Kashmir’s Necropolis is 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 two postcolonial nations. This book is invested in asking a 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.
Amrita Ghosh
Kashmir’s Necropolis: Literary, Visual and Cultural Texts
Lexington Books, 2023
The selected works in this book 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. 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.
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 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 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 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 in 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. 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.”
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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 producing a certain imaginary of 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.
Amrita Ghosh is assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Central Florida.