned rogues and thieves from an early age. In the novel, Nerys’s benevolence in singing and dancing with the children, offering food and money to the weaver community for the nurturing and protection of the unwanted daughter of the English woman, adds to a larger problematic narrative of constructing a certain coloniality of childhood. There are several other examples in the text when Kashmiri children appear, described in dehumanized ways: When Nerys lives in Kanihama

”This Is a Troubled Place”

83

village and Rainer comes to visit her, he drops coins into the hands of the boys who fight to open his car door, affirming their servile position (215), or the children of the shawl weaver women who dig their “filthy hands” into her pocket (220); the children who “scuttle away sideways like a crab” (224) taken by the magic show presented by Rainer Stamm. As the children’s mother dies, the kids are brought to their grandparents’ family in the shawl-weaving community in Kanihama, and Nerys once again assumes that whatever help with food and money they had offered for the children would be taken away by the locals (277). Historical accounts of Kashmir during the British regime suggest a different picture about local community relations. Robert Thorp’s Cashmere Misgovernment notes that “I have never yet heard of an Englishman having had anything stolen by a Cashmeerie, and have very rarely heard of theft among themselves” (38). Thorp also explains that in villages, Kashmiri people lived together looking after each other and one “who has no relations to look after him is supported by the community” (Thorp 38). He notes that on the eleventh of every month, food and money were distributed to the poor by more affluent households (Thorp 38). The text’s erroneous assumptions and projections of the children “saved” by Nerys’s kindness and buying their life with money aided by Nerys and Rainer Stamm become a rather sad story of colonial mentality.

THE SYMBOLIC PRESENCE OF THE “KASHMIRI” SHAWL This kind of “epistemic violence” brings the larger question of the title of the text—The Kashmir Shawl, which linguistically conceals an error. The inaccuracy reveals the larger problem of erasures. Ideally the correct phrase is the “Kashmiri shawl”—the extra i acts as the possessive, a marker of people and belonging to the space. The Kashmir Shawl locates the shawl to the place, but the possessive is absent. But why is this significant? It becomes a misnomer that emphasizes consumption and commodity fetishism of Kashmiri artifacts and cultural productions. The Kashmiri shawl, a central symbol, is an object of desire not only for Mair to find the missing link of her grandmother and family who left a trail in India, but interestingly, the shawl also functions as a reminder of how Kashmiri commodities become linked and appropriated in an exploitative and reductive way producing a certain symbolic violence. I want to pause here briefly to focus on the shawl itself and what it means in the narrative structure and the larger goal of understanding Kashmir in the text. Michelle Maskiell traces the history of the shawl-weaving industry in Kashmir and states: “the Kashmiri Shawl, always refers to textiles woven

84

Chapter 4

in Kashmir; Kashmiri type shawls” that indicate shawls woven by “migrant Kashmiri weavers” in colonial India and “imitation Kashmiri shawls” made by Britain and France in the model of the authentic Kashmiri ones (Clabburn qtd. in Maskiell 27). Maskiell also explains that the misnomer “Cashmere” now in currency in the Western world, actually originated in the eighteenthcentury English spelling of “Kashmir” and later got associated with “exotic” luxury wool in nineteenth-century Britain (28). What is particularly interesting is that the cultural and commodity fetishism of all things marked as “cashmere” retains markers of empire and the novel’s title, thus, reflects such a fetish. Maskiell also argues that the “the importance of colonialism for the procurement of Kashmiri model shawls and their characteristic design” is “underestimated” (30). Written in 2011, the novel thus produces a double kind of epistemic violence on Kashmir and its people, even when there is a serious attempt at a different gaze on the surface. Not only does the centrality of the shawl become a reminder of the staple consumption of Kashmir during the heydays of colonialism, but Thomas harkens back to that same stereotypical consumption through the shawl, even if Nerys Watkins isn’t a direct imperial consumer of the shawl in the usual ways. One may argue that the function of the kani shawl is in its circulation and exchange between the English ladies: from Caroline Bowen to Nerys to her granddaughter Mair. It is for Caroline’s half Kashmiri-half English daughter Zahra and is meant as a bridal present for her. Yet, the symbol of the shawl as a future dowry for Zahra is a problematic one when it never operates in that role in the text; rather, the shawl becomes a floating signifier in a strange economy of exchange that ossifies Kashmir and its people in grievous ways. Chitralekha Zutshi’s fascinating work on the historical production and circulation of the Kashmiri shawls explains that: the production of Kashmiri shawls began in Kashmir in the mid-fifteenth century and gathered momentum under the patronage of the Mughal emperor Akbar after his conquest of the Kashmir Valley in 1586. Until the eighteenth century, Kashmiri shawls were entirely handwoven on looms made of wooden sticks on which the weft yarn was wound and interlaced with the warp to produce intricate patterns. Such shawls were known as Kani shawls from the name of the Kashmirivillage, Kanihama. (422)

This is the same kind of shawl that is at the center of Thomas’s novel. Zutshi also states that Kashmiri shawls were laden with meaning and exchanged hands to denote high value from the presenter to the receiver of such a rare gift. Even the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar between Maharaja Gulab Singh and the British empire included a statement that apart from other commodities, Singh would offer three Kashmiri shawls annually to the British government

”This Is a Troubled Place”

85

(“Designed for Eternity: Kashmiri Shawls” 424). Thus, the novel’s central symbol of the shawl is a tell-tale sign about Kashmir itself—the shawl becomes a symbol for the place, how the place “was presented to the British public was through its most celebrated commodity—the Kashmiri Shawl” (Zutshi 429). Interestingly, before Thomas’s 2011 novel, there was one more novel of almost the same name in 1841, written by Charles White titled, The Cashmere Shawl: An Eastern Fiction that even had the shawl as a narrator (Zutshi 430). It was a three-volume novel that engaged in details of the origin and production of the shawl and showcased the material existence of the shawl in its journey within the British empire in which the characters were in a series of romantic tales that comprised of lovers, villains, violence, chaos, and rescues by lovers “all set in the luxuriant valleys and mountains of Kashmir and central Asia” (Zutshi 431). Zutshi also points to the Cashmere shawl’s imperial presence in other British fiction like Virginia Woolf’s, Mrs. Dalloway and Night and Day. Uncannily, White’s 1841 fiction brings us back to Thomas’s The Kashmir Shawl from 2011. One may even argue that the 1841 description of Charles White’s novel is an aide-mémoire for Thomas’s text which spans roughly seventy years from 1941–2011 and constitutes love stories, colonial secrets, a shawl that links clandestine relationships, villains all set in the stunning landscape of Kashmir. It is also hardly a coincidence then, that in 2011 Thomas’s novel won the Best Epic Romance of the year in England. The two romances between a married missionary wife Nerys Watkins and a magician, the Swiss mountaineer Rainer Stamm in the 1940s, and another generational romance between the Swiss Bruno Becker and Mair Ellis in the present transpires over the shawl’s material, symbolic, and economic relationship it had with the Empire along with its murky connections to the kin of the Maharaja of Kashmir. At one instance in the text, when Mair comes to Srinagar and shows the shawl to her grandmother’s old friend, Caroline Bowen, the narrator calls the shawl “drawn between them like a narrative” (The Kashmir Shawl 244). The shawl thus becomes a symbol of anxiety for Mair and other characters as it narrates the stories of its “production and consumption” (Zutshi 432) and strange exchanges within the British Empire. After Mair finds the shawl in her parent’s house, the narrator reveals Mair had already researched about Kashmiri shawls for four months and already knew that it was a “kani” woven shawl with rich value. Later in Ladakh, the shawl’s true value and grandeur make her realize that the shawl was “far too opulent” (40) for being a gift from her grandfather to his wife. Nerys Watkins acquires the shawl in mysterious ways, given to her by Caroline Bowen to keep it for her secret daughter, Zahra who then leaves with Rainer Stamm and his Indian wife for Switzerland. Zahra grows up in Switzerland and later settles in India with her family but never learns about her Kashmiri lineage, or her

86

Chapter 4

English mother, and a brief mentioning of her mother at the end of the novel is promptly disbelieved by the now older, well-established Zahra. The shawl exchanges hands for the last time when Mair fulfills her grandmother’s circuitous task of keeping the shawl for Caroline’s daughter and leaves it unknowingly at Zahra’s home in New Delhi. It is an interesting ending to the novel, almost a closure that the shawl has finished an entire circle and found its rightful owner, away from the English “keepers” who were only safeguarding it for the rightful daughter of Kashmir. Nonetheless, the shawl’s convoluted journey through the generations from British Raj and its memsahibs to the present moment tells a “shawl narrative” that becomes a sad fetish for Kashmir and its people, sometimes even without their knowing or wanting. They are not at the center of this narrative. Although, there is an attempt to pay a homage to the historical village of Kanihama, its weavers, spinners, and embroiders, the text still dismembers its own intentions by locking Kashmir with its fetishized shawl that only links three English women and their lovers as accomplices to their central stories. In effect, this has larger ramifications on Kashmir in the present time in the text’s production of a sanitized version of the conflict and retains the Kashmiri shawl as a synonymous popular value-laden imaginary of Kashmir. By highlighting the consumable aspects of Kashmir the novel enables the same statist narratives. Zahra may never know why she received the old kani shawl, or the secret of her mixed lineage, which seems irrelevant in the text. It isn’t important because the narrative ends with the final valorization of the good deed by Mair Ellis who finds her space back in the family and ends her rootlessness by the noble act of returning the shawl, even when its significance is lost. Ultimately, it is about her finding herself and not the shawl’s significance to Zahra. The “Kashmiri” human face of the shawl is sadly lost in this circuitous journey. Bushra Jamil and Umer Ismail construct a slightly alternate history of the Kashmiri shawl, critiquing the existing scholarship to some extent in the way it focuses on the British encounter with the Kashmiri shawl and its journey of production, consumption, and appropriation during British colonialism up until the Partition. They acknowledge the importance of the work done by Maskiell and Zutshi and bring back the discussion of the shawl and its significance to the “human face” of its people from precolonial days. In some ways, their account of the shawl’s history might reek a little of an apologist comparison between weavers under Mughal era and British colonialism, but what is significant in their argument is the focus on the labor by Kashmiri artisans themselves—the human agent behind the shawl and less on symbolic value-laden aspect of the Kashmiri shawl. Jamil and Usmail point to the extreme conditions faced by the shawl weavers for five centuries till Partition and how they mostly worked in “a system of debt-driven labour which practically enslaved entire families to the extent that 12–16 work hour days

”This Is a Troubled Place”

87

only ensured that they didn’t starve” (88). The Dogra rule was particularly harsh for the weavers and conditions of producing the shawl were based on extremely exploitative conditions. Placing the text in such a history, it can be argued that Thomas does pay attention to the poverty in the lives of the weavers and spinners in the shawl industry. With the help of Mehraan, a local overseer of a shawl factory in Srinagar, Mair visits a shawl loom and is in awe at the magnitude of meticulous work each kani shawl requires: Mair could hardly conceive of the amount of work involved. She found that her eyes were stinging, partly in sympathy with the young men who strained over this exacting work all day, every day of their lives, and partly in awe of the legacy that had somehow come into her possession. (The Kashmir Shawl 205)

Here, readers are faced with the mammoth reality of weaving and embroidering these shawls and the human face involved in them. Yet, ironically, as mentioned before, in this embedded narrative to locate the shawl’s history, the larger goal is directed at Mair’s finding out about her grandmother through the shawl. Mair even declares to the manager of a Pashmina processing center in Leh, “I am . . . just trying to find out something about the shawl’s history and maybe through that a little about my grandmother. I never knew her, you see” (The Kashmiri Shawl 39). It is a telling moment in the text when Mair further explains to Tinley that her grandfather was a Christian missionary, to which Tinley responds, “The Europeans came, not many stayed. They opened some clinics and founded schools for children and for that we owe them a debt” (The Kashmir Shawl 39). The narrative thus reiterates an apologia for the Empire and the mission. This in turn is heightened by an awareness of the material significance of the shawl reminded by Mair’s disappointment in the shops at Bund in Srinagar, where she browses the “lovely goods” and “only hope[s] that somewhere along the links that radiated from here, in the boutiques of five-star hotels in India or the expensive shops of Fifth Avenue and Bond Street, there would be plenty of interested women with money to spend” (The Kashmir Shawl 194). Despite all the earlier framing of the poverty ridden conditions of the Kashmiri weavers, this becomes a naïve, if not a tragic reversal that reveals the novel’s “aporia”—a central gap that belies the text and shows why the shawl is a problematic signifier. In these quoted lines, Mair underscores the shawl’s due merit to be sold for large values in New York or London or the wealthiest spaces in the Indian market, which once again connects the shawl’s consumption within elite classes peddling Kashmir as an exotic luxury, but also significantly, it reflects the mercantile violence enabled by neocolonial means, not just from the British empire. It erases the Kashmir conflict to the periphery, whereby only the consumption and trade are important. Indian five-star boutiques can sell the Kashmiri shawl to be bought by upper classes, but alongside it erases the hegemony

88

Chapter 4

that puts them in such circulation. The shawl’s value is directly proportional to the demand and sales from upper-class consumers in New York, London and India, confirming the reality of imperial/neocolonial relationships. It is rather telling that in 2015, the president of India and his wife gifted a special “Kashmiri Shawl” to Michelle Obama on her visit to India3. THE EUROPEAN GAZE ON KASHMIR’S CONFLICT In this last section, I bring us back to the novel’s representation of Kashmir’s conflict and how a certain epicolonial violence is furthered through such a representation. The first time one encounters the conflict brewing in Kashmir is when Mair visits Srinagar and stays in a houseboat in 2011. Mair becomes a witness to a terror strike when insurgents bomb an Indian Border Security Force troop’s vehicle, and a scene of violence perforates the so far peaceful and beautiful Kashmir seen in the novel. Mair explains the conflict as “outbreaks of violence between insurgents and the Indian security forces . . . a temporary stir, as least for outside observers” (The Kashmir Shawl 193). Later, when Mair meets Mehraan, a chief of the shawl workshop in Srinagar tracing the journey of her grandmother’s shawl, the conflict is summed up again briefly through Mair’s perception: [Mair] had read in the newspapers about the stone-throwers, groups of militant young men who believed in free Kashmir. They collected rocks and gathered in mobs to pelt the security forces. When the police and army retaliated, sometimes a boy was killed. Riots in protest at a death had led to curfews, increased police and military pressure, a period of uneasy calm, and then the cycle would begin again. (italics mine The Kashmir Shawl 201)

When she asks the Kashmiri local Mehraan the same question, how he feels about azadi and if he supports it, Mehraan’s response comes as a refusal to believe in the notion of freedom: “Freedom, for a poor man, is an idea only. But, no, I do not myself believe that Kashmir can be independent. It is a matter of economics” (The Kashmir Shawl 201). When pressed further if a possible solution for Kashmir would be to join Pakistan, Mehraan’s response comes as a sanitized reminder of statist versions that summarize the conflict from afar—“Pakistan has problems enough” (The Kashmir Shawl 201). In a few lines, a more than seventy-year-old struggle and an unfinished long Partition is skimmed and put away through Mair and a strategic mouthpiece of a Kashmiri subject. To be sure, it is not wrong to think that some people in Kashmir would have such a political take on the conflict. Yet it is, indeed, a larger

”This Is a Troubled Place”

89

framing problem to give voice to only one instance to the Kashmir conflict that is couched in the same statist view and to assume that poverty and political voice are mutually exclusive and that a certain working class of Kashmir has no political consciousness or stake within the socio-political structures. Certainly, Kashmir is not a monolithic space with only one voice. For the text to have Mehraan’s voice do away with the whole concept of azadi, and not provide any other narrative device of alternate voices, is another level of epistemic violence. Elsewhere, Mehraan once again, on the insistence of Mair, narrates the history of Kashmir before Partition and presents a history of syncretism. As Mehraan tells Mair: in those days, before Partition, Kashmir was a different country. In Srinagar, out in the villages also, we were Muslims, Sikhs, Hindu, Buddhist, altogether. There was of course trouble sometimes, neighbors and disputes, but not so to tear apart a country. (The Kashmir Shawl 202)

Kashmir problem’s is not just a “postcolonial” tension as it is usually understood, and as Angana Chatterji explains the “resistance in Jammu and Kashmir” was ongoing much before Partition. In one example, she focuses on the resistance of July 13, 1931 when an uprising took place, organized by the All India Kashmir Committee “to secure the rights and freedoms of Muslims in Kashmir” (Chatterji 97). This uprising took a communal turn with authorities brutalizing Muslims and in turn, Hindus were looted. The conflict only worsened after the 1947 Partition in the way Kashmir was “assigned” to India. But the myth of a syncretic past that the text produces also reaffirms the nationalized versions of history. Tamoghna Halder also explains that Kashmir has never seen a Kashmiri ruler and witnessed a long history of oppression from the Mughal reign (1589 AD) to Afghans (1753–1819), Sikhs (1819–1846), and Dogras (1846–1947), “until the Indian and Pakistani states took over” (Halder “Kashmir’s Struggle”). As mentioned in the introduction, when the British East India Company annexed Kashmir after defeating the Sikhs in the first Anglo-Sikh war in 1846, Kashmir was sold to the Dogras for a sum of 7.5 million rupees. Gulab Singh, the Dogra ruler was fully controlled by the British and Kashmir was severely exploited under his reign. It was during this time also that Kashmiri peasants suffered tremendously and could not hold land, and the state of Kashmiri Muslims deteriorated with heavy taxes on everything, including marriage (Halder “Kashmir’s Struggle”). Halder also points out that during the same time, Kashmiri Pandits fared much better with upper-class jobs in administration and as teachers. The Hindu-Muslims divide worsened with a struggling and oppressed dominant Muslim population and a seemingly affluent Hindu elite class of people.

90

Chapter 4

There were many agitations by the shawl weavers, workers since 1865 and from 1930 onward Kashmiri Muslims began an ongoing resistance against the oppressive regime (Halder). The Muslim working class suffered acutely prior to Partition which did not change after Partition and worsened with the Indian nation-state becoming a post-colony in its practices and statist policies of control and domination in Kashmir. The Kashmir Shawl strives to become a historical novel with details of colonial era, Kashmir’s weavers and the present conflict, but the simplistic, smooth narratives of the conflict paint a rather problematic representation. Such a sterile encapsulation of the world’s highest militarized zone in a novel that was awarded the epic romance of the year in the UK also becomes a stark critical erasure in manifold ways. Firstly, Mair’s own synopsis of the Kashmir conflict seems to do a summing up of both sides, one that seeks freedom and another that holds power and retaliates with force to maintain sovereignty—but her summation that “sometimes a boy was killed” (italicized before) becomes a sad reduction of crossfire casualties of a war zone that it can happen “sometimes.” It spells a casual acceptance of death of Kashmiri youth. Mair’s matter-of-fact condensed version of the conflict also makes light of why stone throwers in Kashmir resist against the state. The text makes it seem like a pesky problem that the state intervention cannot keep at bay. Thus, using Mehraan as a spokesperson of syncretism alongside a few skirmishes here and there, the novel also produces grand narratives of history that erase voices of Kashmiri people. In an ethnographic essay on stone throwers in Kashmir, Angana Chatterji documents a Kashmiri youth’s statement, “India asks us, ‘Why do you throw stones?’ No one asks, ‘Who burned your house down’” (“The Militarized Zone” 93). Chatterji’s essay coincides with the period Thomas’s novel is also set in, which was published right after a time in 2010 when Kashmir saw one of the highest protests against brutal state techniques to silence Kashmiri people’s voices. Chatterji explains: Summer 2010 witnessed strikes and mass protests, as hundreds and thousands of people marched through the streets, in cities, towns and rural areas, across Kashmir to protest against the suppression of civil society. . . . Dominant Indian representations of the situation described the mass civil disobedience as something engineered by pro-freedom groups or cross border interests, rather than a spontaneous response by the people to their experience of subjugation. (100)

These protests were also followed by Indian forces opening fire on crowds, detaining and torturing elderly people and “coerced false confessions” to wrongdoing (Chatterji 100). This political timeline is important to situate the novel’s trajectory especially in its framing of the stone throwers.

”This Is a Troubled Place”

91

In the article “Stone Wars” Mohammad Junaid also traces the history of stone battles in Kashmir and reflects on the helplessness and collective resistance of Kashmiris. Junaid states: Stone wars test human endurance, and their long history in Kashmir also says something about the collective endurance of Kashmiris. There is a legend that it was a practice invented in the older neighborhoods of Kashmir’s city, Srinagar, more than a century back, and deployed first against oppressive moneylenders and then against the region’s autocratic rulers. Older Kashmiris remember throwing stones at the cavalcade Indian Prime Minister Nehru on one of his visits to Kashmir. They hold him responsible for occupying Kashmir against the wishes of Kashmir’s inhabitants (Junaid “Stone Wars”).

Junaid speaks of a helplessness that most Kashmiris face under a brutal state domination which has no way out but to manifest itself in stone pelting. Given this context, Thomas’s description of stone throwing constructs an image of Kashmir where only some “radical” Kashmiri men throw stones at the state and simply get killed in turn. The bigger problem is the presence of such a description of Kashmir’s conflict in a text that perhaps is targeted for a wide range of European/British readers. Rosie Thomas, as a popular author, with several other books to her name, has quite a readership in Britain. Her readers are mostly in Europe and England, and this novel The Kashmir Shawl constructs an epic about Kashmir for many Western readers with an idea of a conflict where some “miscreants” are creating problem toward making this a “troubled place.” Here, I bring back the discussion of epicolonialism and the novel in this context. The text weaves various strands of important historical events in Kashmir but it also perpetuates structures of colonial formations that enable layers of epistemic violence to create a stultified vision of Kashmir and Kashmiri subjects. A secondary problem emerges out of the colonial tale symbolizing the object of desire, the shawl and how it also reduces Kashmir to a consumption. But an epicolonial text is more than that—in chapter 1, I argue about Kashmir being a unique space caught in a liminality between two postcolonial nation-states, between living and death, an aberrant space that indicates a missing taxonomy in our postcolonial vocabulary. This novel as an epicolonial text brings us back to that liminal space in which the text is caught in the “disjuncture between the colonial past and present continuities” (Shankar) in a way that recreates epistemic challenges in viewing the land, its people and the gaps that are left in between. The text enacts an epicolonial violence in which old colonial discourse intersects with neocolonial erasures toward a peculiar projection of Kashmir. The “saving” of the halfKashmiri girl Zahra by Nerys and her granddaughter thus ties them together

92

Chapter 4

in a colonial ‘saving of the native’ account. Moreover, Mair, the trapeze artist, manages one final trapeze “trick” for a fantastic rescue of a drowning Kashmiri child in the Jhelum toward the end of the novel. In the end, she and Bruno Becker take “possession of the Rose of Kashmir,” the houseboat in Srinagar, and the narrator iterates—“nothing out of place, nothing missing” (The Kashmir Shawl 500). The lives of Kashmiri people can be trapped in systemic epicolonial formations, yet the text ends with an affirmation that nothing is amiss for the European tourists. Only Kashmir and Kashmiri people have receded into being a backdrop, a fantastic omission. NOTES 1. A part of this chapter was presented at Cornell University’s conference: “Kashmir in the Global Humanities: Genres, Poetics, Ecologies.” Department of Asian Studies. September 10, 2022. I am indebted to Suvir Kaul for discussing this paper with me during the conference. 2. Adela Quested’s moment of fear after being lost in the cave’s darkness and its significance has been extensively written about in which the fear of contact with the native body is assumed as rape. 3. https://www​.ndtv​.com​/india​-news​/president​-mukherjees​-wife​-gifts​-pashmina​ -shawl​-to​-us​-first​-lady​-michelle​-obama​-733578

Chapter 5

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman The Garden of Solitude and The Tiger Ladies

Together we make the slow move out of sorrow and into life. Sudha Koul to her grandmother, The Tiger Ladies Life teaches us that there is beauty in ugliness. Sridar, The Garden of Solitude

No study of Kashmir can be complete without the “Pandit question,” the mass migration of the Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir in the early 1990s owing to insurgency and political crisis. The 1990s became a moment of historical rupture when thousands of Pandits were forced to move away from their homeland into becoming “internally displaced peoples” within the mainland of the Indian nation-state. The last three chapters trace varied investigations of the Kashmiri subject, the politics of death, and the Kashmiri body in its decorporeality and haunting within necropolitical space, along with explorations on agency and rethinking pockets of resistance through them. This chapter focuses on two works—Siddhartha Gigoo’s debut novel The Garden of Solitude (2011), the first English novel that represents the Pandit exile from Kashmir through a Bildungsroman of Sridhar, a young Kashmiri Pandit boy who witnesses the family’s involuntary departure from Kashmir in peak turmoil; the second text The Tiger Ladies (2002) is the first memoir by Sudha Koul, a Kashmiri Pandit woman writer who tells the story of three generations of women in her family, recreating a history of cultural traditions of Kashmir through women in the family. The last chapter studied different ways of haunting within Kashmir’s landscape that reconfigure the notion of resistance and agency amidst a violence that captures the body and its surroundings. This chapter moves away from 93

94

Chapter 5

the focus on necropolitics and looks at another way of exploring resistance and survival in Kashmir’s conflicted space. I read these texts through a notion of alegropolitics—a term coined by Ananya Jahanara Kabir. I study Gigoo and Koul’s works with a focus on the tropes of memory and nostalgia to understand spaces and identities in crisis but especially, how these texts “alegropolitically” create alternate modalities of being and resistance for subjects witnessing terror, violence and living as refugees. Ultimately, as the chapter unravels, I argue that Gigoo and Koul’s texts are framed in alegropolitics that emerges a narrative of reconciliation, hope and syncretism. Both works also operate in the Bildungsroman genre. For Koul, it is her memoir of her childhood traced through the “tiger ladies” in her family constituting of her grandmother and mother via whom she constructs an alegropolitical remembering of Kashmir’s past in claiming her subjectivity and identity as a Kashmiri woman through a mnemonical jouissance. In Gigoo’s novel, writing and art create the space for a different dimension of allegro—a claiming of a Kashmiri subjectivity through creative alegropolitics. Sridhar’s Bildungsroman, thus, forms a part of a subversive kunstlersroman, in which he presents a paean to writing and creativity as a source to collectively speak and write about the forgotten Pandit stories. Ananya Jahanara Kabir coined the term alegropolitics, meaning the “politics of collective enjoyment” to underscore the alternate ways of understanding resistance that are beyond the usual ways of determining subaltern and collective resistance. The term has its roots in the Latin word alacrem meaning lively or cheerful, whereas the Italian word allegro denotes bright and lively as its primary meanings. The word forms a basis of denoting a certain joyous affect in music. Kabir extends Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics to raise a significant question: “what happens to the other side of necro? It is the allegro, or the body that is pushed to death, survives and produces possibilities of joy to survive” (Kabir “Partition’s Alegropolitics”). Thus, for Kabir the concept of alegropolitics is a way to think of “trauma that has been experienced and suffered and how people can think of post-trauma survival and find possibilities of collective enjoyment in their new communities.” The previous chapters present the subject caught in a necropolitical violence that locks them to a state of “living dead” and alegropolitics helps us understand agency and resistance in alternative ways in the Kashmiri subject. Quoting Kabir, “That power of surviving and resisting trauma and rebuilding life is what is termed as alegropolitics . . . when most of the times there is a focus on the melancholic and mournful effects of trauma” (Kabir “Partition’s Alegropolitics”). “The other equally important affect of joy without which survival would not be possible” is where Kabir draws our attention to through this concept of alegropolitics. Thus, it is a different register that alegropolitics operates on to create new communities through the “survival and rapprochement”

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

95

(Partition’s Alegropolitics”). My entry into The Garden of Solitude and Tiger Ladies is through this alegropolitical vision of reconciliation that certainly does not erase the trauma or displacement but uses collective symbols of tradition, food, and joy into rebuilding a Kashmiri identity from the displaced margins. This is not a measure of giving up on Kashmir but reclaiming it. Such alegropolitical frames of thinking in postcolonial discourses also bear resemblance to Holocaust memory studies. Holocaust scholars Ann Rigney and Diane Wolf also present a similar notion of rethinking trauma narratives. Their work has often countered what is debated as the “overdetermined paradigm of trauma” (Rigney qtd. in Wolf 75). They focus on several case studies of family memories that present “hope and positivities.” Wolf explains, “These memories of positivities do not negate memories of trauma, but in many cases, they are just as prominent if not more” (75). Wolf discusses family narratives that focus on the “survival and triumph,” (80) amidst darkness and brutality. A focus on “Such memories of positivities suggests that we need a new conceptual language for non-traumatic memories. Perhaps ‘Postmemories of joy’ are the place to start” (Wolf 84). This closely resembles alegropolitics in many ways, especially in the retrieval of memories of collective joy that help build productive forces to forge a community ahead. THE TIGER LADIES Sudha Koul’s memoir The Tiger Ladies (2002) is dedicated to her ancestors to “write an epitaph to a way of life” (Koul’s dedication in The Tiger Ladies). Koul’s tripartite memoir is split in three sections with tributes to the women in her family: grandmother, mother, and daughters who resurrect and keep alive a certain vision of Kashmir and Kashmiri women’s subjectivity. The memoir begins with a vision of Dhanna, Koul’s grandmother who smells of buttermilk that she churns and drinks all day. Interestingly, this is the first memory of Koul’s grandmother that is called “sweet elixir” (4) in the text. Buttermilk, as Kabir has argued elsewhere, also becomes one of the primary mnemonic codes of nostalgia and abundance for lost eras before Partition occurred in Punjab (“Partition’s Alegropolitics”). That Koul begins her grandmother’s memory with her drinking mint buttermilk situates the memoir in a space that frames a collective memory of happiness and abundance. Koul’s memory of her grandmother Dhanna’s Kashmir is sprinkled with lavish horticultural symbols of fruit trees, abundant large black cherries, the popular hatab tree that provides “the most intense heat”, walnut trees and pine (The Tiger Ladies 13–14). This is a Kashmir constructed with the usual cultural markers like paisleys, lotus, and chinar trees that separate it from the whole of India (The

96

Chapter 5

Tiger Lilies 14). These symbols also mark the space of Kashmir associated with women in pherans, babies swaddled with pashmina shawl and everyone carrying the Kashmiri firepot kangris for heat (The Tiger Ladies 7). In this section, Koul is careful to carve out a Kashmiri womanhood that is laced with the iconic symbols of Kashmir, thereby creating and claiming a space of Kashmiri Pandit women within the historical memory of Kashmir. Koul remembers her grandmother’s words as she “smoothes out the wrinkles in the fabric with a gentle reverence that is shared by all Kashmiris”—“Pashmina has always meant security for the women of Kashmir. In the old days women got saris of pashmina in their trousseaux . . . Never forget, these shawls are equal to gold.” (9). However, the text is also honest in portraying the class and socio-political divides between the Hindu and Muslim worlds in Kashmir. Koul reminds that Hindus and Muslims lived alongside each other, but Muslims are served food in special “cup and sauce” (The Tiger Ladies 10) in Hindu homes, a practice that was a common, mutual behavior among the two communities.1 In this backdrop, Koul strives hard to create a syncretic alegropolitical framing of the past where symbols of joy, heritage and pride bring all Kashmiris together. As Koul remarks, “In Kashmir, we were more preoccupied with the fact that we were all Kashmiri and we lived in the most beautiful place on earth” (9). This section as a tribute to grandmothers constructs a dominant frame of pleasure, joy and pride in Kashmir’s art and culture. The delicate details of the Kashmiri shawl wallah producing “hundred year old shawls” (11) or the white silk shawl with embroidery that glows like “uncut rubies, emeralds, pearls and diamonds” with “myriad flowers representing an infinite number of possibilities that create entirely new universes” (11) create a Kashmir that may seem fetishized and exoticized for the western readers. Yet Koul’s deliberate attempt to recreate the indelible markers of Kashmir’s rich cultural and arts past performs important functions in the text—first, Koul strategically uses alegropolitical measures to convey a solidarity and syncretism of Pandits and Muslims in Kashmir. This is not just a syncretic past where confluence of Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims is pronounced to showcase a harmonious history of confluence. Rather, as mentioned earlier, this kind of syncretism works as a reminder of the arts, moments of pleasure and laughter along with cultural signifiers that brings together the shared traditions and joys between the Pandit and Muslim communities. For instance, early in the memoir, a Muslim shawl seller’s visit into the Pandit household is described in great details and what he means to the Hindu family. The women in the family laugh along with him and “he loves to make us all laugh with sales talk in English employed in the past for British memsahibs” (The Tiger Ladies 13). The focus on the “shawl wallah” and his moments of shared camaraderie, mirth, and banter with the family, along with the shawl seller’s daughter

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

97

Izmat accompanying him becomes a significant part of Koul’s childhood memory. The text highlights a shared happiness through the figure of this man coming and going in their lives selling Kashmiri arts, and his presence is something beyond the sales and profit. He symbolizes an intrinsic bond, a liaison between the women and the traditions through pleasures embodied in laughter and secrecies that he learns with the women in the family. Koul stresses, “It is a family gathering and he is a part of it, it is a time for tea and gossip” (13). Here, I use the Greek concept of syndesis to probe how Koul’s memoir enables a conjunction of syncretism and syndesis to create newer frames of alliance and bond that make us rethink the present fractures within Kashmir. Syndesis, in Greek, means “a process dictated by the urge to bind together” (155) as defined by Richard L. Castro in a varied context in which he studies Colombian architect Rogelio Salmona’s work. Castro’s study of the architecture uses this concept of syndesis to make connections, a “trust that something may come out, though one is not yet completely sure what” (Rajchman qtd. in Castro 155). The “shawl wallah” in this context becomes a force of syndesis, binding together life forces that recreate solidarities and connections in the present. Koul emphasizes the importance of this figure by claiming that “The shawl maker has all these symbols of our life firmly cataloged in fine stitches on his cherished samplers” (The Tiger Ladies 16). What is particularly important in this instance is the notion that Koul’s reminiscence of the winter and luxuriant springs in the gardens of Kashmir is directly associated with the shawl maker. It is a memory that heightens the collective joy of the traditions and art through the syndesis in the figure of the Kashmiri Muslim shawl-maker. The symbol of the shawl maker is laced at interesting junctures in the first part of the memoir. He returns in the text at important stages in the construction of Kashmiri womanhood, weaving through art, cultural heritage, women’s collective pleasures, desires, gossip and even marriages. Koul remembers that the shawl seller becomes an indispensable part of a bride’s journey to her husband’s home: After the girl of the house gets married he follows her to her new address. If he already knows the people there, he is also the most reliable informant about the going ons at her in laws’ home. And, when lives move ahead and scenes shift, it is to the same shawl man that a young woman might sell the first half of her pashmina sari. (The Tiger Ladies 19)

To be clear, I want to emphasize that this is not just a case of subordinate hierarchies of a shawl peddler in search of sales and profit that is presented by Koul. This is a larger synergy of trust and bond which, I argue,

98

Chapter 5

is symptomatic of the syndesis and alegropolitical necessity to remember Kashmir and to create new possibilities of a community, connecting the land and its people. Kabir’s own reading of The Tiger Ladies points out to the memoir’s problem in representing Kashmir and the Kashmiri Muslim subjects in subordinate structures and in idyllic notions that match the stereotypical valorizations of Kashmir, hegemonically produced. Kabir is critical of The Tiger Ladies and argues that it is a: lovingly written memoir of the “vanished” Kashmiri Pandit world, the conspicuous consumption of beautiful objects was a privilege all too often secured through the labor of the Kashmiri Muslim. Sudha Koul’s prose in The Tiger Ladies dwells on the priceless shawls ordered by the women of her family . . . the Kashmiri Muslim artisan waiting for their decisions fits but uneasily into the Koul’s opulent living room and into the remembering text. (Territory of Desire 165)

As stated before, while Koul’s narrative is not without romanticizing pasts of the syncretism that often elide power structures and class, my reading of Koul’s memoir and her remembrance of Kashmir, notwithstanding some of the problems already mentioned, looks at moments of syndesis that the text creates to look at the past in which both Kashmiri subjects are welcomed into a space of newer possibilities. The figure of the shawl artisan, as highlighted before, is an example of something beyond just a dismissive figure of waiting for sales and profit “uneasily” in the opulence of the Pandit world. Rather, the shawl maker becomes a part of the women’s world, laughter and mirth, and even a secret liaison between women, once the younger women are married and move to their in-laws’ home. The artisan, therefore, occupies an important space that forms an intrinsic world of the women. He is not dismissed into an othered space but is a part of their ritualized tea times, laughter and forms a space of nostalgia that is not couched within a space of inferiority and otherness. Rakshan Rizwan in her analysis of Koul’s memoir also states that, “I posit that it should not be discarded as yet another complicitous literary text that perpetuates redundant sociopolitical and religious hegemonies in Kashmir” (124). Rizwan, albeit, notes the problems in Koul’s text that flatten the socioeconomic privileges and class question of the Pandit-Muslim divide, yet according to her, the text “is still the richest and most descriptive narrative account within the body of Kashmiri writing of the lived cosmopolitanism of the Valley before the 1990s” (124–125). For Rizwan, The Tiger Ladies successfully creates a space for a “historically valuable literary archive” that showcases the “visual and material culture” of Kashmir to bind together

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

99

Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir across a wide span of time (Rizwan 125). The text is also lauded in offering a rare “female subjectivity” in an “exclusively masculine world of literary and cultural representations in Kashmir” (Chambers qtd. in Rizwan 125). Of course, Rizwan’s focus in studying Koul’s memoir is on the text’s function as an important work in furthering human rights as a “vibrant cultural life” (Kashmiri Life Narratives 128), slightly different from the focus of this chapter. But Rizwan’s study serves as an important intervention in, first, redirecting attention to a much ignored memoir on Kashmir by a Kashmiri Pandit woman and second, by locating the “life narratives such as Tiger Ladies to create a sense of community and belonging .  .  . while concomitantly rendering cultural human rights more intelligible and understandable for its reading publics” (Rizwan 131). My take on Koul’s text extends this notion of “life narratives” from Rizwan and investigates how this belonging is fostered and framed through alegropolitics. Such an alegropolitical notion in The Tiger Ladies also constructs a memory of intimacy—a collectivity in eating together, of being in shared spaces, of celebrations and cooking that binds the two Hindu and Muslim communities. There is an unspoken code of accepting differences but also almost a subversive vein in which Koul remembers that both communities: quietly pass each other coveted dishes, forbidden in traditional interaction, over the backyard fence. We attend each other’s weddings in pleasure and enjoyment. On the night that henna is applied to the groom or the bride, we stay up all night singing songs, sipping green tea with crushed cardamom, cinnamon, and almonds. (The Tiger Ladies 32)

If earlier, Dhanna, the grandmother had marked dishes specifically for Muslim people in the household, there is a transgressive moment later in which weddings become spaces where such boundaries are “quietly” belied and toppled literally over the fences between the houses. Weddings and even religious traditions, thus, become alegropolitical moments of such subversive potentials. Koul once again remembers the significant Pandit festival of Shivratri and states, “We also send fruits and nuts to our older Muslim neighbors, while their children come over to our house for lunch or dinner. In turn we look forward to eating at their house on the two Eids celebrated by Muslims” (76). These celebrations are not just blindly fetishized as Koul does not hesitate to mention that some members of her family were reluctant to eat from a “Muslim home.” Rather, what I am pointing to is the underscoring of memories in which both Hindu and Muslim subjects are part of a larger memory making of Kashmir’s past through shared joy, despite the differences. The middle section on “Mothers” in Koul’s memoir creates a different kind of syndesis in which the Bildungsroman literally comes alive, as the

100

Chapter 5

childhood along with her experience of transitioning from girlhood to womanhood is documented. While the religious differences of the two communities become more pronounced in this section, it, nevertheless, emphasizes on the notion of agency in Kashmiri women beyond that divide. This section perhaps also comes closest to a direct indictment of patriarchal standards for the women in the family as questions of desire and arranged marriages emerge in the narrative. The erstwhile Kashmir of lingering summers and festivities slowly turns to a political landscape with the anti-India movement, and statist and militant violence clamoring for attention. The section ends with Kashmir as the mother figure watching her children, as the Pandits and Muslims get engulfed in an “incomprehensible darkness” (The Tiger Ladies 142). Yet, even in this section that underscores the growing rift between Muslims and Pandits, the narrative once again reminds of the tug toward an alegropolitical syndesis. Koul reminisces summer celebrations for Hindus and Muslims as things fall into chaos in the Kashmir valley: Summer celebrations are the same for Hindus and Muslims. After hibernating in the long winter we seize the other seasons and stay outdoors and in the sun as long as we can, enjoying our supernaturally exquisite valley. We have everything in common—our food, our music, our language, and humor, our Sufi tradition and shrines, our blossoming fruit trees, our lakes, and rivers, talking endlessly over our common fences. (The Tiger Ladies 122)

There is a constant pull toward shared joys as the memoir moves from Kashmir of the past into an uncertain violent present and such moments of engulfing violence, are punctuated by an appeal toward an alegropolitical compulsion to look beyond the crumbling life in the valley. The last section in Koul’s work on “Daughters” perhaps becomes the most ‘apolitical’ stance on Kashmir, as the narrative focuses more on claiming a space of home and diasporic, immigrant identity in the United States and fleets between claiming and Indian identity and holding onto a Kashmiri subjectivity as Koul remarks, “Being Indian is a habit we cannot shake off” (The Tiger Ladies 181). Nevertheless, Koul does acknowledge the horrors of statist violence along with insurgency and its impact on the people of Kashmir on all sides. Interestingly, in such instances when the narrative tells the changing tale of Kashmir and violence shrouding the land, she reminds that, “They say even in the worst of times, Mujahideen leaders delivered Shivratri supplies to pandits living in Kashmir” (195). Elsewhere, Koul reads the online news of the massacre of Pandit families in Pahalgam during a pilgrimage (The Tiger Ladies 204). But even in that instance, she emphasizes on something that harkens us back to the alegropolitics of the text. Sitting in New Jersey, Koul looks at an internet photograph of pilgrims killed by insurgents and that moment of death shifts to a different register:

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

101

If you go away from the photograph, off the right of the computer monitor, and walk up the hill there is a small bakery. If you are early enough you will see the old baker with his four sons pulling out piping hot loaves of bread from the oven. (204)

This is an especially interesting moment worthy of our attention because at a time when Koul remembers instances of crisis and ruptures in Kashmir’s tragedy or feels the loss of her homeland, her memory revisits a moment of joy in the senses of the hot piping loaves. Of course, it is important to note that Koul left Kashmir prior to the beginning of violence and insurgency, at a time when Kashmir was considered more peaceful. Therefore, her experience of the loss of Kashmir valley and its trauma was different from the rest of the community who underwent the horrors of loss of home first-hand. Yet, what is interesting in her remembrance is the shift from the register of death to a moment of sensorium joy in the daily routines of the community. This becomes key to provide solace and a way toward carrying on with the trauma of a lost Kashmir that she may never return to, or claim as home. The news of Pandits dying then get juxtaposed with the Kashmiri Muslim family’s bakery in the locality—a memory of pleasure resurrecting the 1990s darkness that she has just observed in the newspaper. I read this as a particularly powerful moment in the text, and like some of the other instances in the text analyzed before, it forms a syndesis in the alegropolitical frame that binds together in crisis to survive and continue by joining two communities together. Food has always been a significant element in reconstructing nostalgia and memory. There is important scholarship on food cultures and memory that delve into the aspect of how sensory aspects of food and the body trigger powerful mnemonic narratives. Nick Fox and Pam Alldred discuss the importance of food being an crucial site of memory (Sutton qtd. in Fox et al 6) in which they argue about the “materiality of memory” and its intersections with food that have profound effects on “continuity and change in the social world” (2). In this context, I read this memory of freshly baked bread juxtaposed with the violence, as a kind of alegropolitical memory that becomes a “productive force” (Fox et al 11) and aids in the sustaining of life in moments that are marked with loss and violence. The evoking of the memory of the family bakery provides a kind of healing in this moment beyond death, “a reconciliatory power of alegropolitics,” using Kabir’s words. As Kabir asserts, alegropolitics emerges a “matrix of enjoyment producing activities enabling a survival tactic” and can actually be a key to survival in and how it helps to continue create community and surmount loss and trauma (“Partition’s Alegropolitics”). The ending of The Tiger Ladies deserves special attention in the way it combines a feminist ending with a Kashmiri Muslim woman at the fore, along

102

Chapter 5

with the shawl artisan’s daughter Izmat returning to the scene, now beyond Kashmir’s territories. Ismat visits Sudha in United States almost six years since they had last met and brings three gifts from Kashmir for the narrator. First, a packet of fresh powdered mint from Koul’s grandfather’s house in Kashmir; second, an incense from a shrine, whose religious origins, whether Hindu or Muslim “does not matter” to Koul, since “we trust each other’s mysteries even now in spite of everything” (The Tiger Ladies 209); and the third gift is from Izmat’s own garden: special narcissus bulbs, which symbolize “a perennial promise of rebirth” (210) for Koul. This instance of the three gifts is cut immediately with a memory of Koul meeting Izmat in Srinagar’s popular local restaurant, where they eat lamb kebabs, chutney, and sweet treats. Once again, the pleasure of food becomes an important way to forge a bridge between a difficult present through a sensory experience offering reconciliatory possibilities. The symbolic gesture of the presents also literally crosses a boundary in which a bit of Kashmir’s earth is transported to Koul, in an act of fusing borders and boundaries via Ismat’s friendship. As Izmat and Sudha’s discussions on Kashmir become awkward and tensed during their reunion meeting in the United States, Koul acknowledges, “Between us we know that the world we grew up in has vanished and we have to meet in objective spaces now” (211). This meeting also gets juxtaposed with memories of them having familiar Kashmiri food, a “familiar dinner of fish and lotus root, and kohlrabi greens and rice” (The Tiger Ladies 212). This continual concurrence between difficult moments of a changed Kashmir to pleasureful experiences and memories of food and familiar joys creating a shared space denotes a specific function in the text to forge solidarity and a certain kind of intimacy that carries on despite tragic histories and a difficult present. Koul’s memoir ends rather startlingly with a focus on her life in diasporic spaces of America as she ponders about Kashmir’s present situation and hopes for “even the impossible,” a resolution to the conflict. As she reads a newspaper report on Kashmir, her eyes stop at a face of a beautiful Kashmiri Muslim woman in a veil, a mother of a girl child. The last lines of the memoir end with the Kashmiri woman’s voice about her child’s future—“I would like her to be the Prime Minister” followed by Koul’s own voice—“I smell a tiger and rose petals” (The Tiger Ladies 218). Rizwan calls this “a lasting image of a Kashmiri Muslim tiger lady,” an image that becomes a symbol of “visual cosmopolitanism” for her that “traverses the world of mythology, religion, and politics” (Kashmiri Life Narratives 154). It is indeed fascinating that the ending of a memoir that is about the life, histories, losses and cultures of Kashmiri Pandits ultimately ends with this fascinating image of a Kashmiri Muslim woman, a new tiger lady, wishing empowerment and agency for her daughter. Of course, the title of the novel is a tribute to the women ancestors in Koul’s family: her grandmother, her mother, and the daughters, referred as

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

103

tiger ladies. Koul also includes the obvious reference to the Hindu goddess Vaishno Devi whose shrine is located outside Kashmir in a cave, where pilgrims flock to worship at her shrine every year. Literally, Mother Vaishno is mentioned in the memoir as the Lady of the Tigers. However, the symbol of the tiger lady in the end operates beyond the Hindu mythological structures. The last lines of the text shift the gaze from the religious domain and the familial lineage of women to include new registers of feminist solidarity and possibility. This is where I locate true syndesis in Koul’s memoir—it forges through loss, trauma, and violence and finds new spaces of binding that can emerge as radical hope. Thus, Koul enacts a different way of positing the Kashmiri subject, through alegropolitical memories of a collective solidarity, connections and newer futurities. THE GARDEN OF SOLITUDE Siddhartha Gigoo’s debut novel narrates the lost history and a macabre experience of migration for Kashmiri Pandits in a world where amnesia becomes a refuge to a certain generation of Kashmiri Pandit community. The text retrieves the voices of this generation of Pandits who seek recourse in “restorative nostalgia.” Unlike Koul’s memoir that is written from a distance and prior to the peak militancy in Kashmir in the 1990s, The Garden of Solitude, primarily focuses on the journey of the young protagonist Sridar in search of roots and identity after experiencing the loss of his home first-hand. Gigoo’s novel charts Sridar’s affective experience of the loss of homeland and constructs a syncretic counter-hegemonic memory of the past. The novel presents a postcolonial Bildungsroman that charts Sridar’s paradoxical journey of becoming an “unhomed” subject internally displaced within the nation, caught between the threshold of an “outsider” from an “insider.” Similar to Koul’s memoir with its tribute to grandmothers, Gigoo’s novel also begins with a prologue focusing on the protagonist’s grandmother Poshkuj. The novel has a striking beginning with Poshkuj laughing hysterically while eating dinner at the Pandit festival of Gada Bhata; she then dies laughing after asking a riddle, as a fish bone gets stuck in her throat. The first sentence of the novel, thus, catches the readers in two registers—laughter and death. Literally, the two notions of necro and allegro are pitted against each other in that moment setting the tone for the rest of the novel. As explained earlier, The Garden of Solitude records the exile of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley and their survival in refugee camps and decrepitude. Perhaps, it is therefore apt that laughter dies in the novel initially, with death taking over—a metaphor for the loss that is impending in Sridar’s story. Yet, as I argue in this section, the possibilities of alegropolitics still remain in the

104

Chapter 5

novel, albeit in a different way from Koul’s memoir. I am mainly interested in how Gigoo creates different modalities for survival, community-building, and creation of identity through writing and aesthetics, and in that, the novel becomes a postcolonial kunstlerroman that constructs a subversive aesthetics, as “tools of conviviality” (a term coined by Cameron McCarthy). This ultimately forms alegropolitical possibilities of reconciliation and hope in the novel. In a different context, Cameron McCarthy discusses how art and aesthetics shapes the postcolonial imagination in subversive potentials that can emerge alternate forms of feeling, affiliation, community well-being, and “offer critical starting points, or tools of conviviality” that can lead to “emancipatory visions” (McCarthy). McCarthy’s work is about education and how to build decolonial spaces and curriculums in an onslaught of globalization and neocolonial structures, and I use his concept to study Gigoo’s novel in ways the Bildungsroman shifts to a kunstlerroman and produces possibilities of alegria and resistance through art and aesthetics. The term Bildungsroman first emerged after German philosopher Wilhem Dilthey coined it in the biography of Frederick Schleiermacher and it began to gain attention (Panade and Sarawade 78). The word literally means “coming of age” novel or a novel of development, which has its origins in eighteenth-century German literature after which it gained currency within Europe and American literary traditions in the nineteenth century. It is also known as a “novel of formation” that is a “fictional account tracing, usually in the third person, the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social growth of a fictional protagonist, typically from childhood to maturity” (Amoko qtd. in Panade et  al. 78). Using Jerome H. Buckley’s study of Bildungsroman Panade et al. also remind that some of the salient elements of this genre are “childhood, the conflict of generation, provinciality, the larger society, self education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and a working philosophy” (Buckley qtd. in Panade et al 78). Mikhail Bakhtin, also, comes to mind in his analysis of the Bildungsroman genre, in which he explains that Bildungsroman becomes a novel of “human emergence” “growing in national historical time” (21). Tobias Boes’s extensive study of nationalism and its connection to Bildungsroman is also significant here to see the connections of the bildung of the subject and their larger trajectory within the nation-state. According to Boes, the “Bildungsroman is a genre connected more than any other to the rise of modern nationalism” (5). Boes studies five German novels at different historical junctures to argue how they respond to specific historical time periods in representing a national trajectory of the protagonist’s journey, yet there remains something that doesn’t always fit into the national teleology, which for Boes, becomes “cosmopolitan remainders” (5) in such a Bildungsroman. Boes refers to Karl Morgernstern’s analysis of the Bildungsroman and argues that “any attempts to give a national form to the life of

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

105

a protagonist will always resist fulfillment in institutional structures thereby violating the demands for finality and normative closure that are constitutive of traditional Bildungsroman” (7). It is in this context of the Bildungsroman, I read Sridar’s journey in The Garden of Solitude as one claiming self and “home,” through a coming of age in creativity. As a writer he uses the kunstlerroman traditions to carve out an identity of people who exist in a space of rupture, and thus, this journey questions seamless national imaginaries. In doing that, I argue, Gigoo’s novel uses the Bildungsroman genre to create a postcolonial kunstlerroman that uses art and creativity as alegropolitical functions to construct and recover community identity, ultimately forging newer possibilities. As discussed earlier in chapter 2, the use of literary form and genre is often fragmented or in a malleable shape that denotes the inarticulate space inhabited by the literature from Kashmir’s conflict zone. Many of the literary works discussed in this book denote this fracture in the way form and genre are no longer bounded by traditional elements, but they give rise to an indeterminacy. The Garden of Solitude, too, falls into that space constructing a unique postcolonial Bildungsroman by making the erased stories of the Pandit migrancy visible, but also by not making this a story of “development” or “formation”. Rather, by foregrounding the artist as a writer, and the protagonist Sridar writing The Book of Ancestors, the novel amplifies the voice of a community that become residual migrants searching for a home without closure in the nation-state. In this context, it is significant to turn to the genre of a “postcolonial Bildungsroman,” a term Erika Hoagland uses in her work on “Postcolonializing the Bildungsroman.” As mentioned before, Bildungsroman, as a literary genre, is rooted in the Western bourgeoisie and Enlightenment and traditionally the taxonomy of the term specifically denotes the text’s structure of charting the protagonist’s maturity and journey into finding their identity and the creation of the subject. Thus, it poses the larger question of the protagonist’s search for identity and maturing selfhood in the novel’s trajectory. Some critics also argue (Berthold Harwood qtd. by Hoagland) about the traditional Bildungsroman ideologically manifesting a “homogenizing stability” (Hoagland 23) at the end of the protagonist’s journey after which they find their place in the world. On the other hand, postcolonial writers have appropriated and refigured the genre in various ways and it has become an exciting form that “articulates experiences and identities that are beyond the traditional scope of the genre’s foundational precepts” (Hoagland 4). What is unique here in Gigoo’s use of the genre is that it not only reclaims a lost history of a community but it also subverts the traditional paradigm by presenting a central character whose growing subjectivity is one of an unhomed subject, a subject that is rooted in nomadism in the novel. This is significant because Sridar as the subject in exile from Kashmir ultimately transforms into

106

Chapter 5

a wandering migrant subject within the nation. If a Bildungsroman portrays the “harmonic cultivation of the individual” (Steinecke 93) after a series of conflicts with the world, whereby a seemingly stable resolution and accommodation is reached even if it means alienation from society (Hoagland 28), Gigoo’s novel almost becomes a postcolonial—“anti” Bildungsroman charting the unhomed subject’s existential dilemma of not being an outsider, and yet the status of an insider is denied to him—essentially, he becomes the ‘unaccommodated nomadic man’ within the nation. For Sridar and his friends like Pamposh and the third generation of young Kashmiri Pandits, home becomes a distant idea they remember from childhood memory. Sridar has a moment of realization in the novel as he notes, “Three years in Baderkote had made him an outsider, a recluse” (137). Later, when asked by another friend Tulmul about love, he rejects the idea of any relationship stating, “She has her own house. I am homeless, an exile.” (120). In the novel, as Sridar becomes a tourist in the Indian mainland, traveling through Allahabad and Banaras, he befriends a young guide who asks him where he comes from and in that startling moment, the narrator states that Sridar wanted to say, “I am a homeless, a migrant” (141). The narrator once again highlights Sridar’s father, Lasa’s inability to find admission for his son in any Indian school after leaving Kashmir. Sridar adds, “No school will be willing to admit a homeless [migrant] one without an address” (90). I want to emphasize on the transformation that Sridar undergoes from being a subject in exile to one being a homeless migrant. In another context of Partition refugee subjects, Amit R. Baishya argues that the Bengali refugee subject migrating to India from East Pakistan (Bangladesh) after the Partition of 1947 eventually became nomadic subjects. Baishya focuses on this metaphor of “nomadism” for the refugee subject and quotes John Peters who distinguishes between the theoretical categories of exile and nomadism. He emphasizes, “‘exile locates the home in a homeland that is distant and for the time being unapproachable,’ while nomadism, ‘denies the dream of a homeland with the result that home, being portable, is available everywhere’” (Peters qtd. by Baishya). For Baishya, the figure of the refugee is transformed into a nomad in the specific context of Bengali refugees from East Bengal in Siddhartha Deb’s Point of Return. Sridar’s shift in becoming a wandering nomadic subject in the novel is also striking in the way the journeys and travels situate him with nomadism as a way of life where the question of returning home is dubious. It is equally important that the trajectory of a Bildungsroman mostly posits a chronologically progressive time, one that matches the forward-moving linear time of a nation. Although, one may argue that A Garden of Solitude is linear in structure, I want to emphasize how the space and time unity, the notion of a calendar-bound forward-moving time is disrupted by the text. Throughout the novel, after the exile of the Pandit community is depicted,

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

107

there are numerous times where the seemingly chronological narrative is disrupted by memory—a dream of the lost homeland, green fields in Pampore, Sridar’s mother and grandmother making apple jams, the image of the stained glass in Sridhar’s house, against the present refugee existence in one cramped room without windows in a barn. As Sridar notes, they were learning to “live life backwards” (85) with “thoughts oscillating back and forth between the past and the present” (The Garden of Solitude 113). Such instances highlight the rejection of homogenous time, a sense of time marching ahead. Instead, such a fragmentation of past and present fused together indicates time as interrupted and discontinuous. So how does alegropolitics figure in this subversive postcolonial Bildungsroman? The novel’s emphasis on creativity, arts and alegropolitical memory marking festivals, gatherings, a collective sense of survival against trauma provides possibilities for reconciliation. As discussed earlier, the prologue of the novel marked by laughter and death of Sridar’s grandmother, Poshkuj also emphasizes something else—the telling and writing of stories. Gowri, Poshkuj’s daughter-in-law, carries alive the tradition of telling her stories and keeping them alive, which comes a full circle with the hint in the last lines of the prologue: “Poshkuj was never to know that years later her exploits would find mention in her great-grandson’s book—The books of Ancestors” (xiv). The novel begins with a focus on the writer, the teller of lost stories. The writer remains as the dominant focus, not just to tell the stories of the past of a community whose memories die out along with the hopes of returning home, but the focus on the writer and his “life-writing” affirms the domains of creativity against trauma and pain. Such that, the journey of Sridar becoming a writer against all odds and struggles is itself an alegropolitical narrative of resilience and resistance. Art and the artist in the text become a source of hope for the Pandit community. Part 1 of the novel begins with Sridar’s childhood when he is fourteen years old and begins his formative journey as a writer in Kashmir. The narrative dwells extensively on his writing the first essay, the nervousness and his coming into the writerly space: For days Sridar did not come out of his room. He stopped playing cricket with his friends to complete his essay. During the nights, he could not sleep. There were times when he could not write, but gaped vacantly at the ceiling. . . . One moment there were words painted all over the pages and the next moment there were just blank pages. Finally, after days of struggle and confinement, he came out with a bunch of leaves. ‘Tomorrow, I will show the essay at the school,’ Sridar said to himself as he read the words slowly in his mind. He rejoiced at his writing. There was something in his writing that eluded him. (The Garden of Solitude 5)

108

Chapter 5

The sense of time depicted in this extracted section is one when violence within Kashmir has not begun yet. The quotes closely follow the nascent journey of a writer and leaves an absence—“something eluded him” in his writing, a hint at a later culmination of the artist as a writer whose voice was to come into fruition from telling the stories for his people. This same section of the text is immediately followed by Sridar’s dream about dying, in which “he dreamt that he was dead before completing an essay he was writing” (6). Once again, Sridar’s dream is specifically not about the fear of death, per se, but that he would die before he wrote what he was intended to complete. Creativity becomes one of the most important frames that becomes associated with the protagonist, his sense of self and artistic growth. In doing that, Gigoo also emphasizes the role of literature and art toward providing hope and solace to a fragmented community ruptured in its historical time and space. Sridar’s winters are punctuated with a wait for spring and reading books to pass time (The Garden of Solitude 10). He dreams of words and lines written on pages only to wake up and realize that the essay was not on the pages yet. The only idyllic time in Kashmir which is described in the novel is the spring in Pampore, when Sridar visited his cousins with his grandparents. This memory of his childhood is sprinkled with saffron field, orchards, waving to tourists passing by, “undulating fields”, chinars and freshly baked “lavasas” (11)—one of the most endearing memories in the text. And once again, this memory is with instances of cousins narrating stories to all children. The rest of Part 1 in the novel rapidly presents a disintegration of harmony and syncretic lives of Pandits and Muslims in the valley, with each day a new killing and disappearance, along with Pandit families fleeing out of Kashmir in growing terror. January 24, 1990 is described in painful, poignant details when Sridar and his family leave Kashmir forever, the “most traumatic night” of their lives (65). Part 2 of the novel focuses on painstaking survival and everyday horrors of thousands of displaced people without homes, suddenly coming to terms with decrepit living conditions, poverty, and cramped into small tent-like dwelling camps in which the Pandit families become “Internally Displaced Migrants” within India (83). Interestingly, there are moments worthy of our attention in this excruciating narrative of lives of stupefied people trying to rebuild their existences. Amid the hopeless conditions of everyday life in the camp, families busy themselves creating makeshift lives in a struggle for survival. Families huddled into adjacent rooms put up clotheslines, with children playing with toys on the floor. Survival and resistance to overcome this tragedy become the only focus as the narrator portrays, “makeshift kitchens assiduously set up by the Pandit families in the corridor of the school [that] emanated smells of traditional Kashmiri tea, turnip soup and monjhaakh” (The Garden of Solitude 75). Elsewhere in the same section, Sridar starts going to a

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

109

makeshift camp school and announces to his father, “I am accumulating the ammunition . . . someday, I will write a story about all this” (87). I want to read these two examples as instances of alegropolitics. The symbolic markers of everydayness in life, with the wafts of Kashmiri tea and staple Kashmiri food with turnip soup and the “monjhaakh” greens eaten in Kashmiri homes is alegropolitical precisely because it is a moment of love, of human courage to survive without a defined teleological journey. It is as significant as any form of dissent to survive amidst trauma. Elsewhere in the novel, Lasa, Sridar’s father, meets many displaced Pandit migrants in Delhi who earn a meager living by running roadside eateries—“The wives cooked dishes like Roganjosh and Dumaloo, while their husbands served them to the pedestrians at reasonable rates” (The Garden of Solitude 130). These stories of courage, resilience become alegropolitical acts of survival. However, to be clear, it is not my attempt to create a romanticized fetish of struggle and resistance to overcome life’s challenges in this story of pain and loss for the Pandit families. Certainly, I am not arguing that the makeshift kitchens, the food being cooked, the dilapidated conditions of living are collective moments of joy; rather something else is taking place that I read through the alegropolitical lens. These nuggets of solidarity, where “idle conversations resulted in friendships” (86) or Lasa’s telling his son that they “can decorate the wall with the wall hangings that we have in our trunks” (82) or Sridar making up his mind amidst the horror of his situation to “revive his writing” (87) and wanting to write poetry in a displaced people’s camp, are signs of a community surviving loss and perhaps death, toward creating life again. Sridar, in his new “home,” waits for evenings to gaze at the sky or return to his books that offer solace, and another migrant Gopinath gets appointed the headmaster in a makeshift camp school and celebrates it with his wife who cooks rice and cheese for him. Gopinath cries out, “It is the happiest day of my life. . . . I want this day to last forever” (92). Even the act of putting on a coat and necktie every day to this camp school becomes an incredible act in resilience and resistance for life to grow out of despair. Thus, alegropolitics in The Garden of Solitude is different from The Tiger Ladies in that it creates a lens for a catharsis and survival, amidst life spreading out in horror, with an imagination of new possibilities in creating life anew. As mentioned earlier, Koul did not witness the events related to the Pandit exile first-hand, as opposed to Gigoo who did. In that context as well, Gigoo’s narrative is a direct one and the remembrance and strategies of coping vary in two texts. I return once again to Ananya Kabir’s notion of alegropolitics here—as she states “it is not a political manifesto, but an attitude, a stance and a lens to bring to critical analysis” (“Partitions Alegropolitics”) to seek change. Gigoo in the novel presents such a stance and attitude through which life grows again out of bleakness. As the school headmaster Gopinath once again

110

Chapter 5

reminds a teacher, “This attitude will not do,” on the latter’s lamentation about chaos everywhere around him (The Garden of Solitude 93). I want to return to Sridar’s earlier statement about gathering “ammunitions” to write a story and importance of the moment once again. The writer and his art are foregrounded in the story that would help create a lens to remember the lost histories of a displaced community and their way of life in Kashmir. Art becomes the way through which the cathartic experience for a community and their way of life is remembered. Sridar’s act of writing The Book of Ancestors also helps in galvanizing this persistence toward not forgetting, emphasized by the narrator in various instances of the novel, to narrate the stories of people that lost their voice (The Garden of Solitude 66). I turn to one of the harrowing scenes of forced migration on a morning when Pandits leave in trucks and cross the Banihal tunnel and the narrator notes that most people seemed “speechless as though they had lost their voices” and that “each one had a story to narrate” (66–67). Gigoo’s novel then becomes an exercise in constructing a voice and identity for a generation for whom the past was the only refuge left, “to be re-lived” (86). Elsewhere, Lasa writes a letter to his son, reminding him that “But we must remember our ancestors; remind ourselves who we are and where we came from. We must pass on the stories of our ancestors from one generation to another” (158). The novel also indicates that: The Kashmiri Pandit story did not exist anywhere. The migrants and their stories did not appear in news items related to Kashmir. There were no statistics, no pictures of the dead and the dilapidated houses of the Pandits, no record of disease in the migrant camps .  .  . there was no remembrance of a generation which has lived in Kashmir. (The Garden of Solitude 196)

Interestingly, Sridar’s response to his father in a letter captures alegropolitical ways of dealing with such erasures and loss: How many know how to laugh even in suffering? How many know how to live and love. You see too deep into the heart of things, into the soul of them. You know the beauty of tears. . . . In madness we will be happy. In madness we will hear the song of life and find beauty and love. (The Garden of Solitude 159)

It is a powerful moment in the novel in which Sridar emphasizes laughter and love, the alegropolitics of creating life over mourning. Rethinking the South Asian ethos of “mazaa” or fun, Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Ulka Anjaria argue for an optics of “mazaa” that creates “new ways of knowing, analysing, critiquing and writing” (232). According to them, the Hindi/Urdu word “mazaa” means “fun, pleasure, play” that “has an

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

111

embodied pull” (232). For them, it is important to put mazaa back in reading practices that “allows for indeterminacy.” As they explain, “Dwelling in mazaa does not mean ignoring inequalities, violence or power, but finding new ways of writing about the forms of life that thrive even in times of crisis” (232). This new optics of mazaa is not necessarily one in which the idea is to have fun per se but to see what happens in crisis and violence, in which there are moments when violence, crisis is not taking place constantly. Something else is born, the will to laugh, live, to overcome, and survive through moments of domestic joy, through rituals, celebrations, love, food and laughter. Anjaria et al. agree that the implications of reading and analyzing within this new optics is sometimes unknown or latent, but it is important to note such alegria in crisis and alienation because it can “generate worlds” (234). Postcolonial critique and theory especially has not delved into this kind of reading of alegria or mazaa, and is invested into exposing and critiquing the ideas of hegemony, structures of colonial/neocolonial power, resistance and agency. Yet, this “mazedaar metholodogy” (the term used by Anjaria et al.) of alegropolitics is not looking at pleasure and fun for the sake of it; rather as Kabir notes, it also questions the role of the critic and the kind of reading “we” adhere to, or are constantly producing. This frame then “is not just as promoting individualism or complacency, but as a means of reimagining the self and of world-building” (Shapiro Anjaria & Anjaria 237). In The Garden of Solitude, before Sridar embarks on a series of journeys to Ladakh, Delhi and to Denver, USA there is a last letter he writes to his father in which he points to the memory of an old couple in the refugee camp he had visited a summer ago. He writes about the couple sitting “unruffled” in the camp. There is chaos and ruckus around, but a “strange ennui engulf[s]” (160) Sridar as he watches the scene. As he gazes at the couple he notes “the way they exchanged glances. The way they smiled and sighed. It was ineffable” (160). He ends the letter reminding Lasa of “beautiful things” that will “sing through their silences for they have music in them” (160). I turn to this moment in the letter and what comes after in Sridar’s journeys for two reasons—firstly, the emphasis on beauty amidst crisis, the focus on a couple’s unspoken love, “unruffled” in a migrant camp setting, the ability to smile in enormous loss is something that keeps coming back in Sridar’s gaze in the text. Moments like these recover life, create a certain affect of love and regeneration surrounded by unspeakable trauma. Secondly, there is already an extensive gamut of scholarly work on Gigoo’s novel that studies trauma, the loss of the Pandits, comparing it to the historical exile of the Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir valley, along with questions of memory, nostalgia and identity. Recent writing by Somjyoti Mridha on representing Kashmiri Pandits and construction of minority identities in Pandit narratives of exile, looks at the history of armed rebellion, the changes within the erstwhile “privileged

112

Chapter 5

Hindu subjects of the Dogra state” to being “miniscule minority in their own homeland” (215). Mridha’s study also looks at Koul and Gigoo’s texts and does a historical reading to argue how the representation of Pandit communities form a “minority complex” (216) which happens because of harsh religious polarization, and ultimately becomes “a reminder of the gaps in our federal democracy” (218). Mohd Nageen Rather also writes on The Garden of Solitude and discusses the “balancing act” the novel presents in representing the Pandit and Muslim relations, when both communities are alienated, one by the agony of losing their homeland, and another by constant terror of militarization under which young Muslims live their lives (205). Certainly, such works are important contributions in creating space for dialogue and debate and larger visibility of the Kashmir conundrum. This chapter departs from taking sides or in the historical complexities, and brings in alegropolitical frames to showcase how the mundane tasks of living, laughter and food and joy embodied within the displaced characters create life forces that present what Paromita Vohra calls a “a loving eye” (Vohra qtd. in Anjaria 241) towards reading narratives of ruptures and loss. And in doing that, Gigoo as the writer performs an important task of creating an optic for readers and critics to really partake in the sensory and fragile experiences in witnessing loss and fractures of displaced lives that continue to overcome, survive and carry on. The middle sections of the novel, that are often not discussed or talked about render something important as well. Sridar’s journeys into Allahabad, Ladakh, the Ladakhi tribes and Shinkiyesh, the ultimate stillness of the soul, all may seem digressive from the larger impulses of the harrowing novel recording the lost stories of a displaced community. Yet, these journeys are profoundly significant in Sridar’s coming of age as the writer. Only after he is in United States, a restlessness and incompleteness overcome his senses. In Denver, Sridar remembers his grandfather’s Books of Ancestors that awakens the “purpose to fulfil” and write about the “lost generation” of Kashmiri Pandits. It is also for the first time in Denver, Sridar regrets the delay to write about the refugee lives. After eighteen months in United States, he returns to India and visits migrant camps twelve years after he had left them. Sridar is now the homeless migrant writer who writes about the “personal histories, stories of their childhood, their dreams, their youth, their struggles, and their fading memory” (207). The text returns to the creation of a postcolonial kunstlerroman through the focus on writing and aesthetic foregrounded in the novel. The last section of the novel pays a homage to the arts and writer speaking the stories of a lost community. Sridar’s return to Kashmir and his own home in Khanka-i-Sokta is punctuated by an emphasis on the arts and aesthetic to speak to the people with lost histories. Sridar meets Nagraj, another displaced Pandit theatre actor in a writer’s gathering and meeting him

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

113

shifts the focus to the significance of Bhands, traditional street performers in Kashmir. Bhand Paether is the ancient Kashmiri folk theatre tradition that dates back between the sixth and eighth centuries and uses socio-political and cultural issues in satirical stories of laughter and collective mirth performed by street performers. The novel emphasizes on how Bhands made people “laugh and think” (209) and the need to revive this forgotten art. Later Nagraj wishes to take the group of Bhand Paether to cities in India to “tell the real stories to the people of this country” (231). The symbol of the artist as writer and the emphasis on arts becomes crucial in the end to record collective stories and also extend spaces of healing. The ending of the novel comes full circle with the grandmother readying herself to tell a story, this time documented by Sridar in The Book of Ancestors. The novel’s title reminding of the gardens and horticultural metaphor of Kashmir also has an interesting shift. Kashmir is usually framed in horticultural splendors of gardens, flowers and beauty in popular imagination. This imaginary of Kashmir with the magnificence and presence of gardens and spectacular landscapes is not just from a colonial past. Anubhuti Maurya writes that from the sixteenth century in 1586, Kashmir was a “paradise at the northern political frontier” of the Mughal kingdom. Popular to the Mughal ethos, Kashmir was an “evocative word” (Maurya 21) that was referred in Persian as Kashmir Jannat nazir (“paradise like Kashmir”). In early seventeenth century poetry, this representation gained currency so much so that “court poets eulogised the lush greenery, streams, springs, lakes, abundance of flowers and fruits, the high mountains and the salubrity of Kashmir’s climate” (Maurya 22). By the mid-seventeenth century, the famous Mughal gardens in Kashmir had been built that to this day stand as one of the most exquisite gardens known in the Indian subcontinent, and also belong to the category of UNESCO world heritage centers. Maurya also argues that the hold of such horticultural imagination of wonder and marvel also extended the space of Mughal sovereignty over Kashmir used within a discourse of power (22). Within Kashmiri literary productions the symbol of Kashmir as a garden has also been used to stir and awaken people against the brutal Dogra regime that became extremely harsh towards the Kashmiri Muslim people. Peerzada Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor, one of the most eminent Kashmiri poets awakened the youth of Kashmir through his poem, “Walo ho Baghebano” (“Arise, O Gardener” trans. by T.N. Raina), in which he calls out to the people: If thou wouldst rouse this habitat of roses, Leave toying with kettle-drums Let there be thunder, storm and tempest, Aye an earthquake (Mahjoor “Arise, O Gardener”)

114

Chapter 5

Here, the garden and its gardener are implicated together in claiming this “habitat,” Kashmir through a revolutionary call. Mahjoor was even imprisoned for writing these verses for a wake up call to the Kashmiri people. The garden symbol has thus undergone shifts and transformations from its dominant usage. Ironically, Kashmir’s garden imagery continues to be emphasized and politicized by the Indian nation-state. On March 24, 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted, “Tomorrow, 25th March is special for Jammu and Kashmir. A majestic tulip garden on the foothills of the Zabarwan Mountains will open for visitors. The Garden will see over 15 lakh flowers of more than 64 varieties in bloom” (Twitter March 24 2021). The tweet was accompanied by spectacular images of Kashmir’s gardens and stunning tulips in a riot of colors in the backdrop of lush green landscapes. Of course, from the statist point of view this creates a sanitized image of beauty akin to the dominant representations within populist frames of film, advertising, and hegemonic cultural imaginaries of Kashmir. Preetika Nanda also points out to the politics of garden imagery furthered by the state. As Nanda states, in 2021: after the Tulip Garden Festival ended, the ministry of Tourism along with Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce & Industries (FICCI) and the Indian Golf Tourism Association (IGTA) organised a three day event, “Tapping the Potential of Kashmir: Another Day in Paradise” from 11th to 13th April. (“Tulips and Other Indian Visual Manias in Kashmir”)

Nanda highlights the ways the gardens of Kashmir have been strategically used to aestheticize the conflict, “it helps fixate the scenic and the picturesque while eliding political aspirations, indigenous meanings, memories and metaphors” (Nanda). Interestingly, Suvir Kaul in his recent book Of Gardens and Graves uses the garden horticultural frame of Kashmir, only to juxtapose it with the opposite of verdant flourishing nature and life: graves that have taken over the landscape. Kaul extracts the title from 1770 poem The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith who protested “the dispossession of rural communities in Ireland and England by wealthy landowners” (13). The line in Goldsmith’s poem, “The country blooms—a garden, and a grave” is taken by Kaul to point out that similar “dispossession is true of Kashmir today, blooming as it is with garden and graves” (Kaul 13). In the backdrop of this politicized and value-laden fetish for Kashmir through its gardens and magnificent landscapes, Gigoo’s novel uses the garden imagery differently— the title The Garden of Solitude uses the popular garden symbol and yet it wrenches itself free from using it for representing Kashmir in the old ways of seeing it in splendor and beauty.

Alegropolitics, Syndesis, and Postcolonial Bildungsroman

115

In fact, the title wrenches itself free from a territoriality in Kashmir’s landscape and shifts the register to something else—solitude. The only time Sridar uses the garden metaphor in the novel is towards the end when he dreams of his great-grandfather’s lost book The Book of Ancestors that he eventually would write and muses, “I will not reconcile to my fate. I will not give up the search. I will till the soil once again, sow the seeds, water the saplings, and tend my garden once again” (The Garden of Solitude 191). Sridar’s emphasis is, of course, on writing the lost book and not forget what the Pandits survived and endured, but the gardening metaphor in these lines also denotes an aspiration to create “my garden”—a wish towards finding the lost garden within. The title, then, becomes Gigoo’s final alegropolitical thrust towards solitude to seek and claim Kashmir beyond the conflict-ridden politicized space. I read the search for the “garden of solitude” as alegropolitical to show how the novel creates spaces of survival and reconciliation in choosing solitude over conflict. This is not a forgetting of the past, rather a push towards envisioning different futures for Kashmiri subjects. As this chapter has shown, Koul and Gigoo’s works present different ways of remembering the past that creates voice and agency for Kashmiri Pandits within the cultural landscape of Kashmir, but also enables various ways of binding the community together along with Muslim subjects. This is not just a syncretic return of sharedness but both texts use different strategies of resistance and survival to offer ways of overcoming loss. If Gigoo’s protagonist becomes the writer speaking of the lost stories of Pandits, using creativity and art as alegropolitical means of writing resistance, Koul shows a varied vision of syndesis and survival that creates paths towards hopeful futures. Both works provide alternate ways to reconceptualize resistance and survival beyond the frames of necropolitics that forge alliances without posing precarious divisions. NOTE 1. Muslims would do the same practice of relegating specific plates or cups when serving food to Hindus. Koul’s account is an honest one in which she portrays how both communities lived with each other.

Chapter 6

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures Kashmiri Women in Images, 1947–Present

In1 August 2019, the Indian state revoked Article 370 that constitutionally provided Jammu and Kashmir a special semi-autonomous status.2 This revocation resulted in a historically longest blackout of Kashmir with millions of Kashmiri people left without any means of communications via phone or internet. This chapter sparks from an incident that occurred in that autumn of 2019 within digital spaces while the whole of Kashmir was still in a blackout, cut off from the rest of the world. On October 2, 2019, two months after the termination of Article 370, as Kashmir still reeled under a total shutdown in every realm of life, Raw Mango, an upscale and popular Indian designer brand of ethnic clothing released a new designer campaign named “Zooni” on their social media and Instagram gallery showcasing clothing and fashion from Kashmir (figure 6.1). The campaign statement said—“Our upcoming collection, draws from the depth and cultural wealth of Kashmir and its people.” The campaign’s images depicted a stereotypical representation of Kashmir and its women that quickly spread in the visual realms of social media garnering comments and compliments. Their first image in the series of photos of women also came with the caption (figure 6.1): “Presenting Zooni . . . Because Kashmir is about its people. Which needs to be seen, and heard.” As Raw Mango released this Kashmir campaign to sell their clothes to upper-class Indian clientele, many enquired about the prices of the clothing, complimenting and admiring the beautiful clothes, and many came in support of the campaign. Around the same time in October 2019, another image (figure 6.2) floated on social media giving a tiny glimpse of life in Kashmir. A mother with her two children, a daughter and a young boy on a bicycle are seen walking on a deserted Srinagar street under strict surveillance and gaze of two army personnel with their guns peeking in the image. I juxtapose these two images 117

118

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1  Screengrab from Raw Mango Instagram gallery October 2, 2019 that was deleted after public outrage and controversy.

because they tell us how a certain kind of visual representation gains currency in “a culture of silence” (phrase by Bhambra in Silencing Human Rights). Gurminder Bhambra describes the above phrase as a fraught negotiation between the “silenced” (Kashmiris literally silenced in the communication blackout,) and the “silencer” who possesses structures of power. This latter image of the Kashmiri woman and her family presents a stark realism during the longest blackout by the Indian state in 2019 that reminds of serious representational erasures such as the mentioned Raw Mango campaign. Visual culture holds a pivotal space in present times and has the ability to transform and enable critical discourses of resistance and agency, especially in conflict-ridden spaces. In the context of Kashmir, the sphere of visual culture also offers a unique space of critique against valorized productions and representations of Kashmir. This chapter studies some current visual narratives, specifically photography and art on/from Kashmir, focused on depictions of Kashmiri women and argues that a triad formation persists within the frame of representation of Kashmiri women: as passive victims of conflict and trauma, as agents with “direct” resistance and political subjectivity, or as fetishized objects selling exotica (Bollywood and designer market trends like

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

119

Figure 6.2  A Kashmiri boy rides his bike beside his mother and sister, past Indian security force personnel standing in guard in front of a closed shop in a street of Srinagar, Kashmir's capital city on October 30, 2019 during the lockdown. Source: Kashmiri photojournalist Danish Ismail from Srinagar Post Abrogation photo, 30 October 2019 Kashmir.

RawMango). Against this kind of tripartite structure of representing Kashmiri women, I urge for a nuanced understanding of the concepts of resistance and agency that are uniquely interrelated in the formation of a gendered discourse. Thus, this chapter reconfigures simplified yardsticks of victimhood and invisibility or easy understandings of political agency for representing women in Kashmir’s conflict zone. Ultimately, it questions the notion of agency itself by focusing on the idea of everydayness in precarity that gives us a glimpse of the quotidian of gendered existence within a conflict zone like Kashmir. Here, I focus on three things: first, how visual productions representing Kashmiri women have shaped public discourse, national and international memory; second, how to rethink questions of agency and resistance in the everydayness in Kashmiri women’s lives using “infra-politics,” a phrase coined by James Scott; and finally I explore three women artists in their different medium who produce vital connections between representation and agency that reveal how these go hand in hand towards rethinking visual discourses for women in Kashmir. The chapter ends with the previously mentioned notion of silence that has pervaded mainstream India about Kashmiris, especially since the blackout of August 2019. In this, Bhambra once again reminds, “the opposite of silence may not be speech or voice” (2)—but the

120

Chapter 6

lack of an ethicality in viewership in the complex web of representing gender discourses in Kashmir. As the introduction of this book explains, it is widely established that Bollywood cinema has consistently constructed a certain exotic fantasy of Kashmiri women since the 1960s. Debashree Mukherjee talks about this over-used imagery of Kashmir through Bollywoodian lens and calls it a “violent disconnect” with the real Kashmir and a typical Indian fantasy. According to her this Kashmir is “an imagined quasi place”—one “that is desired but not understood” (“Through the lens of Bollywood”) and such dominant images impact how Kashmiri women are also viewed (Mukherjee). As aforementioned, a plethora of films in the dominant Hindi film industry has narrativized Kashmir in this same way—an exotic locale for fantasy and romance (Kashmir ki Kali, Jab Jab Phul Khile, Junglee to just name a few). In these films, Kashmiri women are all stereotyped in traditional costumes, as beautiful women on shikara boats in the backdrop of lush landscapes or snowclad mountains. These visual texts essentialize and offer a “bollywoodized” notion of women in Kashmir which embeds itself in the cultural consciousness as the normative imagery. In this context, Afreen Idrees also claims that The culturally different, politically Other Kashmiri Muslim woman has come to be reified as exotic and erotic, emptied of female subjective reality, relegated to passivity, and imprisoned in immanence. The pervasive presence of this vision, of this masculine scopic economy empowers the penetrating Indian gaze to scrutinize, know, and possess.(”Painting Against Disremembering”)

The Zooni Kashmir campaign is a similar rehashing of the old fetish of exotic Kashmiri women as an ‘empty signifier.’ The campaign statement, as aforementioned, emphasizes that Kashmiri people need to be seen and heard and the land is for its people. Yet, one wonders what kind of “seeing” and “hearing” is possible here. Some Kashmiris, who had the rare luxury to meager internet access, and some non-Kashmiris in India protested against this campaign by commenting directly on RawMango’s Instagram profile. By early hours of the morning during that same night, the campaign and its images had been deleted. RawMango also issued a public statement, that they were removing the campaign images due to public sentiment and that there was “assumption of intent” from people. Let us take a further look at the images (figures 6.1 and 6.3) from the deleted campaign more closely—the first image of the woman (figure 6.1), clearly dressed as a bride, has her eyes lowered in a veil, adorned in stunning traditional clothing and the campaign name “Zooni” is plastered across her face, a strategic metonymic suggestion. Her face is barely visible but remains as an adorning background to enhance the campaign title. In figure 6.3, Zooni, the bride, is surrounded by other

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

121

Figure 6.3  Screengrab from Raw Mango Instagram gallery October 2, 2019 that was deleted after public outrage and controversy.

women, her “coterie,” as the caption suggests. The faces of these women are not clear, only their bodies are discernable in the hazy image. It is also important to remember that this campaign came at a time of crisis when two months of total blackout of communication had already silenced Kashmiris with a life under siege punctuated with curfews, cancellations of weddings and celebrations. Tragically, the Zooni campaign was not seen or accessed by Kashmiris—a reminder that saving the culture and grandeur of Kashmir is not for Kashmiris. Such tropes exist to fetishize and profit from a silenced people. As the news of revocation of Article 370 heightened in the media, a narrative of progress and betterment of Kashmir and Kashmiri women particularly gained prominence. Misogynist voices from political leaders emerged about “saving” Kashmiri women. One of the justifications for scrapping off Kashmir’s semi-autonomy, with the revocation of Article 370, was prefaced around women’s rights and emancipation of Kashmiri women. A certain legislator exclaimed, “now BJP workers could marry fair skinned Kashmiri women and buy plots of land”3 and another minister added, now one “can bring brides from Kashmir.”4 Such exclamations are a painful reminder of a

122

Chapter 6

gendering discourse in which women and land are conflated to be claimed. In “India’s Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender and (Anti)Nationalism” Nitasha Kaul presents a gendered analysis and argues that India’s masculinist nation-state feminizes the land and the Kashmiri body which allows for a normalization of violence (126). According to her, “the feminised landscape and the restive population [that] needs to be controlled, chastised, disciplined, and coerced into affirming its ‘marital’ relationship with India” (Kaul 128). Arguably, this idea of saving the Kashmiri women, also goes back to Bollywoodian roots of Kashmir in dominant visual discourses in which beautiful women are often co-opted in romantic intimacies with non-Kashmiri men (Junglee 1961, Kashmir Ki Kali 1964, Mission Kashmir 2000 as a few examples). Yet, post the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, when nation building becomes a larger project for the fledgling Indian nation-state, images of women upholding tradition with stereotypical garb produces a certain discourse that takes away from the idea of any resistance or fracture within the space in which Kashmir resides. While the dominant filmic representation of Kashmiri women in such films (mentioned above) highlight the exotic “Kashmiri” fetish, Andrew Whitehead reminds of a time immediately after the Partition, when Kashmiri women had a larger role enacting resistance in a very publicly visual way. In his incisive work on Kashmir, Whitehead explains that immediately post Partition in the autumn of 1947: parks and open spaces in the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, were taken over by groups of [Kashmiri] women who practiced military style drilling and learned how to fire rifles. These were members of Kashmir’s women’s militia hastily recruited at the initiative of the left-wingers in the face of an invading force which imperiled the city. There was next-to-no military tradition in Kashmir and the sight of Kashmiri women bearing arms, was, for many, arresting and startling. (Whitehead 2017)

According to Whitehead, this was also a “moment for political empowerment” for women. Prior to the autumn 1947, the catastrophic year of 1946 also saw the emergence of women resisting the princely rule in Kashmir in a sustained political campaign. In December 1947, the paper People’s Age published a cover with Kashmiri women bearing rifles and stated, “The women in Kashmir are the first in India to build an army of women trained to use the rifle” (Whitehead 2017). In 1948, the image of the women’s militia with the central image of a Kashmiri woman named Zuni Gujjar became the cover of the “Kashmir Defends Democracy Pamphlet” (figure 6.4). But these images of women bearing arms were either incorporated within a statist dimension of Kashmiri women fighting to accede to India or more troublingly, as Whitehead states, “The popular

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

123

political mobilization of which the women’s militia was part has been largely written out of the competing historical narratives in Kashmir” (2017). Nyla Ali Khan’s work on Kashmiri women activists in post Partition India also notes that Kashmiri women have “managed against all odds to express their agency during the plethora of political, social, and military transformations in the past nine decades” (142). She traces the moment at the aftermath of Partition and states: Subsequent to the accession of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian dominion in 1947, whole the Indian subcontinent was reeling from the mayhem of the country’s partition, women’s organizations attempted to contribute peace-building work at the local and regional levels. (143)

Khan’s work also discusses the significant role of women’s militia in fighting and driving away Pakistani tribesmen attempting to annex Kashmir in 1947. What remains tragic is such histories and images of resistant Kashmiri women are erased off systematically from public memory in the eventual “bildung” of the nation. Instead, the 1960s–1970s produced a steady influx of Kashmiri women’s presence in popular Hindi films that match the stereotypes perpetuated by campaigns like “Zooni.”

124

Chapter 6

Figure 6.5  Saja Begum, the mother of Amir Farooq Dar, who died after being bitten by a snake, at her home in Heevan, India, September 13, 2019. Source: Photographer: ATUL LOKE/Copyright: The New York Times/Redux.

With the intensification of the conflict in the 1990s, visual coverage of Kashmir as a conflict zone emerged as a critical space of social witnessing in the photojournalistic field. Photography as a cultural and historical artifact has served to visually communicate voices that are often unheard or lost (albeit often also reiterating the hegemonic voices). However digitized and manipulated “people still believe photographic images and recognize their special relation to the ‘real’” (Levi Strauss 160). Photography in the context of Kashmir, becomes, in Susan Sontag’s words, “means of making ‘real’ that matters [which] the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore” (“On Photography” 7). Images of Kashmir have undergone a slow transformation from exoticized images of glorious landscapes to the changing space of Kashmir as a conflict zone. In this transformation, the representation of women of Kashmir in images have undergone a transformation too. The following images between 2018–2022 showcase Kashmiri women in a specific light not just within India but internationally too. Published in New York Times in 2019, figure 6.5 presents the grieving mother Saja Begum mourning the death of her son at her home in Heevan, Kashmir. Another image from 2018, published in popular Indian newspaper Hindustan Times, presents a close-up gaze on a group of Kashmiri women whose faces offer anguish, lament, and grief.5 The image accompanies an article on Kashmiri women suffering from mental trauma from the impacts of the long

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

125

conflict. In June 2020, Pakistani English language newspaper Daily Times published an article showing Pakistani solidarity with Kashmir against sexual violence in the conflict. The photograph complimenting the article showcases a group of four Kashmiri women, three of whom have semi-covered faces. All of them are looking away from the camera, their wistful gazes casting a poignant stare.6 In 2021, BBC published an image of five Kashmiri women weeping and mourning; the conjoining article focused on Hindu and Muslim civilian killings by militants.7 Interestingly in 2022, an English language newspaper called Morung Express from Nagaland, India’s other borderland conflict zone in North-East, published an article on the killing of a Kashmiri Pandit woman by terrorists in the Kulgam district of Kashmir. The main image in the article is also of a group of wailing women presenting bereavement.8 These images, published in varied news portals and from different geographical spaces in the last five years construct a certain dominant imaginary and form the first part of the triad mentioned before—almost all of them depict grieving, mourning women, a visual narrative that has been historically and socially accepted and expected as the gendered terrain of grief. This is not to argue that resisting Kashmiri women throwing stones or in direct empowering images are non-existent, or that mourning itself cannot be strategically important as a mode of resistance (as discussed later). All of these described images from different geographical spaces and time periods emphasize the kind of representation Kashmiri women dominantly receive when it comes to international visibility, and consequently point to what gets erased from collective memory in the abundance of such images. Vibhuti Ubbot in Women in Kashmir’s Conflict zone Between Patriarchy and Armed Conflict explains that traditionally women in a crisis or conflict are described or represented within the discourse of victimhood. As Ubbot states, “women are mostly seen as mute recipients and mostly as victims of the conflict” (“Agency Revisited”). She further explains that “women in conflict zones mostly carry double burden, firstly being viewed as victims of the war and patriarchy elides women’s agency in violence.  .  .  . Especially, women as victims of conflict and war shape mass media” (“Agency Revisited”). Certainly, mourning has been a gendered symbol along with the trope of mothering, but it is also extremely significant not to downplay the role grieving has in enabling spaces of resistance. There is a whole body of path-breaking literature and theoretical discourse in how mourning and social ritualistic grieving are themselves acts of resistance and create ways of ethical and political reflection. Athena Athanasiou in Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black focuses on women in Belgrade and emphasizes the role of collective rituals by which trauma is addressed in specific ways in public formations. Athanasiou argues toward “undoing grief as feminine language” to highlight women who are

126

Chapter 6

undertaking collective ways of grieving outside in “un-sanctioned” spaces to deconstruct the normative image of mourning and to signify an “activism in mourning.” Ather Zia’s incisive book, Resisting Disappearance, Military Occupation also discusses this phenomenon of subversive mourning and focuses on Kashmiri women’s activism against enforced disappearances. Zia locates the agency manifested in mourning through Kashmiri women’s collective appearance in public spaces and argues that such images of women mourning publicly are also critical in claiming the bodies of the so-called, state-determined dangerous and criminal subjects whose deaths are unworthy to be mourned. Zia’s work focuses on the Association of Parents of Disappeared People (APDP), an all-women organization started by a protester Parveena Ahangar whose own son was among the many disappeared in Kashmir. Generating a politics out of her grief and providing a space for other grieving parents through this organization, Zia explains how Parveena Ahangar herself sets an example of rising above the notion of victimization to present a collective resistance by embodying grief as a subversive mechanism. In the work, Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir, Inshah Malik also urges to rethink agency in Kashmiri women and argues how Kashmiri women are denied political agency even if they have consistently been politically empowered amid sexual violence and trauma inflicted on them by the state actors. Malik, especially, reminds us that the history of Kashmiri women’s resistance as political subjects and partakers into the liberation struggle gets faded or often forgotten, when they have historically voiced their self-autonomy and placed themselves in the movement. Thus, Malik corrects this idea of the voiceless victim as the idea of the Kashmiri women in her ethnographic work. Malik’s other work, particularly on the politics of mourning, is important to understand the intervention that Kashmiri women employ in funeral processions or public mourning. In the essay, “Gendered Politics of Funerary Processions” Malik points out that under Islamic law women in Kashmir are prohibited to mourn publicly, and yet they do so by transforming funeral sites as “contested spaces of power, grief and mourning” (Malik 63). According to Malik, gendered mourning become “affective sites” of Kashmiri sovereignty enacted by Kashmiri women (Malik 64). While the gendered culture of grief work and mourning makes Kashmiri women’s role assigned to the traditional role of mourners, interventions like these enable a complex understanding of feminist agency. Malik emphasizes that: the improvisation of the traditional cultures of mourning involved bringing women’s grief into the public sphere (that was prohibited by the tradition) and then by women grieving bodies (that the state prohibits grieving for). In doing

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

127

so, they provided a new political cohesion to their Kashmiri political community, while creating a more progressive role for themselves. (Malik 65)

Interestingly, Deepti Misri’s work on the visual spectacle and public mourning also reminds that the “role of the grieving mother and martyr’s mother has become iconic in the Kashmiri nationalist imagination” (Manchanda quoted in Misri 133). In the same vein, Misri focuses on the public gathering and silent protests by the APDP group that includes use of visual art, graffiti, photography and makes the case for a critical spectatorship that can “reorient our gaze” (134) about Kashmir from multiple locations. The “public spectacle,” Misri argues, performs a vital challenge to the state’s power and enacts as a reminder for the forgotten “disappeared people” (“This is not a Performance” 139). Misri studies visual narratives from Kashmir and asks the question how certain gendered violence secure visibility and some do not. Her work is noteworthy in the way it underscores the importance of understanding gendered vulnerability amid the state and patriarchal limits on such vulnerabilities (Misri 159–160). The scholarships by Zia, Athanasiou, Malik, and Misri all significantly present the politics of mourning in public spaces when such instances of visible grief and loss are criminalized by the state. These works intricately study women’s agencies and resistance as well as emphasize the need for a different kind of “seeing” of visual texts from Kashmir. I acknowledge the poetics and politics of gendered protests and mourning, and my point of departure is only to point out how dominant aesthetics and a skewed representation also usurp critical ways of “seeing” when it comes to Kashmir. The selected images from different news portals in the last five years point to an ossified version of the mourning figure of the Kashmiri woman, and without the “real” gaze into Kashmir, they all connote the stereotypical assignation of gendered roles for women. Once again, this is not to suggest that Kashmiri women do not employ vital enactments of resistance and agency in public spaces. Yet, what gets currency and is generally perceived is a role that stresses victimhood. This is also not assuming that the photographs of women portraying loss or acute vulnerability don’t have value or significance in recording and witnessing Kashmir’s conflict through a gendered vision. Instead, I extend Misri’s key question on what kinds of visual representations become valid in the “optical unconscious,” to rethink how representation itself has crucial connections with agency. In her work, “Representing Agency: An Introduction” Katrin Trüstedt specifies that certain kinds of representation have the ability to “enable or stifle agency” (196). Trüstedt’s work is at the heart of the complex web of representation and its interconnectedness with agency as she probes “how the constitution of subjective agency and formation of selfhood depend” on

128

Chapter 6

the representational politics itself (196). The term “representing agency” is defined by Trüstedt as “agency enacted in or produced by representation—can enable us to speak and act, but also hinder us from speaking and acting” (196). In the case of Kashmiri women’s visual depictions since the independence of India, through the years till present, representational discourse gets inherently fused with the discourse on agency. In the last section of the chapter, I turn to newer representations in art and photography to illustrate how artistic representation lends itself into rethinking the triad structure. In a different context, Amit Baishya in his work on Terror and Survival, studies literary texts from North-East of India and explores people’s everyday survival in them. As Baishya states, “the ordinary ways through which they survive and endure states of dispossession and abandonment” (Deathworlds 15) becomes crucial. The key focus turns to survival when subjects continuously live under constant violence. Agency is manifested in manifold ways in this space of exception. Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan also argues, “Women’s agency can neither be viewed as an abstraction, nor celebrated as an unqualified good. Agency is never to be found in some pure state of violation or action but is complexly imbricated within various structures” (220). Baishya and Sundar Rajan’s framings of agency are important within the embedded violence in conflict zones. In Social Suffering, Veena Das, Margaret Lock and Arthur Kleinman remind us that “at the very least these scenes of violence constitute the threshold within which the scenes of ordinary life are lived.” (Social Suffering, Das and Lock et  al 68). The act of witnessing, mourning, ongoing trauma, and warlike conditions within Kashmir reaches such every day, ordinary lives of women, where agency can be located somewhere beyond grieving, mourning and visibly resisting and “being an agent”. Here, I come back to the Twitter image that depicts a mother walking with her two children on a curfewed street during the lockdown of 2019. The everyday life under violence and grief lurks in the backdrop, even if one does not see it immediately. I want to pause here to focus on the significance of this everyday survival and what it means for women of Kashmir. Stellan Vinthagen and Anna Johansson’s work on “Everyday Resistance” observes that “agency is historically tangled with everyday power, and contingent due to changing contexts.” They call it “resistance studies” and show how agency can be located in everyday lives. James Scott introduced the concept of “everyday resistance” in 1985 to foreground a different kind of agency—one that doesn’t involve visible rebellion, subversion, riots, or protests. Scott calls this “infrapolitics” which recognizes ordinary lives of subalterns in political contexts. Such infra-politics is also intricately woven into the lives of Kashmiri women as they create spaces of normality within

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

129

aberrant conditions of the conflict zone. Michel de Certeau’s phrase “practice of the everyday” also gives an idea how Kashmiri women live in the continuous conditions of conflict—attempting to go out in a curfew, going about the day, its rituals and practices, all are haunting reminders of the everyday lives embodied and assimilated by women in a conflict, one that is anything but banal and normal. Acts that deviate from hegemonic understandings of resistance tend to achieve non-recognition. Yet, this “practice” of everydayness and the “descent into the ordinary” by women of Kashmir, is beyond ‘ordinary’ in the necropolitical space. VISUAL POLITICS IN PHOTOJOURNALISM AND ART: THREE WOMEN ON KASHMIR In this section I focus on a different sensibility of visual productions by three women: award-winning Kashmiri photojournalist Masrat Zahra, and two painters, Rollie Mukherjee from India and British-Kenyan artist, Soniya Amrit Patel’s visual art representing Kashmiri women. The selection of these women visual artists is worthy of an explanation. In the last few years, there has been some incredibly important work by women artists from within Kashmir that create decolonial optics against dominant portrayals of Kashmir. I choose a mix of genres and medium by the artists to point out how they negotiate to alter women’s representation and visual discourse from within and afar. That these works are by women within Kashmir, mainstream India and from Europe/Africa also presents intersectional frames, unspoken feminist solidarity and allyship. By including different genres such as photography and paintings, I also consider how various modes of visual cultures produce new possibilities to rethink representation, resistance, and agency. Masrat Zahra’s Photography: “Everyday Resistance” in Visual Domain Photojournalism is a male dominated field even beyond a conflict zone. Alex W. Campbell and Charles Critcher discuss gender and photojournalism and explain that “women are still under-represented in photojournalism, and... they have a sense of ‘doing things differently’ in gaining access unique to the world of women... subjects which would otherwise remain under-represented” (1541). Zahra, herself, claims that one of her larger drives to become a photojournalist in Kashmir was because “stories and perspectives of women have been largely ignored and buried in the Kashmiri and international media. . . . I want to document the untold stories of women” (Groundxero).

130

Chapter 6

Lillie Chouliaraki subverts the usual trope of thinking of the camera posing the “male gaze” and argues that the camera can be used subversively to present a certain “emotionalisation” to portray women in a conflicted space with an interiority (qtd. in Critcher et al. 1542). As Campbell and Crichter point out, “women photographers have widened and deepened the visual narrative of war photography by focusing on under-represented dimensions in an intimate way” (1556) as they “humanise” conflict zone depictions in their photography and present “a new intimacy” that they attribute to the rising women photojournalists in conflict zones.(Chouliaraki qtd in Campbell 1542). Photojournalism in Kashmir forms an important tool to bear witness to the everyday trauma and an existence in stasis. David Levi Strauss in Between the Eyes emphasizes the photo image, also termed as the “photographed instant” “registering the relation between the viewer and the subject . . . it secures an understanding that is a profoundly political process” (10). This maybe a disturbing one, or an expected affirmative one, but a politically shared narrative takes places which is vital in the Kashmiri context, because it also interestingly creates a relation to the “other” and affects viewership. In Levi Strauss’s words, an understanding toward a “collective subjectivity” is even possible through this political understanding that is shared between the viewer and the photographed subject (49). Ariella Azoulay also argues that photography from conflict zones and occupied spaces creates a contract for spectatorship toward “civic duty [for] the persons who are represented visually” (17). As Azoulay points out, such a “civic contract” of visual images creates spaces for new conditions for visibility. At the moment of watching or viewing, these photographs call on “me” and “us” to restore the humanity of the photographed persons which the dominant narrative erases or calls into questioning. More interestingly, as Azoulay points out, such a “civic contract” of photography renders a certain power to the “stateless” and “occupied” to deconstruct the sovereign power (23). If images like the ones shown/mentioned above circulate dominantly giving primacy to a certain script of Kashmiri women as grievers or in loss, women photojournalists in Kashmir begin to alter that space. I have so far pointed to the representational axis of photography on Kashmir in how it dominantly perpetuates women’s role as mourners of loss and deaths of their kins (mostly male). Here, using a framework of photographic images as a “civic contract” I turn to two selected images in this section by award-winning photojournalist Masrat Zahra from Srinagar. In 2020, Zahra won two international awards for her ethical and courageous photographic coverage of the Kashmir conflict, which lent a special focus on local communities and women. In the first composition by Zahra, (figure 6.6) a slice of everyday life under surveillance and an “invisible violence” is visualized.

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

131

Figure 6.6  “Strife: A Photo Essay.” Image published Wande Magazine, Feb 23 2018. Source: Photograph and published with permission by the photojournalist, Masrat Zahra.

The image is of a mother with her two kids, accompanying them to tutor lessons during curfew in downtown Srinagar, as Zahra explains (“Strife”). The streets are empty, signifying a curfew, and the frontal view of the photograph is blocked by the soldier with their back to the camera, a gun peeking on the left. The children are looking away, but the mother’s face has a questioning and even defying look directly toward the soldier. In the photo essay “Strife” which also comprises of this particular image, Zahra herself explains the use of monochromatic black and white colors “to capture the mood of sadness, suffering. Black and white create a kind of focus and distance” (Zahra). There is a brooding element in the photograph with a sense of everyday violence palpable in the lives of the woman and children. The darkness of the image also creates a focus on the subject and yet removes “us” from it, that this is not “our” lives. The spectators are distanced from the scene, the monochromatic black and white colors offering an “othered” space in which horrors of such everyday lives pervade Kashmir. And yet as Azoulay reminds us, the “civic contract” of photography presents a certain power to the “occupied” and has the ability to restore humanity to the photographed. In Azoulay’s words, Zahra’s photograph becomes a crucial “counterevent” against a vision repeated by hegemonic channels. The mother’s participation in a banal moment in daily life such as this, becomes an enactment of resistance in the empty streets, with the menacing presence of the army staring at the family. She stares back; her defiance is embedded

132

Chapter 6

in the will to carry on the tasks with her children, to practice an ordinary life in an absurd situation (figure 6.6). In the second image (figure 6.7), titled “A Photograph on Kashmir” published during the pandemic on March 30, 2020, Masrat Zahra provides the caption: as the whole world is under a lockdown and many comparing and seeking tips from Kashmiris who have suffered worst state-imposed lockdowns in the recent years. I want to use a picture [of] everyday here to let the world know how lockdowns are different here. (Zahra, Instagram caption. April 30)

The scene in the second photograph (figure 6.7) once again depicts a street and a mother and her two children walking by. Three of them hold hands, the children look at the camera, and the mother’s gaze is downwards, away from the camera with a worried expression spotted on her face. The image is especially striking in the way the barbed wires are sprawled in front of them, their intertwined sharp edges visible to the viewers blocking the children, literally and symbolically. The photograph is symbolic of a cage-like Kashmir, especially poignant, as Zahra reminds of the double erasures Kashmiri people have to undergo in a pandemic “lockdown” after having lived in perpetual lockdowns continuously. Samreen Mushtaq also observes that in a continuous conflicted space like Kashmir the border between war, conflict zone and home, public and private blurs and women face the everyday

Figure 6.7  “A Photograph on Kashmir.” March 20, 2020. Source: Photograph and published with permission by the photojournalist , by Masrat Zahra.

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

133

trauma by resisting, witnessing, and surviving (“Home as the Frontier” 54). Mushtaq’s work focuses on the everyday survival of Kashmiri women which form testimonies of violence experienced by women, and looks at “everyday forms of resistance” in their negotiation with this hyper militarized space (54). Mushtaq also reiterates how important it is to know the story of “the Kashmiri women beyond the victimhood discourse in order to understand how they have survived the violence over the decades” (57). Thus, home itself becomes a space of resistance in the lives of Kashmiri women. Carrying on the daily chores and routines of home become small acts of resistance and survival. Zahra’s photo essay “Strife” is a haunting representation of women in Kashmir in manifold perspectives: a defiant woman directly gazing at the camera in protest, stone throwers, children playing on the streets, all shift our focus on the everydayness. There are “casual” images of women looking at the sky praying, women in school reading, two women standing gazing at the camera with a child in front of them, an elderly woman coming out of a mosque captured by Zahra. As she states: The photographs in this essay thrum with the energy of an intimate attachment, and a knowing eye. What is outside the frame, constantly seeps into its insides, so that we already inhabit the city that the pictures chronicle—catching its subjects mid-glance, mid-stride. (“Strife: A Photo Essay”)

Zahra’s representation of women in both the selected images carve out a “dailyness” aspect of life caught within the structures of violence in which the “conflict is everywhere—inside and outside—you don’t have to go looking out for it” (Zahra). In a conflict that seeps down into every realm of life, Zahra’s images reconceptualize how we understand agency in women negotiating a violent space in public and private spaces. Kashmir’s Contemporary Women’s Art Contemporary art on Kashmir offers a rich feminist space with women artists from various geographical spaces: from inside Kashmir, within mainland India, and an interesting international artistic scene is coming together toward widening the space of creativity and artistic re-envisioning of Kashmir and its women. Indian artist Nilima Sheikh from Baroda, whose art is also studied by Ananya Kabir in its different phases,9 imagines Kashmir through nine painted scrolls in which she depicts Kashmir’s multiple histories, forgotten pasts and offers a syncretic and layered view. HeritageLab, a curated online museum of art and culture published Sheikh’s series in 2019, titled “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams” which was inspired by Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry and explores a diverse narrative of Kashmir with illustrated folktales, depictions of violence, history, mythology, mysticism, and the conflict (“Each

134

Chapter 6

Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams”). Indian feminist artist Nalini Malani’s paintings and installations on Kashmir have also created, what renowned cultural critic and film-maker Mieke Bal calls “activating art.”10 One of Malani’s 2018 painting installations titled, “Can You Hear Me?” is about Asifa Bano, an eight-year-old girl who was raped and killed in Kashmir. Malani’s art consists of unsettling sketches, screaming and exploding on the canvas demanding answers. One of the paintings in this series is called “Rage” poignantly merging pain of the little girl’s murder with feminist anger. Albeit two decades ago, Sheba Chhacchi and Sonia Jabbar’s powerful collaborative installation titled, “When the Gun is Raised Dialogue Stops: Women’s Voices from the Kashmir Valley” reminds viewers of the buried and forgotten voices of Kashmiri women. In Kashmir’s contemporary art scene, young Kashmiri women artists like Khytul Abyad have powerfully intervened the artistic imagination by creating paintings that document Kashmiri “stories and truths” (Abyad interview). She states in an interview, “‘We try’ despite all the shutdown, curfews and surveilled life” (Interview). Abyad’s art merges paintings with graffiti like drawings often focusing on women and children of Kashmir. Her painting “Dance of the Dead” (2019) is especially worth mentioning in the way women are depicted dancing defiantly against a necropolitical landscape. While this section focuses mainly on women artists, other important Kashmiri artists such as award-winning artist and sculptor Masood Hussain deserves a special mention. Hussain’s art has created a massive space for resisting and representing the conflict in myriad ways. Rollie Mukherjee’s Kashmir Paintings This section explores Rollie Mukherjee’s paintings representing Kashmir’s conflict zone. Mukherjee is an Indian artist whose works have been exhibited widely in Srinagar and other parts of India. Her recent works also have a specific focus on gender and Kashmir. The first painting selected here is a part of three works in the series, “Shadows Beyond the Ghost Town” that on the outset captures the eye with a stunning palette of color. (Figure 6.8) On a closer look, the painting reveals a bloody landscape where the arboreal symbols are fused in purple and reveal sinewy branches. Further investigation reveals the branches masquerade as guns sprouting from earth. Nature is overshadowed by blood shrouding the entire landscape, and there is no space for green, a color of regenerative hope for verdant nature. In the painting, a woman appears crouching on the land; she is working on the soil, face down, expressionless. But the nature around her is covered in blood and violence. In this painting, Mukherjee creates a counter-landscape that deconstructs the fetishized memory of a gorgeous landscape of Kashmir. Here, Kashmir’s nature has been seized by militarization. There is also

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

135

Figure 6.8  “Shadows Beyond the Ghost town.” Source: Published with permission by the artist, Rollie Mukherjee.

a juxtaposition of stasis and horror in the image that unsettles the viewer with the stillness of the woman enveloped by the violence she sits in. (Figure 6.8) In the second painting, “Drifting” (figure 6.9) there are some important symbolic markers of Kashmir that Mukherjee reverses to represent a Kashmiri necropolitical landscape. Explaining the title of her painting, Mukherjee states, “This work shows Kashmiri women witness the gruesome reality day to day and rowing through the misery of death. This painting also de-fetishizes imposed exotic colonial gaze” (Mukherjee). “Drifting” has an element of stillness around it even if the woman is caught in movement, rowing the shikara boat; but she rows through images of death and sterility. The water is not flowing and as Mukherjee herself states, usual exotic colonial imagination of Kashmir is reversed by subverting the landscape— the same iconic markers of Kashmir are there, dal lake, a Kashmiri woman rowing a shikara across the waters, the mountains in the backdrop and a stunning paisley floral carpet, all remain as reminders of Kashmir, but they are in decay. None of these symbolic markers of Kashmir exist in the same meaning of beauty or richness in “Drifting.” The painting turns these into a harrowing stasis where death hovers on the landscape of Kashmir. The carpet reveals scores of skulls, skeletons, and bones hidden underneath it, and the woman rows on with a stack of human skulls peering on the boat. The trees bear no leaves and their shadows cast a gloom on the lake’s still waters. Life in this necropolis of Kashmir hangs in the in-between space

136

Chapter 6

Figure 6.9  “Drifting.” 2016. Source: Published with permission from the artist, Rollie Mukherjee.

and the woman’s figure carries on rowing stoically in waters murky with blood and each corner revealing shadows of death. The title of this work also suggests a directionless temporality, a drifting that leads “nowhere” reflecting Kashmiri subjects who are drifting in a landscape of death when time itself is usurped by violence. In both Mukherjee’s paintings, there exists a haunting element that disturbs, and yet poignantly enacts as a reminder of the space women inhabit in the daily witnessing of trauma. If Zahra’s selected photographs beg our attention toward women in their “practice” of everyday in a complex negotiation of a conflict, these paintings present another dimension of women’s existence in Kashmir. Both paintings showcase women in landscapes in which they are alone and surrounded by death or are amidst those who once lived, and their remnants of corporeal life have taken over. Both images also show women in some kind of “doing”—they carry on in such conditions. The first artwork reveals the woman in an action, tilling the bloody soil, or sowing seeds, an image toward women’s role in the futurity of Kashmir. Similarly, the second painting also points to a woman “carrying on,” rowing her boat across a deathly pall, literally carrying the lifeless remains in her background as she wades through the stillness of the lake. Although there is an element of stasis evident in “Drifting,” the painting captures a stoic defiance to “row ahead” reminding of the difficult task women have within the private and public spaces negotiating the conflict.

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

137

Soniya Amrit Patel, “Paintings on Kashmir” The next artist Soniya Amrita Patel comes from interstitial, transnational, and international spaces and her art also portrays Kashmir with a focus on gendered resistance and agency. British-born artist Soniya Amrit Patel has roots in Africa, Spain, and India. She grew up in Nigeria, lived briefly in India, and finally settled in Spain. Having widely exhibited her work in Europe, Patel’s focus turned to Kashmir in the aftermath of the revocation of Article 370. She produced her first work titled “Kashmiri winter” that draws our attention to Kashmiri women. Patel’s art is also especially interesting in the way it represents how migrant artists like her envision Kashmir and its women from wider geopolitical and intersectional spaces. (Figure 6.10)

Figure 6.10  “Kashmiri Winter.” 2020. Source: Published with permission by the artist, Soniya Amrit Patel.

138

Chapter 6

“Kashmiri Winter” was published during the pandemic in 2020 and Patel’s own statement on this painting explains the context of her work which comes out of the backdrop of the 2019 abrogation of Article 370 by the Indian state. Patel provides a brief note on this painting: This artwork pays homage to the strong, defiant and resisting women of Indian administered Kashmir, and their ongoing fight for rights, peace and wellbeing. Typically, women bear the load, quite literally on their heads, of carrying firewood while stocking up for the challenge of surviving the chills of ChillaiKalan. This involves collecting water, wood, food rations, and other supplies, a staggering task in rural areas of Kokernag, for example, about 100 km from Srinagar. Women bear the biggest brunt of conflicts started by men. In Kashmir they have become increasingly visible and vocal crying out and making their voices heard as they take part in protests rebelling against the boundaries of traditionally expected gender roles. (Patel’s website)

Etched in a background of chiaroscuro of light and shadows, the foregrounded Kashmiri women in this painting are splattered in blood. Their hands are crossed over their heads in a posture of defiance and protest, yet their mouths are unseen. Their postures are one of combative resistance in the everyday violence marked by bloody splotches. Interestingly, compared to Mukherjee’s paintings, Kashmiri women in Patel’s painting are shadowy, merging with the shadowy landscape of Kashmir. The painting also has a play with the classic Spivak’s subaltern speech dilemma: these women are trying to speak; they are resisting and defiant, but they are not heard because no one is yet listening. Even though their mouths are not visible, there is a suggestive horror and scream embedded in the effect of this image. The chiaroscuro in the painting is also not pleasing to the eye, rather, the darkness and shadows depict chaos, gloom, and blood around the women standing in defiance. Patel’s second painting in her Kashmir series, titled, “Red Blizzard in Kashmir, Women in Focus II,” also plays with the speech versus listening binaries focusing on Kashmiri women. Foregrounding one woman’s face are innumerable women transposed with each other, fading in a blood-smeared backdrop. This image literally also depicts a woman saying or whispering something.(Figure 6.11) Patel once again describes the artwork with a commentary: “At first they whispered. The whisper grew to a scream . . . Now it is a clamour as they cry out against injustice.” (Soniya Amrit Patel website). Interestingly, this painting also highlights a “speaking back in blood” gesture by the Kashmiri woman. If the splattering effect of blood on the landscape is a reminder of the violence and lives lost in a continuous warlike space, the woman in front also “whispers” and “speaks” of that violence and injustice that grows into a clamor and is carried over by numerous other women like her. The poignant

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

139

Figure 6.11  “Red Blizzard in Kashmir, Women in Focus II.” Source: Published with permission by the artist, Soniya Amrit Patel.

imagery in this painting also weaves in the irony of the title. Instead of a snowy blizzard, it is a winter engulfed in blood, which also critically positions the viewership to rethink the juxtaposition and if “we” can see and hear the women. These selected paintings and photographic images produce alternative ways to portray women and “representational agency” in Kashmir. They offer interesting optics to portray Kashmiri women combating the everyday. Veena Das once again explains the effect of trauma and violence on the gendered subject as a space in which the everyday survival becomes “the sense of something recovered” (62). Women negotiate this realm of violence, trauma, and mourning though this “descent” into the everyday and survive amid it. Das’s understanding of the everyday conflict zone and women participating in the dailyness helps frame the narratives of Zahra, Mukherjee and Patel in their visual representations. These visual texts challenge the usual tropes used for Kashmiri women that saturate digital and social media spaces; in that, they also emphasize on the significance in the role “we” have as viewers and listeners. The women depicted in the selected works also present a stoic resilience under the onslaught of silencing, subjection and control. And this silencing itself is what I turn to finally. The chapter began

140

Chapter 6

with the historical abrogation of Article 370 in the summer of 2019. The eerie and uncanny silence in the prolonged blackout that continued outside Kashmir spoke of something beyond the lack of solidarity or support. As Gurminder Bhambra argues, silences need to be conceptually understood as something more than “simple absences.” Silences, according to her “are also a constitutive feature of discourse and practice. . . . Silences work in a systematic way to inform issues of representation, and the associated problems of inclusion, exclusion, and participation, both historically and contemporaneously” (Bhambra 12). Thus, according to her, the solution to “silence” is not simply “voice” as a contrary method, “but the deconstruction and possible reconstruction of the initial paradigms that produced and re-produce these silences, between the silenced and the silencer” (Bhambra 12). The visual texts discussed in this chapter by Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri women produce counter-narratives to such silence and create ‘non-essentialist’ modes of understanding agency when it comes to women in conflict zones like Kashmir. They allow a more nuanced understanding of situational networks within which women negotiate survival and endurance in coping through violence and silences. The women artists in discussion also present a glimpse of such networks as well as allyship through art, as decolonial praxis, thereby allowing radical possibilities of linking women across boundaries to present a feminist global solidarity with Kashmiri women.

NOTES 1. This chapter emerges from two of my conference talks in 2018 and 2019. I presented the first talk in University of Cordoba, Spain on November 6, 2018, titled, “Women in Images Within Kashmir’s Conflict Zone” and the second one was on October 18, 2019 for Annual South Asia conference, at University of Wisconsin, titled “Visual Digital Culture and Women in Kashmir’s Conflict Zone” in a panel on Visual Cultures, Dissent and Conformity. This chapter is a much larger extended version from the two conference talks. For another similar perspective on camera and Kashmiri women’s visual representation, see: Sadaf Wani’s 2021 article, “The Patronizing Gaze of the Camera: The Problems with Constructing Visual Identity of Kashmiri Women Around Their Tears,” Inverse Journal. September 2, 2021. 2. On August 5, 2019, the Indian government revoked Articles 370 and 35A which constitutionally provided Kashmir with a relatively autonomous, special status and for preserving Kashmiri identity. As a consequence of this revocation, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was split into union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. For details on historical and political significance of this historic revocation see, Duschinski, Haley et  al. “Year of Siege.” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology. July 30, 2020.

“Representing-Agency,” Infra-Politics, and Visual Cultures

141

3. Alok Pandey and Deepshikha Ghosh of NDTV India report that BJP legislator Vikram Saini uttered these statements after the revocation of Article 370 by the Indian government. https://www​.ndtv​.com​/india​-news​/bjp​-lawmaker​-vikram​-sainis​-article​ -370​-shocker​-now​-marry​-fair​-kashmiri​-women​-2081529 4. Indian news channel Times of India (IndiaTimes) reported, Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Khattar stated this controversial line after Article 370 was removed. https://timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/city​/gurgaon​/now​-we​-can​-bring​-girls​ -from​-kashmir​-says​-haryana​-cm​-ml​-khattar​/articleshow​/70617564​.cms 5. For more details on this image, see “Spare a Thought on Kashmir’s Women” by Lalita Panicker, Hindustan Times, June 23, 2018, https://www​.hindustantimes​ .com​/columns​/spare​-a​-thought​-for​-kashmir​-s​-women​/story​-npd​ASOZ​z0vo​Wz5o​ C3keEtI​.html 6. For more details, see: “Pakistan Expresses Solidarity with Kashmiri Women On International Day For The Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict,” by Tariq Ullah Wardak, June 19, 2020, https://dailytimes​.com​.pk​/629038​/pakistan​-expresses​ -solidarity​-with​-kashmiri​-women​-on​-international​-day​-for​-the​-elimination​-of​-sexual​ -violence​-in​-conflict/ 7. The article and the connected image in discussion are here: “Jammu and Kashmir: Killing of Civilians Sparks Militancy Fear,” Riyaz Masroor, October 12, 2021, https://www​.bbc​.com​/news​/world​-asia​-india​-58839297 8. For more details on the image and article, see “Terrorists Kill Hindu Teacher in J&K’s Kulgam,” Morung Express, May 31, 2022, https://www​.morungexpress​.com​ /terrorists​-kill​-hindu​-teacher​-in​-jks​-kulgam​-kashmiri​-pandits​-threaten​-mass​-migration​-from​-valley 9. Ananya Jahanara Kabir analyzes Sheikh’s paintings in four phases in how they depict different junctures of Kashmir. For more see Chapter 6, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 10. Mieke Bal writes on Nalini Malani’s art installations and paintings in the book, Medias Res: The Art of Nalini Malani.

Conclusion

Kashmir and the Uncanny

This book covers some of the literary and visual productions from the last fifteen years on and from Kashmir pointing to a violence that has incapacitated life in all forms. As an ending, it is only befitting that one remembers why rethinking the discourse on Kashmir is important in its intricate entanglements with the socio-political and popular cultural realm against the official narratives that continue to disseminate in dangerous ways. As recent as January 2023, India released its post-pandemic, hyper-celebrated Bollywood blockbuster, Pathaan, starring some of the biggest Bollywood stars such as Shahrukh Khan, Deepika Padukone, and Salman Khan. The film has been widely embraced not only in India but also within diasporic contexts. The grandeur associated with the film harkens to Bollywood’s “soft power” and reach, even in some non-diasporic ‘foreign’ contexts. Theaters have been filled with cheering crowds, applauding key scenes of ‘nation-making.’ Yet, what cannot be missed is that the film’s unconscious resides on the covetous claim for Kashmir and the story’s central plot centered around the Indian state’s claiming of it. The very beginning scenes focus on the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir and its response from the ‘other side’ in Pakistan. What follows is an exciting espionage, action film scripted in the usual narrative of Indian forces showcasing their right over Kashmir over the cross-border ‘enemy’ nation. The film is an enormous success and is a glorious tribute to Bollywood in all its excesses and yet the political message is clear—the nation’s savior, the army of the state in this case, the Pathaan, played by superstar Shahrukh Khan is the valorized subject and ironically, his real-life Muslim identity has been read as a space of resistance against the state by critical viewers. In the film’s plot, he saves the nation and in return protects Kashmir from being annexed by the neighboring enemy, with the support of his love interest, a Pakistani 143

144

Conclusion

woman ISI agent who soon learns of her ‘mistake’ in supporting her country’s politics on Kashmir because of a potential bio-terroristic attack on India planned by Pakistan over Article 370 and Kashmir. As I watched the film in United States, I realized, the key to the film truly lies in the spectatorship and response trickling through the songs, the special appearance by another mega-Bollywood star Salman Khan, the nationalist moments of calling out Jai Hind1 and a heavy tribute to the soldiers of the nation. The film’s success and ethos make it clear that Article 370 is now beyond a state’s political strategy; it now belongs to the populist realm of the people in garnering their support and call for legitimizing one of the murkiest events in Kashmir’s tragic history. The film thus covertly makes a case for validity and support for 2019’s historically longest blackout of millions of Kashmiris, and the violence on Kashmir. This phenomenon of using Kashmir to bolster the postcolonial nationstate’s nationalism is not new. Lesser-known film, Dhoka: Round D Corner (2022), was released without this grand flourish and tells a similar story. In this film too, Kashmir forms an uncanny presence within the plot of a marriage gone wrong. The formulaic version of a Kashmiri man as the troublemaker, or terrorist, becomes a part of the plot in an otherwise absurd narrative of a couple’s failed relationship. The need for a Kashmiri terrorist in the plot is illogical and unclear, and only reiterates Bollywood’s obsession with Kashmir. It also explicates the nation’s unconscious anxiety through Kashmir as a signifier. Whether or not the Kashmiri figure Haq Riyaz Gul is a terrorist is debatable in the film, and the husband of the estranged couple is clearly the “villain” in the story. Yet Gul is trapped as the “real” terrorist, framed by his uncle in Kashmir to plot the killing of students in Mumbai. Thus, Kashmir is still the culprit and the trope of the Kashmiri Muslim as the terrorist disrupting the nation’s peace becomes yet another way of satisfying the statist project. Dhoka was a failed film at the box office in 2022 and is now running in OTT platforms like Netflix as of 2023; meanwhile, Pathaan clearly has struck a chord in the nation and beyond. Both films released consecutively in 2022 and 20232 present a nation’s aporia: Kashmir is clearly present, but also “hidden” in the film’s diegesis. In that, the message is unmistakable about the diegetic worlds such films create. These two films perform a “worlding” of the Indian nation-statehood in which Kashmir lies in the space of symbolic alterity. Pathaan’s popularity also highlights our own complicit entanglements in the Kashmir conflict—the popularity and messaging of the film, sadly underscores audience culpability when it comes to perpetuating and maintaining a kind of necropolitical discourse on Kashmir surveyed throughout the book. Bollywood taps into a populist impulse within people’s unconscious, and in return establishes a certain ‘normative’ Indian subject. In this play

Kashmir and the Uncanny

145

of representation, the recovery of the Indian nation-state three years after the pandemic also necessitates a story that must involve claiming Kashmir against Pakistan, and ironically presents a national narrative in which the “quasi” Muslim subject has to pass his ultimate allegiance test to the nation by securing Kashmir. In the film, the villain (Pakistan and) an ex-Indian agent who works for the Pakistani nation-state claims, “I want Kashmir, obviously Kashmir” which reveals the film’s discourse of normalizing Kashmir as the object of desire, thus legitimizing the Indian control of said object. Sadly once again in this tale, Kashmir and Kashmiris are missing. The preceding chapters in this book have given us ways to rethink this play and dangers of representing Kashmir, and to understand the painful forms of violence that weave through every part of Kashmiri lives. These texts have offered glimpses of the Kashmiri subject’s struggle to survive, agency and will to live in a quotidian of violence in all its visible and invisible forms. NOTES 1. Translated from Hindi as “victory to India.” 2. In September 2023, Telugu film Kushi (Dir. Shiva Nirvana) uses Kashmir to depict a southern love story. Kashmiri men are portrayed as violent and savage in the first half of the film.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Afshana, Syeda. Backyard of Corpses: Narratives from Kashmir. New Delhi: Penguin India, 2013. Ali, Agha Shahid. “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight.” The Country Without a Post Office: Poems. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. Ali, Nasreen. “Kashmiri Nationalism Beyond the Nation-State.” South Asia Research. Vol. 22(2), 2002. 146–160. Anjaria, Jonathan Shapiro & Shapiro, Ulka. “Mazaa: Rethinking Fun, Pleasure and Play in South Asia.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. Vol. 43(2), 2020. 232–242. Anjum, Aliya & Verma, Saiba. “Curfewed in Kashmir: Voices from the Valley.” Until My Freedom Has Come: New Intifada in Kashmir. Ed. Sanjay Kak. HayMarket Books, 2013. 105–117. Kindle. Antze, Paul & Lambek, Michael. Tense Past. New York: Routledge, 1996. Athanasiou, Athena. Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Woman in Black. Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli. Princeton University Press, 2008. Baishya, Amit Rahul. Deathworlds, Terror and Survival: Contemporary Literature from North-East India. New York: Routledge, 2018. Baishya, Amit R. “‘The Fragile Magic of Being at Home’: ‘Nomadism’ as an Impediment to Storytelling in Siddhartha Deb.” Conference Paper. 40th Annual Conference on South Asia. University of Wisconsin, Madison. October 20–23, 2011. Balagopalan, Sarada. “Constructing Indigenous Childhoods: Colonialism, Vocational Education and the Working Child.” Childhood. Vol. 9(1), 2002. 19–34.

147

148

Bibliography

Bhabha, Homi. “Preface Precarities, Resistance and Care Communities in South Asia.” Special Issue. South Asian Review. Vol. 39(3–4), 2008. 267–268. Bhambhra, Gurminder & Robbie, Shilliam. Silencing Human Rights: Critical Engagements with a Contested Project. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Bhardwaj, Vishal. Haider. 2014. UTV Motion Pictures. Mumbai. Bhardwaj, Vishal & Peer, Basharat. Haider: The original screenplay. 2014. Noida: Harper Collins India. Bhat, Javaid. ”Form of the Kashmiri Novel.” Kashmir in the Global Humanities: Genres, Poetics, Ecologies. Cornell University Conference. September 10, 2022. Boes, Tobias. Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Bildungsroman. Cornell University Press, 2012. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Bradatana, Costica. “A Light for the Future: On the Political Uses of a Dying Body.” Dissent Magazine. May 23, 2011. April 20, 2015. Braund, Susanna. “Haunted by Horror: The Ghost of Seneca in Renaissance Drama.” A Companion to the Neronian Age. Eds. Emma Buckley & Martin T. Dinter. Wiley, 2013. Burke, Jason. “Kashmir Unmarked Graves Hold Thousands of Bodies.” The Guardian. Published, August 21, 2011. Retrieved May 30, 2019. Campbell, Alex & Crichter, Charles. “The Bigger Picture: Gender and the Visual Rhetoric of Conflict.” Journalism Studies. Vol. 19(11), 2018. 1541–1561. Castro, Richard L. “Syncretism, Wonder and Memory in the Work of Rogelio Salmona.” Transculturation: Cities, Spaces and Architectures in Latin America. Eds. Felipe Hernandez, Mark Millington & Iain Borden. Rodopi, 2005. Cavarero, Adriana. Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence. Columbia University Press, 2009. Chatterji, Angana. “The Militarized Zone.” Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Eds. Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy, et al. Verso Books, 2011. Chatterjee, Sushmita & Subramaniam, Banu. Eds. Meat: A Transnational Analysis. Duke University Press, 2021. Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. University of California Press, 2007. Das, Veena, Lock, Margaret & Kleinman, Arthur. Social Suffering. University of California Press, 1997. Davis, Colin. “Hauntology. Specters and Phantoms.” French Studies. Vol. LIX(3). 373–37, 2005.9. Debrix, François. Global Powers of Horror: Security, Politics, and the Body in Pieces. Routledge, 2017. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday. University of California Press, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by P. Kamuf. Routledge, 1994. Diprose, Rosalyn. “Community of Bodies: From Modification to Violence.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Vol. 19(3), 2005. 381–392. Dolezal, Luna & Petherbridge, Danielle. Body/Self/Other: Phenomenology of Social Encounters. SUNY Press, 2017.

Bibliography

149

Eagleton, Terry. “The Ideology of the Aesthetic.” Poetics Today. Vol. 9(2), 1988. 327–338. Elmslie, Margaret Duncan et al. Seedtime in Kashmir: A Memoir of William Jackson Elmslie. Library of Alexandria, 1875. Felluga, Dino. “The Road is Clear: Application,” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, July 2002, Purdue University, https://cla​.purdue​.edu​/academic​/english​/ theory​/narratology​/application​/app​licT​nsma​infr​ameRoad2​.html (accessed August 25, 2019). Ferguson, Roderick A. “Racial Formations and Resistance.” Keynote Speech. 16th Annual Feminist Theory Workshop. Duke University, Durham. March 25th, 2023. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House, Inc., 1978. Fox, Nick J. & Alldred, Pam. “The Materiality of Memory: Affects, Remembering and Food Decisions.” Cultural Sociology. Vol. 13(1), 2019. 20–26. Gelder, Ken. “Global/Postcolonial Horror.” Postcolonial Studies. Vol. 3(1), 2000. 35–38. Gigoo, Siddhartha. The Garden of Solitude. Delhi: Rupa Publishers, 2011. Gigoo, Siddhartha. “Author in Focus”—Interview, Cerebration Kashmir Issue, 2012. Gilmour, D. The British in India: Three Centuries of Ambition and Experience. Penguin, 2018. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Guenther, Lisa. “A Critical Phenomenology of Solidarity and Resistance.” Body/ Self/Other: Phenomenology of Social Encounters. Eds. Luna Dolezal & Danielle Petherbridge. SUNY Press, 2017. Halder, Tamoghna. “Kashmir’s Struggle Did Not Start in 1947 and It will Not End Today.” Aljazeera. August 15, 2019. Accessed June 19, 2020. Hoagland, Erika. Postcolonializing the Bildungsroman: A Study of the Evolution of a Genre. Dissertation. Purdue University, 2006. Ann Arbor: Proquest/UMI, 2006. (3232187). Hogan, Patrick Colm. Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism. University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Hozic, Aida & Edkins, Jenny et al. “Tales of Entanglement.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Vol. 49(3), 2021. 604–626. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2006), xiv–xv. Idrees, Afreen. “Rollie Mukherjee: Painting Against Disremembering.” TwoCircles. Net: Mainstream News of the Marginalized. February 23, 2017. Accessed January 21, 2022. “Investigate all Disappearances in Kashmir.” Human Rights Watch. Asia. February 15, 2007. Accessed October 6, 2022. Jamil, Bushrah & Ismail, Umer. “The Kashmiri Shawl: Rethinking Perspectives of Authenticity and Appropriation in a Post-Colonial Era.” Proceeding of the 5th International Conference on Arts and Humanities. Vol. 5, 2018. 80–89. Josselson, Ruthellen & Lieblich, Amy et al. Eds. Identity and Story: Creating Self in Narrative. American Psychological Association, 2006.

150

Bibliography

Junaid. Mohamad. “The Stone Wars.” Guernica Magazine. August 1, 2013. Accessed June 25, 2020. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. The Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Partitions Alegropolitics.” Partition Talk Series, Center of Diaspora Studies, Punjabi University & IIT Kharagpur, India. November 24, 2021. Kanwal, Aroosa. “‘No Bodies’: Specter of an Unjust War in Kashmir.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. March 28, 2021. Accessed November 7, 2021. 1–17. Kaul, Nitasha. “Future Tense: Nitasha Kaul in Live Conversation with Amrita Ghosh.” Malmö Feministik Festival. November 20, 2021. Malmö, Sweden. https:// www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=UtZ2LxS4W_A Kaul, Nitasha. “Kashmir: A Place of Blood and Memory.” Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Ed. Sanjay Kak. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. 189–212. Kaul, Suvir. “Kashmir: A Postcolony.” Interview with Amrita Ghosh. August 21, 2020. Accessed January 2023. SASNET, Lund University, Sweden. https://www​ .youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=R311PqZzx6M Kaul, Suvir. “Diary of a Summer.” Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Ed. Sanjay Kak. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011. 17–28. Kaul, Suvir. “To Walk Past the Threatening Gaze.” Outlook Magazine. August 5, 2013. April 19, 2015. Kaul, Suvir. Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics. Duke University Press, 2017. Kesavan, Mukul. “Hamlet in Hindustan: Kashmir Out of the Closet.” The Telegraph. October 6, 2014. Retrieved June 1, 2019. https://www​.telegraphindia​.com​/opinion​ /hamlet​-in​-hindustan​-kashmir​-out​-of​-the​-closet​/cid​/1312864 Khan, Nyla Ali. “Kashmiri Women Activists in the Aftermath of the Partition of India.” In the Crossfire of History. Eds. Fayeza Hasanat & Lava Asaad. Rutgers University Press, 2022. Khandy, Idrees. “Social Roots of Insurgency in Kashmir.” Violence in South Asia. Eds. Aninsya Purakayastha et al. Routledge, 2020. Knupfer, Anne Meis. Chicago Black Renaissance and Women’s Activism. University of Illinois Press, 2006. Kotay, Fayaz. Colonialism and Modern Education in India: A Study of Kashmir, 1880–1947. Dissertation. Bhimrao Ambedkar University, India, 2015. Koul, Sudha. The Tiger Ladies. The Beacon Press, 2003. Langah, Nukhbah & Ud Din, Kawal. “‘Dada Subjectivity’ and Pakistani Characters in Bollywood Films.” The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad. Ed. Anjali Gera Roy. Sage, 2012. 107–124. Maiskell, Michelle. “Consuming Kashmir: Shawls and Empires, 1500–2000.” Journal of World History. Vol. 13(1), 2002. 27–65. Malik, Inshah. “Gendered Politics of Funerary Processions.” Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 53(47), 2018.

Bibliography

151

Malik, Inshah. Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Malik, Inshah & Manolagayatri, Kumarswamy. “Sexate Agency and Relationality in Witnessing Kashmir Violence.” Gendered Citizenship. Eds. Bishnupriya Dutt et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Matthews, Graham & Goodman, Sam. Eds. Violence and the Limits of Representation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Maurya, Anubhuti. “Paradise at the Frontier.” South Asian Borderlands: Mobility, History, Affect. Eds. Farhana Ibrahim & Tanuja Kothiyal. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Mbembe, Achille. “Notes on the Postcolony.” Journal of the International African Institute. Vol. 62(1), 1992. 3–37. Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture. Vol.15(1), 2003. 11–40. McBlane, Angus A.J. Corporeal Ontology: Merleau-Ponty, Flesh and PostHumanism. Dissertation. University of Cardiff, 2013. McCarthy, Cameron. “Tools of Conviviality: Art in the Postcolonial Imagination.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press. March 25, 2021. Accessed October 8, 2021. Mir, Sajad Ahmad. “Organizing Missions into Distant Lands: Medical Missionaries and the Politics of Health in Kashmir.” International Journal of History and Cultural Studies. Vol. 3(2), 2017. 39–50. Mirani, Haroon. “Ad on Kashmir Hospitality Gets Bouquets, Brickbats.” Greater Kashmir. September 26, 2017. Accessed November 2017. Misrahi-Barak, Judith & Joseph-Vilain, Mélanie. Eds. Postcolonial Ghosts. Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2009. Misri, Deepti. Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India. University of Illinois Press, 2014. Misri, Deepti. “This Is Not a Performance: Public Mourning and Visual Spectacle in Kashmir.” Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation in Postcolonial India. University of Illinois Press, 2014. Misri, Deepti. “Showing Humanity: Violence and Visuality in Kashmir.” Cultural Studies. Vol. 33(3), 2019. 527–549. Mridha, Somjyoti. “Construction of the Kashmiri Pandits as the Minority Community.” Understanding Marginality. Eds. Supriya Agarwal, Neha Arora et al. Rawat Publications, 2022. Mukherjee, Debashree. “Through the Lens of Bollywood: Kashmir as an Image, Kashmir as a Place.” Wire India. August 13, 2019. Accessed October 22, 2019. Mukherjee, Rollie. “Drifting” and “Shadows Beyond the Ghost Town”. Published with Permission by artist, 2018. Murray, Alex. Giorgio Agamben. New York: Routledge, 2010. Mushtaq, Samreen. “Home as the Frontier: Gendered Constructs of Militarized Violence in Kashmir.” Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 53(47), 2018. 54–59. Nanda, Preetika. “Tulips and Other Indian Visual Manias in Kashmir.” Raiot India. June 7, 2021. Accessed September 4, 2021.

152

Bibliography

Nessman, Ravi. “The Wounds of Kashmir’s Never-Ending War.” Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Ed. Sanjay Kak. New York, NY: Penguin Books India, 2011. O’Brien, April. “Horrorism and Ontological Dignity: What Do Not Historical Signs Tell Us?” Present Tense. Vol. 7(1), 2018. 1–6. O’Riley, Michael. “Postcolonial Haunting: Anxiety, Affect and the Situated Encounter.” Postcolonial Text. Vol. 3(4), 2007. 1–15. Panade, Somnath & Sarawade, A. M. “[De]Formation and Perpetuation of Bildungsroman as a Genre.” New Academia: International Journal of Language, Literature and Literary Theory. Vol. 6(3), 2017. 76–85. Parthasarathy, Suhrith. “The Bard Meets Bollywood.” Index Censorship. Vol. 45(1), 2016. 19–20. https://doi​.org​/10​.1177​%2F0306422016643001. Pas, Andreas. British Women Missionaries in India c. 1917–1950. Dissertation. University of Oxford, 2011. Patel, Soniya Amrit. “Red Blizzard in Kashmir” & “Kashmiri Winter.” Published from SoniyaAmritPatel​.co​m, 2020. Accessed June 5, 2020. Paustin, Faustina Chiyama. Postcolonial and Asian Gothic Creative Works and the Creation of New Life. Victoria University of Wellington, May 2019. Peer, Basharat. Curfewed Night: A Memoir of War in Kashmir. London: Harper Collins Press, 2010. Peer, Basharat. “The Bard Meets Bollywood.” Interview by Suhrith Parthasarathy. April 5, 2016. Index Censorship Vol. V. Plumwood, Val. “Tasteless: Towards a Food-based Approach to Death.” Environmental Values. Vol. 17(3), 2008. 323–330. Purakayastha, Anindya Sekhar & Malreddy, Pavan Kumar et  al. Eds. Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives. Routledge, 2020. Radway, Janice. “Foreword.” Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Rai, Mridu. “Making A Part Inalienable: Folding Kashmir into India’s Imagination.” Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Ed. Sanjay Kak. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. 250–278. Rajan, Rajeswari Sundar. “Feminism and the Politics of the Hindu Goddess.” Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice. Ed. Marianne Dekoven. Rutgers University Press, 2001. 212–228. Ramdas, Shiv. “Supernatural or Super Unnatural: An Examination of Postcolonial Horror.” Science Fiction, Fantasy Writers Association. Bulletin 215, December 18, 2020. Accessed December 28, 2021. https://www​.sfwa​.org​/2020​/12​/18​/supernatural​-or​-super​-unnatural​-an​-examination​-of​-postcolonial​-horror/ Rather, Feroz. The Night of Broken Glass. Harper Collins, 2019. Rather, Mohd Latif. “Costs of Kashmir Conflict on Pandits as Depicted in Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude.” Shanlax: International Journal of Arts, Science and Humanities. Vol. 5(2), October 30, 2017. Accessed November 28, 2021. Rizwan, Rakhshan. Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan. Routledge, 2020.

Bibliography

153

Rollo, Toby. ”Feral Children: Settler Colonialism, Progress, and the Figure of the Child.” Settler Colonial Studies. Vol. 8 (1). 60–79. 2018. Rogers, L.W. Ghosts in Shakespeare. New York: Kessinger Publishing, 1995. Rony, Fatima Tobing. How Do We Look? Resisting Visual Biopolitics. Duke University Press, 2022. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press, 2019. Roy, Anjali Gera. The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad. Sage Publications, 2012. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Schofield, Victoria. Kashmir in the Crossfire. London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1996. Schwartz, Margaret. “An Iconography of the Flesh: How Corpses Mean As Matter.” Communication +1. Vol. 2(1), 2013. 1–16. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance. Yale University Press, 1985. Sen, Amrita. “Locating Hamlet in Kashmir.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion. Eds. Sonya Loftis, Allison Kellar & Lisa Ulevich. New York: Routledge, 2017. Shankar, Subramanian. “Thugs and Bandits: Life and Law in Colonial and Epicolonial India.” Biography. Vol. 36(1), 2013. 97–123. Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. Penguin Books, 1977. Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard University Press, 2012. Steinecke, Hartmut. “The Novel and the Individual: The Significance of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister in the Debate about the Bildungsroman.” Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Ed. James Hardin. University of South Carolina Press, 1991. 69–96. Strauss, David Levi. Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics. Aperture, 2003. Thomas, Rosie. The Kashmir Shawl. Harper Collins Publications, 2011. Thorp, Robert. Cashmere Misgovernment. Wyman Bros Publication, 1870. Trüstedt, Katrin. “Representing Agency: An Introduction.” Law and Literature. Vol. 32(2), 2020. 195–206. Ubbott, Vibhuti. Women in Kashmir’s Conflict Zone Between Patriarchy and Armed Conflict. Dissertation, JNU, India, 2018. Umar, Mir. Post on Facebook Timeline. August 26, 2020. 3:25 p.m. Accessed January 2, 2021. Verdery, Katherine. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Vinthagen, Stellan & Johansson, Anna. Conceptualizing Everyday Resistance: A Transdisciplinary Approach. Routledge, 2020. Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011.

154

Bibliography

Whitehead, Andrew. “Kashmir’s Women’s Militia at the End of Empire.” Histories of the Present. October 20, 2017. Accessed November 1, 2018. Wolf, Diane L. “Postmemories of Joy? Children of Holocaust Survivors and Alternative Family Memories.” Memory Studies. Vol. 12(1), 2019. 74–87. Younghusband, Francis Edward. Kashmir Described by Sir Francis Young Husband, Painted by Major Molyneux. Adam and Charles Black, 1910. Zahra, Masrat. “Strife: A Photo Essay.” Wande Magazine. February 23, 2018. Accessed October 5, 2019. Zakaria, Anam. Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-Administered Kashmir. Harper Collins India, 2018. Zia, Ather. Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Zutshi, Chitralekha. “Designed for Eternity: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain.” Journal of British Studies. Vol. 48(2). Special Issue on Material Culture, 2009. 420–440.

Index

Note: Page locators italics refer to figures; page locators followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. Abyad, Khytul, 134 Afghans, 89 Afshana, Syeda, 69 Agamben, Giorgio, 24–30, 32, 37–38 agency, 6, 9, 11–13, 17, 19, 20, 24, 31–34, 41, 43–44, 58, 93, 94, 100, 102, 111, 115, 118–19, 123, 125–29, 133, 137, 139, 140, 145 Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Woman in Black, 125 Ahangar, Parveena, 126 alacrem, 94 alegropolitics, 13, 19, 94–95, 99–101, 103, 107, 109–11, 115 Ali, Agha Shahid, 6, 14, 23, 133 Alldred, Pam, 101 allegro, 94, 103 All India Kashmir Committee, 89 Anglo Kashmir Novel, 74–75 Anjaria, Jonathan Shapiro, 110–12 Anjaria, Ulka, 110–12 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), 26 Arshia, 64, 66–67 Article 370, 2, 20n1, 66, 117, 121, 137– 38, 140, 141nn3–4, 143–44

Association of Parents of Disappeared People (APDP), 10, 126–27 ataraxia, 33 ataraxy, 33 Athanasiou, Athena, 125, 127 August 2019, 3, 117, 119 azadi/azaadi, 14, 25, 35, 45, 61, 77, 88–89 azan, 47–48 Azoulay, Ariella, 130–31 Baishya, Amit Rahul, 61, 106, 128; Deathworlds, 128 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 104 Bal, Mieke, 134, 141n10; activating art, 134 Balagopalan, Sarada, 82 Bano, Asifa, 134 bare life, 24–25, 27–28, 30, 37–38 bare-naked life, 28, 31, 63, 66 Between the Eyes, 130 Bhabha, Homi, 44 Bhambra, Gurminder, 118–19, 140; culture of silence, 118 Bhand Paether, 113 Bhands, 113

155

156

Index

Bharadwaj, Vishal, 18, 57, 68 Bhat, Javaid, 74–75 Bijbehara Massacre, 49 bildungsroman, 93–94, 99, 103–7 biopolitics, 5, 11, 17, 20, 23–25, 27–30, 35, 38, 53, 55 blackout, 2, 3, 21nn2–3, 117–19, 121, 140, 144 Boes, Tobias, 104 Bollywood, 4, 5, 9, 18, 20–21, 57–59, 65, 70n5, 118, 120, 122, 143, 144 Boss’s Account, 51–52 #BoycottHaider, 58 Bradatan, Costica, 34; Uses of a Dying Body, 34 Braund, Susanna, 60 British Women Missionaries, 75 Buckley, Jerome H., 104 Campbell, Alex W., 129–30 Castro, Richard L., 97 Cavarero, Adriana, 41–42, 44, 51–54 Chatterjee, Sushmita, 52–53 Chatterji, Angana, 89–90 Chhacchi, Sheba, 134 Chillai-Kalan, 138 chinar, 95, 108 Chouliaraki, Lillie, 130 Christian Missionary Society, CMS, 76 civic contract, 130–31 The Collaborator, 8, 14, 17, 23, 25–26, 29–35 collective subjectivity, 130 coming of age, 104–5, 112 corporeality, 31, 33, 61–63, 65, 93 corporeal ontology, 50–51, 53 counterevent, 131 counter hegemonic, 103 “The Cowherd,” 49–52 crackdown, 21n5, 26, 35, 37, 39n9, 61, 71n15 Critcher, Charles, 129–30 curfew, 3, 26, 30, 47, 88, 121, 128–29, 131, 134 Curfewed Night, 8, 17, 23, 25–26, 34–37

Daily Times, 125 Das, Veena, 20, 128, 139 Davis, Colin, 62, 64, 67 deathworlds/death-worlds, 18–28, 30 Deb, Siddhartha, 106; Point of Return, 106 de Certeau, Michel, 129 Derrida, Jacques, 62, 64–65, 67 diegetic, 60; diegesis, 144 Dilthey, Wilhem, 104 Diprose, Rosalyn, 47–48, 50 disappearance, 10, 24, 32, 46, 61, 63– 65, 67, 108, 126 Disturbed Areas Act (DAA), 26 Dogra, 3, 76, 79, 87, 89, 112–13 drifting, 135–36, 136 Eagleton, Terry, 14 Eat Pray Love, 74 Elizabethan, 60 Ellis, Mair, 73–74, 85–86 Elmslie, William Jackson, 79; Seedtime in Kashmir, 79 Enlightenment, 105 epicolonialism, 18, 74–75, 91; epicolonial state, 85; epicolonial violence, 19, 88, 91 epistemic violence, 3, 18, 73, 80, 83–84, 89, 91 Everyday Resistance, 128–29 exile, 5, 14, 19, 25, 67, 93, 103, 105–6, 109, 111 Felluga, Dino, 60 feminist, 16, 101, 103, 126, 129, 133, 134, 140 flesh, 32–33, 43, 48–53 Forster, E. M., 80; A Passage to India, 80 Foucault, Michel, 11, 24–25, 27–28, 35, 38, 65; The History of Sexuality, 27 Fox, Nick, 101 Gada Bhata, 103 The Garden of Solitude, 8, 93, 95, 103, 105, 107–12, 114–15 Gelder, Ken, 42

Index

gender, 5, 10, 19, 42, 120, 122, 129, 134; gendered, 9, 10, 13, 16, 20, 46, 119, 122, 125–27, 137–39 Geneva Conventions, 24 Ghostly Matters, 63, 65, 68 ghosts, 18, 42, 58, 60–63, 67, 68, 71n12 Gigoo, Siddhartha, 8, 19, 73, 93–94, 103–6, 108–12, 114–15 Gordon, Avery, 63–65, 68 gothic, 17, 43 Guenther, Lisa, 49–50 Gujjar, Zuni, 122 Gunasundari Katha, 59, 70n9 Haanstaad, Eric J., 47; tachypsychia, 47 Haider, 8, 18, 57–69, 70n5 Halder, Tamoghna, 89–90 half wives, 46 Hamlet, 18, 57–61, 68–69 haunting, 18, 31, 34, 36–37, 42, 44–46, 50, 58, 60–63, 65, 67–68, 93, 129, 133, 136 hauntological landscape, 62, 68 hauntology, 62, 64, 67 HeritageLab, 133 Hindi(s), 37, 66, 70n5, 110, 120, 123, 145n1 Hindu(s), 4, 25, 89, 96, 99, 100, 115n1 Hindustan Times, 124 Hoagland, Erika, 105–6 Holocaust, 27, 48, 51, 53, 95 homo sacer, 25–31, 33 horror(s), 6, 12, 13, 17, 35, 41–46, 48, 50–55, 63–64, 82, 100–101, 108–9, 131, 135, 138 horrorism, 17–18, 31, 42, 44–45, 47–48, 50–55 horticultural, 95, 113–14 human shield, 24, 30 Hussain, Masood, 134 Hutcheon, Linda, 58 Idrees, Afreen, 5, 120 India, 2–5, 7–10, 12, 19–20, 20nn1–2, 24–26, 29, 38nn3–10, 57, 59, 61–62,

157

66, 70n1, 73–76, 80, 84–85, 87–90, 95, 100, 106, 108, 112–13, 119–24, 128–29, 141nn3–4, 143–44 Indo Kashmir Novel, 74 infra-politics, 119, 128 Internally Displaced Migrants, 108 invisible violence, 130 Islam, 26, 39n11, 126 Ismail, Umer, 86 Jabbar, Sonia, 134 Jab Jab Phul Khile, 120 Jamil, Bushra, 86 Johansson, Anna, 128 Josselson, Ruthellen, 44; narrative identity, 44 jouissance, 94 Junaid, Mohammad, 9, 91 Junglee, 120, 122 Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, 4, 9, 12, 14, 19, 24, 57, 79, 94–95, 98, 101, 109, 111, 133, 141n9; Fetish of desire, 25; Territory of Desire, 4, 9, 14, 24, 79, 98, 141n9; territory of desire, 4, 12, 57 kangri, 35, 96 kani, 81, 84–87 Kanihama, 82–84, 86 Kanwal, Aroosa, 45, 48 Kashmir Defends Democracy, 122, 123 Kashmir English Novel, 74 Kashmiri shawl, 74, 83–88, 96 Kashmiri Winter, 137, 137–38 Kashmiriyat, 14, 26, 38n4 Kashmir ki Kali, 4, 120, 122 Kashmir Lit, 73 The Kashmir Shawl, 9, 73–81, 83, 85, 87–92 Kashmir’s Necropolis, 10–12, 20, 61 Kashmirwallah, 73 Kaul, Nitasha, 14–15, 25–26, 122 Kaul, Suvir, 3, 9, 20n1, 36–37, 92n1, 114; intrusive violence, 25, 37; Of Gardens and Graves, 9, 114

158

Index

Kesavan, Mukul, 68 Khan, Nyla Ali, 9, 123 Khandy, Idreas, 45 Khoon Ka Khoon, 59 King Lear, 59 Kleinman, Arthur, 128 Koul, Sudha, 19, 93–104, 109, 112, 115, 115n1 Kristellnacht, 48, 54 Kumarswamy, Manolagayatri, 3, 16 kunstlerroman, 104–5, 112 Langah, Nukhbah Taj, 4 living dead, 6, 23, 27, 29–30, 33, 44, 49, 58, 65–66, 94 Lock, Margaret, 128 lockdown, 119, 128, 132 Mahjoor, Peerzada Ghulam Ahmad, 113–14; Walo Ho Baghebano, 113 Malani, Nalini, 134, 141n10 Malik, Inshah, 3, 9, 16, 126–27; affective sites, 126 Maskiell, Michelle, 83–84, 86 materiality of memory, 101 mazaa, 110–11 mazedaar, 111 Mbembe, Achille, 10–11, 18, 24–25, 27–30, 33–37, 58, 94; state of injury, 35; state of siege, 28–29, 33 McCarthy, Cameron, 104; tools of conviviality, 104 meat, 31, 51–53 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 50, 53 migrant subject, 106 militancy, 19, 21n8, 103 militarization, 3, 12, 24, 36, 46, 58, 112, 134 Mir, Sajad Ahmad, 76 The Miscreant, 44 Misrahi-Barak, Judith, 62 Misri, Deepti, 5, 9–10, 12, 21n4, 127; optical unconscious, 127; This is Not a Performance, 127 missionaries, 75–76 Mission Kashmir, 4–5, 122

Modi, Narendra, 114 Modi, Sohrab, 59 Morgernstern, Karl, 104 Morung Express, 125 mourning, 10, 19, 31, 110, 124–28, 139 Mridha, Somjyoti, 111–12; minority complex, 112 Mughal, 84, 86, 89, 113 mukhbir, 29, 38n6 Mukherjee, Debashree, 120 Mukherjee, Rollie, 129, 134–35 Murray, Alex, 27 Mushtaq, Samreen, 132–33 Muslims, 4, 5, 24, 79, 81, 89–90, 96, 99–100, 108, 112, 125n1 Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir, 126 Nanda, Preetika, 114 nationalism, 11, 104, 122, 144 necropolitics, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23–25, 27–30, 34–36, 38, 55, 94, 115; necropolis, 11, 17, 33, 44, 61, 67, 135; necropower, 19, 25–28, 30, 34– 37; necroscopic, 3; necrotopia, 50 neocolony, 6, 10–11, 18 The Night of Broken Glass, 8, 17, 41, 43, 48, 53, 55 nomadism, 105–6 novel of formation, 104 Obama, Michelle, 88 O’Brien, April L., 53, 54 O’Riley, Michael, 62 Osuri, Goldie, 3, 11 Pakistan, 2–4, 7–8, 25–26, 29, 57, 62, 66, 70n1, 88–89, 106, 123, 125, 143–45 Palestine, 28, 36 Pandits, 21n8, 67, 89, 93, 96, 100–103, 106, 108, 110–12, 115 Parsi theater, 59 Partition, 2–4, 10, 12, 19, 45, 61–62, 86, 88–90, 94–95, 101, 106, 122, 123

Index

Partition’s Alegropolitics, 94–95, 101 Pas, Andrea, 75 Patel, Soniya Amrit, 129, 137–39 Peer, Basharat, 8, 17, 23, 25–26, 34–38, 59–60, 66–68 People’s Age, 122 pheran, 96 photography, 5, 8–10, 118, 124, 127–31 photojournalism, 6, 19, 129–30 Plumwood, Val, 52 pogroms, 17, 48 Poshkuj, 103, 107 postcolonial, 4, 6, 9–13, 17–20, 23–26, 28, 30, 33, 37–38, 41–44, 57–62, 69, 75, 89, 91, 93, 95, 103–7, 111–12, 144 postcolonial Asian Gothic, 43 postcolonial bildungsroman, 93, 103, 105, 107 postcolonial haunting, 42, 62 postcolonial horror, 17, 42 postcolonial spaces, 25, 28, 30 postcolonial violence, 13, 41, 43 postcolony, 9–11, 18, 90 postmemories, 95 Purkayastha, Anindya, 45 Rajan, Rajeshwari Sundar, 128 Ramdas, Shiv, 42 Rather, Feroz, 8, 17, 41–46, 48–55 Rather, Mohd Nagin, 112 Raw Mango, 117–18, 118, 121 Red Blizzard in Kashmir, Women in Focus II, 138, 139 referentiality, 60 refugee subject, 106 representation, 3–5, 7, 9–14, 18–20, 21n5, 23, 32, 53, 57, 69, 73, 75, 79, 81–82, 88, 90, 99, 112–14, 117–19, 122, 124–25, 127–30, 133, 139–40, 140n1, 145 repressed, 42, 62, 64, 67, 69 resistance, 3, 6–7, 10, 12–15, 17–20, 33–34, 39n10, 43, 50, 54, 58, 62, 65, 73, 89–91, 93–94, 104, 107–9, 111, 115, 118–19, 122, 125–29, 131, 133, 137–38, 143

159

Rigney, Ann, 95 Rizwan, Rakshan, 7, 98–99, 102; Kashmiri Life Narratives, 7, 99, 102; life narratives, 19, 99; visual cosmopolitanism, 102 Rollo, Toby, 82 romance novel, 18, 73 Rony, Fatima Tobing, 5 Roohdaar, 60, 61, 64–66, 69 Rothberg, Michael, 16–17 Rushdie, Salman, 13–14, 21n6 Salmona, Rogelio, 97 Schleiermacher, Frederick, 104 Schmitt, Carl, 27 Schofield, Victoria, 38 Schwartz, Margaret, 32; An Iconography of the Flesh, 32; iconography of the flesh, 32 Scott, James, 119, 128 Sen, Amrita, 59–60, 68 Seneca, 60, 71n12 Shakespeare, William, 18, 57–61, 67– 69, 70n5, 71n12 Shankar, Subramanian, 18, 75, 91 Sharpe, Jenny, 80–81; Allegories of Empire, 80 shawl, 3, 74, 77, 79, 81, 83–88, 90, 96–98, 102 Sheikh, Nilima, 133, 141n9 shikara, 77, 120, 135 Sikh, 3, 89 silence, 36, 64, 67, 69, 90, 111, 118–19, 121, 140 Silencing Human Rights, 118 simple absence, 140 Singh, Maharaja Gulab, 84, 89 social ontology, 53 Social Suffering, 128 Sontag, Susan, 124 Souvenir, 41–45 sovereign, 11, 18, 24, 26–30, 35–37, 58, 60, 64, 130 sovereign subject, 24 spaces of exception, 30 specters, 18, 32, 57–58, 60–61, 67, 69

160

Index

Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty, 15, 138 Sridhar, 93–94, 107 The Stone Thrower, 46 Strauss, Levi, 124, 130 subaltern, 65, 75–79, 94, 128, 138 subaltern power, 65 Summer of 2010, 46–47 syndesis, 93, 97–101, 103, 115 talkie, 59 Telugu folklore, 59 terror, 17, 25, 28–29, 31, 33, 35–38, 42, 62–63, 88, 112, 128 Thomas, Rosie, 9, 18, 73–75, 79–80, 82, 84–85, 87, 90–91 Thorp, Robert, 83; Cashmere Misgovernment, 83 Thugees, 75 The Tiger Ladies, 19, 93, 95–102 trauma, 4, 94–95, 101, 107, 124–26, 130, 132, 139; post-trauma, 94 Treaty of Amritsar, 84 Trüstedt, Katrin, 127–28

Vinthagen, Stellan, 128 violence, 1–3, 5–6, 10–14, 16–18, 20, 21n4, 23–30, 32, 36–38, 41–49, 51–55, 58, 60, 62, 65, 69, 73, 80, 84, 87–88, 91, 93–94, 100–101, 103, 108, 111, 122, 125–28, 131, 133, 135, 138–40, 143–45 visual biopolitics, 5 visual culture, 18, 117–18, 129, 140n1 visual representation, 18, 20, 57, 79, 118, 127, 139, 140n1 Vohra, Paromita, 112 Waheed, Mizra, 8, 13–14, 17, 23, 25– 26, 29–30, 34, 38, 45, 73 Watkins, Nerys, 74, 76–78, 80, 84–85 White, Charles, 85; The Cashmere Shawl: An Eastern Fiction, 85 Whitehead, Andrew, 122 Wolf, Diane, 95 Woolf, Virginia, 85; Mrs. Dalloway, 85; Night and Day, 85 Younghusband, Francis Edward, 78–79

Ubbot, Vibhuti, 125; Women in Kashmir’s Conflict Zone, 125 Ud Din, Kawal, 4 UNESCO, 113 unhomed subject, 105–6 Urdu, 39n8, 59, 64, 66, 110 Verdery, Katherine, 32–33; The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, 32 Victorian, 59

Zahra, Masrat, 129–33, 136, 139; A Photograph on Kashmir, 132, 132; Strife: A Photo Essay, 131, 131, 133 Zia, Ather, 3, 9–10, 65, 126–27; Resisting Disappearance, 10, 65, 126 zombie, 28, 66 Zooni Kashmir Campaign, 120 Zutshi, Chitralekha, 38n4, 84–86

About the Author

Amrita Ghosh is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests are postcolonial literature, South Asian literature and film, cultural studies, borderland conflict zones and Partition studies. She has previously researched and taught in Sweden, and she is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning (2022), Refiguring Global Challenges (2023) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (2012). Ghosh is the co-founder editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary and cultural magazine.

161