Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan 9780367428006, 9781003005827

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Kashmiri Life Narratives

Kashmiri Life Narratives takes as its central focus writings – memoirs, non-fictional and fictional Bildungsromane – published circa 2008 by Kashmiris/Indians living in the Valley of Kashmir, India or in the diaspora. It offers a new perspective on these works by analyzing them within the framework of human rights discourse and advocacy. Literature has been an important medium for promoting the rights of marginalized Kashmiri subjects within Indian-occupied Kashmir and it has been successful in putting Kashmir back on the global map and in shifting discussions about Kashmir from the political board rooms to the international English-language book market. In discussing human rights advocacy through literature, this book also effects a radical change of perspective by highlighting positive rights (to enjoy certain things) rather than negative ones (to be spared certain things). Kashmiri life narratives deploy a language of pleasure rather than of physical pain to represent the state of having and losing rights. Rakhshan Rizwan is a writer and scholar working at the intersection of creative and scholarly practice. She is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has a PhD in comparative literature. She has been a guest researcher at the Tilburg Law School. Her research interests include human rights and literature, postcolonial novels, decolonial legal fictions, and minority rights and representation. She is author of “Local Flows: The Pleasurecentric Turn in Human Rights Advocacy in South Asia” (Tilburg Law Review, 2017) and “Repudiating the Fathers: Resistance and Writing Back in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator” (Kashmir Lit, 2013). Her poetry pamphlet, “Paisley” (2017) was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Poetry Prize.

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Kashmiri Life Narratives Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan Rakhshan Rizwan

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Rakhshan Rizwan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-42800-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00582-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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Contents



Introduction: The Poet and the Cassette Player

1

1 Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre: Curfewed Night and Our Moon Has Bloodclots as Kashmiri Bildungsromane

51

2 Literary Fiction as an Alternative to a Human Rights Report: The Case of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator86 3 Imagining Local Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Human Rights in Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies123 4 Palatable Fictions: Negotiating Narratives of Consumption and Subalternity in Jaspreet Singh’s Chef158 5 Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché: Strategic Exoticism in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves194 Conclusion/Postscript

230

Index234

Introduction The Poet and the Cassette Player

Then it begins, first with the croak of the worn-out cassette player struggling to read the tape, then a sudden loud harmonious tune, a prelude to the famous wedding song ‘Aakho Shahr-e-Sheerazo.’ People have listened to this before; the young perhaps all their lives on the radio and many older people on the same cassette player since Mahraaze appeared on that starless night at the ghat fifteen years ago . . . He sits down by the cassette player. ‘Get ready now, hold your breath, and be brave.’ All give their full attention now, eyes fixed on the Telefunken and its grave owner and operator. As the approaching dusk casts cold shadows over the group, the houses lapping over the shrine gate, the scene begins to resemble a Muharram gathering, an elegy about to rise into the sky. Everyone is silent. The tape plays smoothly. Someone’s crying in the distance. Then they hear whacks, thuds, slaps, thuds, cracks, the sounds all rolling into one another, each flurry followed by the same stern voice. Then they hear more whimperings. A spell descends on Mahraaze’s congregation. People begin to murmur, then they don’t. Mahraaze raises his hand. ‘There’s more, there’s more. I have captured many voices, my unwise dears, voices that you may or may not hear in your dreams. I have seized them with my own hands and knocked them here. You had better listen now. (Waheed, The Book 116–17) Mirza Waheed is one of Kashmir’s most prominent novelists and this excerpt, taken from his novel The Book of Gold Leaves, which was published in 2014 to critical acclaim, represents a local Kashmiri madman or mott. In the passage above, Mahraaze gathers the residents of the old city around a tape recorder that plays a strange musical score and urges them to pay heed to the voices issuing from it. Mahraaze is described as a “Persian-conversant dervish” (Waheed 99). He is depicted roaming the streets of Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, with a bridegroom’s garland of Indian currency notes round his neck. He delivers spiritually-themed sermons on simplicity and minimal living from the

2  Introduction city square located close to the shrine. Madmen, mystics, and dervishes are an important part of Kashmiri spiritual life and perform an array of different functions, from the sacred to the comic and the banal (Parrey, A Victorious 179). The word mott in the Kashmiri language, Koshur, translates into “mad” and also “mystic” and in a sense, the word captures the different strands of meaning associated with Kashmiri dervishes who are considered to be both mentally ill and spiritually gifted (Parrey 179). A mott is usually a person who is respected for knowing more about “the world than ordinary unsuspecting folk could fathom” (179). Alongside this, it is also “widely known that because his vision soar[s] in spirituality,” the mott is “clumsy in the mundane affairs of life” (179). In defining the public functions performed by Sufi soothsayers in Kashmir, Parrey says that they are sought by members of their community to “have meals with them, to heal the sick, to fix the jobless, to concoct pregnancies, to bless the new-born or to simply drop down alms of wisdom down their pherans” (179). However, in the text quoted in the beginning of the chapter, Mahraaze is more than a poet and a spiritual agent; he is also a witness to the unlawful incarceration and torture of Kashmiri men, who are being detained in the basement of a captured high school that has been transformed into a military outpost by the armed forces. He manages to gain access to the inner precincts of the school-turned-detention-centre and using his outdated cassette player, he records the disembodied voices, pleas, and cries of the young men who are being held in its basement. He saves these soundbites of suffering on an old audio cassette, which originally carries a traditional Kashmiri wedding song, “Aakho Shahre-Sheerazo,” that is sung to instrumental scores of Indian classical music instruments, namely the sarangi and the santoor. This particular song, according to Waheed’s novel, used to be immensely popular among newlyweds residing in the “meadowlands” of the Valley of Kashmir and evoked memories of weddings and marriage festivities (Waheed 118). In Mahraaze’s recording, the melodious vocalization of a well-loved Kashmiri wedding song and its celebratory verses is interrupted by the sombre and splintered tonalities of torture that issue from the mouths of youthful Kashmiri bodies in postures of intense physical pain. Mahraaze manages to record the sound of “whacks, thuds, slaps, thuds, cracks,” sobs, and even screams on his audio cassette (Waheed 117). Mahraaze’s recording is a metaphor for Kashmir itself, the famed pleasures of which have, in the past two decades, been interrupted and overwritten by enunciations and experiences of violence and pain, such that both happiness and suffering now combine to make Kashmir a unique ‘medley of torment.’ Kashmir has been represented as a paradisiacal space since the 17th century, when Moghul emperor Jahangir visited the Valley and famously remarked that “If there is a paradise anywhere on earth, it is here, it is here.” (Hogan 3). Kashmir became a part of the

Introduction 3 European imagination through Lalla Rookh (1817), Thomas Moore’s “Oriental Romance,” which was published during the Romantic period (Kabir, Territory 56; Schimmel 295). Kashmiri shawls functioned as “concrete material manifestations of its beauty and exceptionality . . . which fulfilled the larger concerns of these narratives to educate Victorian Britons about the diverse and varied geography of the British Empire” (Zutshi, “Designed” 429). Adam Geczy writes, “Kashmir and its shawls circulated in the mid-nineteenth-century British imagination with talismanic mystique. Perhaps more than any other article, the Kashmiri shawl also showed that Victorian Britain used commodities to experience and reflect on its empire” (103). In postcolonial India, Kashmir became “a place for honeymooners and lovers” to unwind, enjoy the sights of the place and to experience romance and pleasure (Kabir, Territory 38). Nehru, India’s first prime minister, described Kashmir as a place where “loveliness reigns and an enchantment steals over the senses” (qtd. in Kabir 38). In the 1980s, however, Kashmir started to become a violent and militarized space, and its political destinies began to shift. This is the period represented in The Book of Gold Leaves, a time during which Mahraaze positions himself not only as a Sufi dervish and soothsayer but also as a political activist and a human rights witness. He shares incriminating evidence in the form of recordings with residents of the local neighbourhood, as they assemble at the shrine of a beloved Sufi saint, Shah Hamdan, in order to publicize his ‘findings,’ and to create awareness about the situation. “You had better listen now,” he urges the multitudes of people gathering in downtown Srinagar. Partly resembling a Greek chorus, Mahraaze anticipates and guides the reactions of the audience with regards to the tableau being enacted before them, issuing edicts in the form of “There’s more, there’s more” or “Get ready now” and predicting that they will be traumatized by the voices and will continue to hear these haunted sounds in their dreams. Rather than gathering around the sanctum sanctorum of the shrine, Kashmiris assemble around incriminating evidence in the form of the cassette player, which momentarily becomes the focal point of political debate and spiritual and public life in Srinagar, Kashmir’s summer capital. In times of political volatility and unrest, poets and mystics such as Mahraaze are compelled to take on multiple roles and use creative mechanisms to stage protest and to voice their political concerns. In an instance in the novel, Mahraaze tries to rescue young men who have been abducted from the streets of Srinagar by a monstrous vehicle – known as the Zaal – by chasing it, and later berating this metallic contraption using “a long poem of expletives in a meter reminiscent of the lyric poetry form, shruk” (Waheed 115). Here, Mahraaze uses a traditional form of Kashmiri poetry – the shruk – to protest the presence of patrolling metal invaders in the streets of his city.

4  Introduction The primary thematic concerns of this book can be located in this brief outline of Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves. The representation of Kashmir as a curious matrix of pleasure and pain; the multiple roles taken on by contemporary Kashmiri writers, as journalists, public intellectuals, and human rights activists; the existence of human rights advocacy and activism in Kashmir; the importance of storytelling in bringing human rights issues to light; the emergence of non-violent and cultural idioms of protest in Kashmir; and finally, the role of Kashmiri life narratives, such as The Book of Gold Leaves, in articulating and publicizing Kashmiri lived experiences, in sparking international debate on the issue of Kashmir and in participating in the re-imagination and re-mapping of its political future: these are all the issues that are attended to within the course of this book. These concerns are tied to the central purpose of the book, which has to do with using selected Kashmiri literary works to redefine the generic contours of life narratives that can be used within the field of human rights. In this work, I will offer alternative theorizations and examples of human rights narratives that can operate within both literary and legal practice.

Mapping Kashmir The territory of Jammu and Kashmir is a contested space, often referred to as only ‘Kashmir,’ and divided into Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir (IJK), which includes the Valley of Kashmir, Ladakh and Jammu, and a Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which includes “Azad” Kashmir (AJK) and sparsely populated parts of northern Pakistan (Bose 2). Approximately 10 million Kashmiris reside in Indian-administered Kashmir, and around 3 million in the Pakistan-administered part (Bose 2). The more populous and infrastructurally developed parts of Kashmir lie in India and the majority of the population of Kashmir is concentrated in the Valley of Kashmir, known as the Kashmiri mandala in the local language, Koshur (Kachru, “The Dying” 4; T. Schaffer 2). The Valley of Kashmir is located on the upper Jhelum River and is considered the “heart” of Jammu and Kashmir (T. Schaffer 1). The capital of Kashmir, Srinagar, is also located in the Valley. Inhabitants of the Valley of Kashmir are primarily Koshur-speaking Sunni Muslims, but a large Shia minority resides there as well (Bose 9). In addition, a small Hindu minority also resides in the Valley and are referred to as Kashmiri Pandits (12). They share linguistic, cultural, and social ties with the Kashmiri Muslim community, but often harbour different political opinions (12). The region of Jammu is even more religiously, socially, and ethnically diverse than the Valley of Kashmir (10). Muslims constitute one-third of the population but belong to different ethnicities (10). They are either Rajputs, Gujjars or Bakerwal, and instead of speaking Koshur, speak Gojri and Pahadi (10) The rest of the population of Jammu is made up

Introduction 5 of Sikhs and Hindus, with the latter also divided across class, ethnicity, and caste lines (10). The territory of Ladakh is made up primarily of Buddhists of Tibetan ethnicity (10). The residents of AJK (Azad Jammu and Kashmir) are mostly Punjabi-speaking and are socially and culturally distinct from the Kashmiri Muslims of the Valley and of Jammu (10). The ethnic, social, religious, and cultural heterogeneity explains the “high degree of political fragmentation and complexity” present in Kashmir (10). Azad Kashmir has its own autonomous government, and functions as a state within a state (Steiner). Despite this, Christopher Snedden, the author of The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir, argues that “Pakistanis have influenced all major Azad Kashmir appointments and elections” (125). He maintains that “Islamabad can ‘influence’ Azad Kashmiris through pressure, devolving or withholding largesse . . . or the courts, since Pakistan’s appellate courts are superior to Azad Kashmir’s courts” (126). Due to this, real power continues to lie in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad; a claim supported by the fact that “Azad Kashmiri politicians are increasingly spending more time in ‘Kashmir House’, Islamabad, than in their capital, Muzaffarabad” (126). The present-day conflict has its origins in the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the departure of the British, and the emergence of India and Pakistan as sovereign states in 1947. In Figure 1.1, the solid black line demarcates the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, which was one of the largest of the 562 princely states in the Indian subcontinent (Bose 14). Princely states were monarchical and dynastic territorial units, which were allowed to self-govern in exchange for being loyal to and recognizing the primacy of British colonial control over their territories (14). Following partition, princely states were invited to accede to either of the two newly independent nation states and sign an instrument of accession with them (17). The British advised the rulers of the princely states to base their decision on the “geographical contiguity” of their kingdoms to the two new-fangled countries (Yong and Kudaisya 223). They instructed the monarchs to consult their local populations before making this momentous decision, but the guideline was issued as a general edict and had no binding legal power (223). Local rulers were not compelled by the British to choose a nation-state via a form of democratic consensus or as a response to popular feeling but were left more or less free to choose their fate and the fate of the people they governed. In most cases, the decision to accede was fairly straightforward in light of the geographical location of the princely state and the religious and ethnic affiliations of the prince and the local population. However, in certain circumstances, the choice of accession was fraught with difficulty. The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was one such example. Ruled by a Hindu Dogra king, its population was largely made up of politically

6  Introduction

Figure 1.1 “Kashmir Region” Source: Library of Congress, United States Central Intelligence Agency, 2003. www.loc. gov/item/2003625170/.

and economically disenfranchised Sunni Muslims (Bose 17). To complicate matters further, Jammu and Kashmir was, in principle, “territorially contiguous” to both India and Pakistan and these factors made the decision regarding accession a particularly contentious one (Bose 31). It could potentially accede to either India or Pakistan and had geographical, cultural, and linguistic ties to both territories (Yong and Kudaisya 223). As a result of this territorial conundrum, the princely state of Kashmir remained independent for approximately two months after partition following which Hari Singh, the Dogra monarch, officially acceded to India (Schofield xi). Pakistan immediately contested the legality of this accession and hostilities broke out between the two states, until the United Nations officially enforced a ceasefire in 1949 (xi). In the more

Introduction 7 than seventy years that have elapsed since partition, the two countries have fought each other bitterly “on the battlefield and at the negotiating table,” each desirous of incorporating Kashmir within its national borders (xi). Kashmir has a special place within everyday language and discourse in the Indo-Pakistani region. Kashmir was introduced into our Pakistani classrooms as a literal Paradise on Earth, and the fabled beauty of Kashmir, its mountain peaks, scenic slopes, and clear blue lakes continued to exert a powerful grip over my imagination even as an adult. Kashmir became a prelapsarian space that was both real and imagined (Zinck 145). It was the mysterious ‘Beloved’ of Urdu couplets – ghazals – beautiful, alluring but forever unattainable and the desire for it, unrequited. It symbolized the elusive promise of an afterlife; my grandparents constantly talked about dying and being resurrected in a place as picturesque as Kashmir and living their lives surrounded by pastoral beauty and lush splendour. People reiterated that the ‘K’ in Pakistan stood for Kashmir, and that we needed to finish this bizarre game of collecting alphabets and corresponding territories in order to feel secure as a newly “imagined” community (Anderson, Imagined 24). In political discourse, Kashmir was our shah rag, our jugular vein – a visceral metaphor for the relationship between Pakistan and Kashmir, which symbolized closeness, intimacy, and co-dependence. While colouring in the map of Pakistan as a child, our secondary school geography teacher, the disseminator-in-chief in this case of the state’s cartographic desires, instructed us to demarcate Kashmir using a series of parallel lines on Kashmir and to inscribe the words “disputed territory” on top of these lines. The rest of the provinces were to be evenly filled in with bold, solid colours signifying complete, uncontested ownership, dominion, and wholeness. The year was 2001 – (29 years after the Simla Agreement had been signed by Pakistan and India), and the UN ceasefire line had become the de facto border, known as the Line of Control (“The Puzzle”). In our “Pakistan Studies” history books, in our lessons, and on our maps, we continued to include Indian-occupied territories within our national borders, and we continued to hope that the crisscrossing, tenuous, parallel lines would transform into solid colours. This book is not about Pakistan’s cartographic desires but about the personal and political futures that Kashmiris imagine for Kashmir. In this book, I will valourize Kashmiri voices and attempt to bring them to the fore of the discussion on this contested space and its political destiny. The Kashmir dispute, as I have highlighted, has consistently been framed as an “inter-state territorial dispute” between two belligerent, postcolonial nations (Bose 6). In many ways, this framing makes sense because the Kashmiri issue was born in the wake of the Indian subcontinent being violently divided, and the story of Kashmir is a story of competing narrative claims. However, Kashmiris are taking control of and are negotiating

8  Introduction their own destinies and Kashmiri voices are addressing local publics, as well as the world, with a renewed sense of vigour, confidence, and hope. I examine Kashmiri fictional and non-fictional life narratives, which, I argue, perform the work of human rights advocacy and make human rights claims. This work is a pioneering study of Kashmiri literary and autobiographical narratives within the framework of human rights advocacy, practice, and discourse.

Human Rights and Literature The language of human rights is everywhere. Michael Ignatieff famously argued that human rights are the “dominant moral vocabulary in foreign affairs” in the post-cold war world (Ignatieff, “Is the”). “These days it is usually not long,” writes Andrew Clapham, “before a problem is expressed as a human rights issue” (1). For better or for worse, human rights is now the “dominant and fashionable vocabulary for thinking about emancipation” and as such it “crowds out other ways of understanding harm and recompense” (D. Kennedy 115). Human rights have come to “enjoy a near monopoly on emancipatory and utopian discourse in a post-communist and post-industrialist era” (Hoffmann 82). In line with this, Samuel Moyn states that, human rights are a “recognizably utopian program: for the political standards it champions and the emotional passion it inspires, this program draws on the image of a place that has not yet been called into being” (1). An-Naim defines human rights as “moral and political entitlements that are due to all human beings equally, by virtue of their humanity, and without any distinction on such grounds as race, sex, religion, or national origin” (100). Being human is the only prerequisite to claiming and receiving these rights (An-Naim 100). Human rights, according to Jolly, help us envision a human subject who is “protected by the universal jurisdiction of the law of humanity. Everyone can suffer, everyone flourish” (Jolly 6). In line with this, Lynn Hunt writes that “Human rights require three interlocking qualities: rights must be natural (inherent in human beings); equal (the same for everyone); and universal (applicable everywhere)” (20). According to her, these aspects of human rights, such as their naturalness, equality, and universality, initially found “political ­expression . . . in the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789” (21). The American Declaration of Independence proclaimed that “all men are created equal” and as such have “unalienable rights” (Hunt 21). The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, in likeness to this, “incarnated the promise of universal human rights” and declared that “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights” (Hunt 17, 21). In the 1760s, the French coined the expression “rights of man,” (droits de l’homme’) which was distinctive from the English term for rights, namely

Introduction 9 natural rights, insofar as the latter had “too many possible meanings (23–24). By the 1780s, the idea of “the rights of man” had crossed over into the English language as well (24). Two centuries later, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which declared that, “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and Hunt argues that the similarities in language between the French Declaration and the UDHR are noteworthy (17). This ushered in a new era of universal human rights, and the UN website lays out the importance of the UDHR in the following words: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is a milestone document in the history of human rights. Drafted by citizens with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10th December 1948, as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and its nations. It sets out, for the first time, fundamental human rights to be universally protected. (UN General Assembly) As a language, human rights is ‘spoken’ by diverse sets of actors. For laypersons, the invocation of human rights is an ethical and upstanding demand for the curtailment of injustices against human beings (Clapham 1). In fact, there has been a “long-standing contest between human rights lawyers, foundational thinkers of human rights – moral philosophers, anthropologists, historians . . . and simple ‘users’ of the language, on who is the principle owner of the discourse” (Hoffmann 83). In Human Rights and Empire, Costas Douzinas states that human rights language has been “adopted by the right and the left, the north and the south, the state and the pulpit, the minister and the rebel” (33). Human rights language is also invoked and studied in many different fields such as “law, morality, culture, politics, history, sociology, anthropology and religion,” and according to Hoffmann, law, culture and morality are the most relevant ones (Hoffmann 92). For him, human rights are a discursive formation constituted by all three: Human rights can be seen as . . . a discursive formation, made up of several distinct discourses, and itself constituted by a host of actors, practices and institutions, which do not necessarily speak the same dialect (of human rights), yet provide the space within which human rights discourse unfolds. Law, morality and culture are alternatives which cannot be translated into each other, but which are completely equivalent in that they cover the same ‘thing’, if only from different perspectives. That ‘thing’, human rights is a master signified, lurking behind each constitutive paradigm, and yet being signified by all three of them together. (Hoffmann 95)

10  Introduction According to Levy and Sznaider, human rights discourse should be seen as both a “cultural and political force that is significantly reconfiguring the basis of legitimate sovereignty, the scope of political responsibility, and forms of belonging” (5). An-Naim argues that “[t]he concept, content and context of human rights are challenging to self-contained academic disciplines because the very nature of human rights involves human experiences that are too complex and intricate for any discipline to fully understand and work with” (108). He suggests that the universality of human rights demands that the study of human rights extend to different disciplines, and by this token, he considers interdisciplinarity to be “integral to human rights at a conceptual as well as practical level” (98–99). Literary texts are cultural products and could to an extent be subsumed under the “culture” part of the discursive formation of human rights. However, recent scholarship in the field of “human rights and literature” has proposed making space for this emerging interdiscipline, and for analyzing it on its own terms, rather than as yet another facet of cultural production and practice. Two edited books, namely Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (2012) edited by Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, and The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature (2016) edited by Sophia McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore, have been instrumental in defining the bounds of the interdiscipline, probing the conceptual overlaps and contradictions that underline the field, and mapping out fertile areas of academic and scholarly inquiry within it. Goldberg and Moore outline the scope of their edited volume by highlighting the primary focus of their contributors who “share attention to the ways in which literary readings of human rights discourses (fictional, poetic, testimonial, legal, political, economic, journalistic, cinematic) may illuminate both the limitations of those discourses and the imaginative possibilities of alternative frameworks” (3). The 2006 PMLA special issue on “The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics” is also signposted as an important one, in laying out the contours of this nascent field (2). In 2009, the journal Comparative Literature Studies produced a special issue on “Human Rights and Literary Forms” with the aim of elicit[ing] work that explored the relationship between storytelling, literary representation, cultural narratives, and human rights (understood as law, as discourse, and as practice) – that considered the role that literature and the arts have played and continue to play in fostering the ideological scaffolding of rights discourse. (10) ‘Human rights and literature’ is a primarily US-based specialism, the emergence of which was aided by a succinct shift in the “political, social,

Introduction 11 cultural and intellectual landscapes” following September 11th (2). However, according to Joseph Slaughter, “the rise of personal story politics and memoir culture in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with mass movements for decolonization, civil rights, women’s rights and sexual freedoms,” meaning that the ground for the field of ‘human rights and literature’ was laid much earlier than 9/11 (xiii-xiv). Along with this, Slaughter also identifies the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Amnesty International in 1977 as a “dramatic turn to personal stories in the context of human rights struggles” (xiv). Amnesty is responsible for making storytelling central to the business of human rights advocacy insofar as it initiated the process of developing “literary methods for mobilizing public opinion (the personal story) and focusing it on repressive regimes (the mass letterwriting campaign) that themselves depended heavily on paper” (xii). According to Pramod K. Nayar, narratives in the field of rights can be defined as “literary texts where the human subject’s social ontology is eroded, and which therefore implicitly demonstrate how the subject can only develop and grow in conditions that sustain life” (xiii). Joseph Slaughter argues that amongst the different genres of literature, the novel, particularly the Bildungsroman, has been useful in articulating and advocating for the rights of human beings. This genre, as per Slaughter, is particularly effective in the way it “inverts the affirmative rights claim of the idealist genre by publicizing the discrepancy between the rhetoric of liberty, equality and fraternity and the inegalitarian social formations and relations in which that rhetoric is put into practice” (182). Crystal Parikh’s Writing Human Rights focuses on human rights through the “ethical deliberations staged in narratives authored by contemporary American writers of colour,” probing the forms of subjectivities and communities imagined in this strain of minor literature (2). In line with Slaughter, she too elevates the Bildungsroman as a transnationally mobile human rights form that is “endlessly transposable across the globe” and of special relevance to American writers of colour insofar as it is deployed by them to produce the figure of the subject of human rights (21–22). In recent scholarship, James Dawes identifies the US novel of human rights as a genre category that “tells myriad stories” but typically follows “two different kinds of plots: the justice plot or the escape plot” (22). The justice plot, he posits, is related to the detective novel and involves “a narrative of return” in which a human rights atrocity occurs and is subsequently investigated (22–23). On the other hand, the escape plot looks to the picaresque and features a “narrative of departure” in which incremental human rights violations ultimately lead to flight from the damning situation (22–23). The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature dedicates an entire section to the question of generic form in the field of human rights, designating a chapter each to human rights forms such as the slave narrative, oral tradition, poetry, photography,

12  Introduction autobiography, and graphic novels and deconstructs the way in which these genres constrain and contain the story that is being narrated. Human rights regimes are closely related to human rights advocacy. McClennan and Moore even define human rights in terms of their links with advocacy and activism: The concept of human rights is at once an idea, a set of discursive norms, a legal practice, and a political claim; it attaches to a sense of community and to the construction of the victimized other; and it depends on storytelling and on practical political advocacy. (1) Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith establish a link between advocacy campaigns and human rights: In the 1960s, group action and advocacy led to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (1969). In the 1980s, women’s and feminist activism led to the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (1981). In the 1990s, trade union and indigenous advocacy led to the adoption of the International Labour Organization Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1991) and The Draft Declaration on The Rights of Indigenous People (1993). . . . In this evolving culture of rights, personal witnessing plays a central role in the formulation of new rights protections. (Human Rights 16) In other words, human rights advocacy has the ability to dictate and change existing law. If literary life narratives are used as a means of human rights advocacy, then they too effectively have the potential, if not to alter, at least to offer critical commentary on the content and application of types of legislation. Personal stories have the power to question legal regimes that make the emergence of this particular interdiscipline of human rights and literature timelier and more significant.

The Language of Human Rights in Kashmir Kashmiri literature in English highlights the human rights violations that ordinary Kashmiris have had to face in the Valley of Kashmir, especially since the troubled 1990s. I argue that the Kashmiri life narratives discussed in this book are a form of human rights literature that champions the rights of the Kashmiris to universal human rights and dignity. The language of human rights is not alien to Kashmiris. In fact, the emancipatory vocabulary of human rights has been deployed in socio-political discourse in order to legitimize the cause of the Kashmiris and to make

Introduction 13 it more intelligible for wider publics since 1948. Following partition, the UN passed a series of resolutions in an attempt to mediate the Kashmir issue and to offer a resolution for the conflict that has served as a consistent flashpoint between India and Pakistan in the last seven decades (Ahmad). One of the key recommendations made by the United Nations was to suggest the organizing of a UN-administered plebiscite through which the opinion of the people of the state of Jammu and Kashmir on the issue of accession could be ascertained (Schofield xii). With the dawn of the human rights era and the close involvement of the UN in the region, the vocabulary of human rights also entered the Kashmiri public sphere in the late 1940s. The popular demand for azadi (freedom) in Kashmir is frequently translated into a demand for “selfdetermination,” which directly echoes the language of human rights. The right to self-determination is believed to be an “integral element of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms” (UN General Assembly). Even though the United Nations was never successful in resolving the Kashmir issue, or even in terms of offering a sustainable path to long-term reconciliation, the words “United Nations, self-determination and plebiscite . . . are an integral [part] of the Kashmiri political lexicon” (Ahmad). The Kashmiri rapper M.C Kash mentions the promise of plebiscite in his rap ballad I Protest, which went viral in the Valley in 2010: “But when The Blood Spills Over, You’ll Stand An’ Fight / Threads of Deceit Woven around A Word of Plebiscite” (110). This hip hop song highlights the penetration of human rights language into everyday discourse, including musical discourse, and draws attention to its sustained relevance within contemporary Kashmir, particularly amongst educated, English-speaking youth, such as Kash and his Kashmiri fans.

Life Narratives In the Kashmiri literary prose discussed in this book, Kashmiri cultural practitioners also adopt the language of human rights. Different types of conventional literary forms are used to do human rights advocacy and of these, life narratives in particular, have become “one of the most potent vehicles” for performing the work of human rights (Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights 1). Life writing or life narratives are “documents or fragments of documents written out of a life” and include autobiographical forms, oral narratives, testimonies, slave narratives, confessional works and anthropological life histories (Kadar 5, 152). Smith and Watson define “life writing” as a “general term for writing that takes a life, one’s own or another’s, as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical, or explicitly self-referential and therefore autobiographical” (Reading Autobiography 4). John Riqelme argues for broadening the term “life narrative” to include “biographical, autobiographical [and] fictive” texts, particularly

14  Introduction the fictional Bildungsroman, because the latter, according to him, has a special prominence within the “modernist canon of life narrative” (464– 65). Gillian Whitlock also includes fictional texts under the rubric of life narrative but draws a distinction between fictional life narrative such as autobiographical fiction, novels, and Bildungsromane, and ‘non-fictional’ life narrative such as biographies, memoirs, journals, prison narratives, letters, and testimonies (201). Similarly, in this book, I consider both fictional and non-fictional Kashmiri texts as examples of life narrative, with a particular emphasis on fiction and the Bildungsroman. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the coming of age story or Bildungsroman is a sub-genre of the novel, which has the “formative years or spiritual education” of the protagonist, as its central theme (“Bildungsroman”). I will further explicate on the terms Bildung and Bildungsroman in Chapter one of this book. Life narratives have been “contributing directly and indirectly” to different human rights campaigns (Schaffer and Smith, Human Rights 28). The work of human rights advocacy usually involves the “promot[ion] of a cause, principled ideas or norms” and the bringing about of broad “policy changes” with the underlying assumption that the human rights advocate or defender is speaking on behalf of and defending the cause of someone else (Keck and Sinnink 8–9). Human rights advocacy broadly refers to the practice of “speaking out on human rights issues and taking action to improve a situation” (“Advocating for human rights”). Human rights advocates may work for an organization or an NGO but may in principle also be lay members of society. According to the Office of The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), a human rights activist is a professional or a non-professional lay-actor advocating on behalf of a victim of atrocity (“Who is”). Kashmiri writers and human rights activists also use stories to do human rights advocacy, but radically stretch the generic bounds of the types of stories that are typically assumed by scholars to be engaged in the work of drawing attention to human rights violations in troubled areas of the globe. In selected Kashmiri life narratives, human rights violations are plotted into the narrative trajectory of the human subject’s life in order to contextualize the loss of human rights in visceral, descriptive, and evocative terms.

Human Rights and Pleasure In Freudian psychoanalysis, human beings possess, and to an extent, follow “the pleasure principle,” seeking to maximize their pleasure and to avoid sources of pain (Freud 1). Sara Ahmed, in her work The Promise of Happiness, states that, “Happiness is consistently described as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, as being what gives purpose, meaning and order to human life” (1). The US declaration of

Introduction 15 Independence famously lists “life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” as part of the inalienable rights of men (“Declaration”). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) refers to the “enjoyment” of specific kinds of human rights as the entitlement of every individual, regardless of caste, creed, race or nationality (UN General Assembly). The Preamble emphasizes the right of all human beings to “enjoy freedom of speech and belief” (UN General Assembly). In addition to this, Articles 14, 25 and 27 of the UDHR outline the rights of all human beings to different forms of enjoyment. According to these clauses, all human beings should be able to “enjoy asylum from persecution,” “enjoy . . . social protection,” “enjoy the arts” and “the cultural life of the community” (UN General Assembly). The word ‘enjoy’ in the UDHR does not only mean ‘to have’ but is also linked to the notion of enjoyment, pleasure, and gratification. The UDHR seems to make the point, however implicitly, that human rights are enjoyable and that we should all have access to them not only because the possibility of losing them is so unspeakably horrific, but also because having them brings us happiness and makes our lives worth living. Happiness and pleasure appear to be central to the shared human experience and there seems to be a tenable, and yet under-emphasized, relationship between human rights and pleasure. Brian Orend states that “[t]he point and purpose of ethics and justice is to advance overall happiness and well-being among people” (89). Referring to the consequentialist justification for human rights, he argues that societies that respect human rights are societies where human happiness is more in evidence than in societies disrespectful of them. People who live in rights-respecting societies are certainly better off, and generally happier, than those suffering under conditions of rights violations. . . . if people in a society care about their own overall happiness and well-being, they ought to ensure that their own behaviour, and the social institutions they share, respect human rights. In general, we are all better off – have a better and more consistent shot at enjoying life – if we live in a society that respects human rights. (Orend 90) In 2011, the UN passed a resolution titled “Happiness: Towards a Holistic Approach to Development.” The resolution recognizes “the pursuit of happiness as a fundamental human goal” and invites member states to “pursue the elaboration of additional measures that better capture the pursuit of happiness and well-being in development and with a view to guiding their public policies” (“Resolution”). It identifies ‘happiness’ as one of the “Millennium Development Goals” and links it to “economic growth that promotes sustainable development, poverty eradication, happiness, and well-being of all peoples” (“Resolution”). At the

16  Introduction same time, the drafters of the resolution are careful to not establish too close a link between economic development with happiness indicators and the resolution notes that “gross domestic product indicator was not designed to and does not adequately reflect the happiness of people in a country” (“Resolution”). In the spirit of foregrounding the importance of happiness within the human rights paradigm and as a defining goal for the millennium, the UN adopted a separate resolution in 2012, which declared March 20th as the International Day of Happiness. The resolution recognizes “the relevance of happiness and well-being as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world and the importance of their recognition in public policy objectives” (“Resolutions”). These resolutions fall short of formulating a universal human right to happiness but are still successful in highlighting the importance of pleasure and happiness within the existing human rights paradigm. They call for a reassessment of the central goals of human rights regimes, based on the lived experience of human beings across the globe, and also adopt a “consequentialist justification” of human rights (Orend 73). In other words, human rights are important because they make human beings happy and, as such, the promulgation of legislation should be grounded in the protection and enhancement of the happiness and everyday pleasures of human beings. Jennifer Oriel argues that “Within the growing international discourse of sexual rights, it is increasingly recommended that sexual pleasure should be recognized as a human right” (392). Here, pleasure within a human rights framework is posited as the human right to sexual fulfilment, rather than as a more generalized and holistic notion of personal happiness and enjoyment. “Sexual equality,” she states, “has been included as a theoretical goal because it is essential to the meaningful expression of human rights” (393). She draws attention to the work of a North African advocacy organization, HERA (Health, Empowerment, Rights and Accountability), which draws a clear link between human rights, sexuality, and pleasure: Sexual rights are a fundamental element of human rights. They encompass the right to experience pleasurable sexuality, which is essential in and of itself, and, at the same time, is a fundamental vehicle of communication and love between people. Sexual rights include the right to liberty and autonomy in the responsible exercise of sexuality. (393–94) According to Oriel, HERA places “sexual rights firmly within the scope of international feminist and human rights activism” by recognizing the importance of sexual pleasure within the human rights vision (394). Within the UDHR, we have observed that there is a recognition of the

Introduction 17 human need to seek pleasure, and the centrality of pleasure and happiness. UN resolutions adopted around 2011 also highlight the growing tendency to articulate human rights vis-à-vis their ability to induce pleasure and happiness. The inclusion of sexual pleasure as a human right further signals the foregrounding of pleasure and enjoyment in the way that human rights are articulated and enshrined. But can we observe an equivalent turn towards happiness and pleasure, as organizing principles, in the realm of human rights advocacy, in the way that human rights are discussed, promoted, and protected around the globe? Human rights stories, according to Schaffer and Smith, can generate “embodied pain, shame, distress, anguish, humiliation, anger, rage, fear and terror” in both the narrators and listeners (Human Rights 6). However, I propose that human rights agents may conversely seek to induce pleasure as a means of advancing their advocacy, generating sympathy in their audiences, and creating publicity. I am suggesting that the idea of rights as pleasure and the narration of rights as pleasure within human rights activism needs to be probed, and in accordance with this, there needs to be a re-theorization of the normative definition of rights narratives that are capable of doing advocacy on a global level. In reality the repertoire of stories that can potentially function within human rights frameworks is much more expansive. Stories that deal with pain and trauma, but also happiness and pleasure, could also qualify as part of ‘human rights literature’ and be used for human rights claim-making and for advocating for the rights of victims of atrocity. For Bakhtin, laughter, in medieval times, “was as universal as seriousness; it was directed at the whole world, at history, at all societies, at ideology. It was the world’s second truth extended to everything and from which nothing is taken away” (84). While there is plenty of seriousness in the way scholars characterize human rights literature, there is little room for the type of laughter or enactment of pleasure that reveals a “second truth” (84). Bowditch and Vissicaro, in their edited book Performing Utopia, characterize the body as a “landscape of pleasure and excess” and quoting Bakhtin, advocate for a recognition of the “indestructible joie de vivre” of carnival, which discloses and reveals “a deeper reality” (Bowditch and Vissicaro 11, 142). For them, “beneath the eruption of laughter and the grotesque body exists a more serious engagement with history, race relations, sexual construction and the performance of the self” (11). In this book, I want to draw attention to the joie de vivre of having rights and to highlight how narratives of pleasure can, in effect, be used to foreground the spectre of pain and the loss of human rights entitlements. In her article “On Postcolonial Happiness,” Ananya Kabir probes the place of “happiness within postcolonial discourse” (35). “Theories and analyses of postcolonial subjectivity” she writes, “focus overwhelmingly on the ‘unhappiness effect’: trauma and its after effects, oppression,

18  Introduction displacement and deracination, and pervasive melancholia as the result of long histories of being colonized or colonizing cultures” (35–36). She proposes the “reclaiming of happiness as political, embodied, inclusive and collective pleasures,” particularly within the field of postcolonial discourse (41). Smith and Schaffer highlight how stories told within the normative human rights advocacy context, either in the form of published life narratives or first-person testimonies contained in human rights reports are of a specific nature: [They are] particular kinds of stories [usually] strong, emotive often chronicling degradation, brutalization, exploitation and physical violence; stories that testify to the denial of subjectivity and loss of group identities. Sometimes these stories are told in the immediacy of catastrophic conflict, sometimes only years or decades after the recollected event. Some stories, formerly locked in silence, open wounds and retrigger traumatic feelings once they are told. (Human Rights 4) I propose that we broaden the scholarly definition of ‘human rights literature’ or ‘narratives in the field of human rights’ to include stories that do not only focus on experiences of pain and physical suffering but also happiness and pleasure. Along with this, the types of stories in the forms of first-person testimonies that are included within traditional human rights reports can also be expanded to include stories of interrupted pleasure and happiness. According to Carrie Hamilton, the field of cultural memory for example, is dominated by “bad memories (trauma, mourning, melancholia) and bad feelings (guilt, shame, anger)” (65). This is because “the strong influence of the trauma/testimony model has led to an emphasis on the suffering of victims of past catastrophes” (65). In contrast to this, she advocates a turn towards “happy memories” and argues that, “memories of past oppression [need not] necessarily preclude the recollection of happiness and hope” (67). Similarly, stories and life narratives engaged in the work of human rights advocacy can also move beyond the idiom of brutalization and pain and focus on the lived experiences of pleasure or the ‘happy memories’ of human rights victims, to use Carrie Hamilton’s phrase (65). Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, writes about pain’s visceral and allencompassing ability to obliterate human consciousness: The objects of consciousness, from the most expansive to the most intimate, from those that exist in the space at the very limits of vision, to those that exist in the space immediately outside the boundaries of the body, from the Big Dipper down to Spain, and in through the realm of personal memories to the most abiding objects

Introduction 19 of love and belief . . . all in one patient rush are swept through and annihilated. (32) Pain and death are positioned in binary opposition to human consciousness, which manifests itself as the pleasure of “personal memories” and “objects of love and belief” (32). Torture and bodily agony destroy the possibility, and even the memory, of pleasure. Testimonies that focus only on these experiences, in some sense, reinforce and cement the logic of unbearable pain that seeks to erase the lived experiences and personal memories of the human subject. “World, self and voice” argues Scarry, “are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture” (35). She draws attention to a fundamental limitation in the suffering-centred approach to human rights advocacy. By only including stories and testimonies of pain, human rights workers are not sufficiently able to mediate and undo the silence that bodily pain imposes upon the victim. Following Scarry, I argue that narratives that focus only on bodily suffering do not go far enough in re-articulating and restoring the “world, self and voice” of the human subject, which pain sought to destroy, but are only able to describe this process of annihilation. The profound humiliation and dehumanization that a human rights victim suffers as a result of undergoing corporeal torture and pain can only be fully remedied by restoring that subject’s remembrance of events, routines, and lived experiences pertaining to things other than the fact of pain. Being able to recall and narrativize the “most abiding objects of love and belief,” the memory of which became effaced as a result of experiencing agonizing pain, restores the humanness and dignity of victims of atrocity (32). The narratives discussed in this book, I argue, support the case for expanding the generic limits of the stories that can operate in the field of human rights. These texts represent human rights abuses as dramatic interruptions in the everyday routines and joyful pursuits of their protagonists, rather than as de-contextualized acts of physical cruelty and torture. They re-locate pleasure as a thematic concern and a plotting device within stories that are used to publicize human rights violations and protect human rights. Happiness, according to Ahmed, is contagious and can be passed around and tossed back and forth (39). Anna Gibbs, for instance, argues that “Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear – in short communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable type of passion” (“Contagious”). Similarly, the recent Kashmiri narratives mentioned in this book are meant to do more than “open wounds and re-trigger traumatic feelings”; they also invite readers to “catch feelings” of happiness and interrupted happiness, and to participate in the political effort of restoring the human rights and pleasures of Kashmiri subjects.

20  Introduction As such, the Kashmiri stories discussed in this book take us beyond the narrative of victimization and the trope of the “body in pain” that dominates storytelling within human rights advocacy contexts, particularly in human rights reports (Scarry, The Body 47). These narratives are a class of human rights stories that do not exclusively thematize atrocity, corporeal violence, and torture but also aesthetic beauty, lived experience, and sensual pleasures. In the Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Happiness, happiness is defined as a common-sense, lay representation of well-being. The second meaning of this term refers to a so-called hedonic or pleasure-centered aspect of well-being. Flourishing, on the other hand, refers to an aspect of well-being concerned with growth and self-transcendence . . . Well-being itself is an umbrella term for a number of concepts related to human wellness. (David et al. 3) I use the terms ‘enjoyment,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘happiness’ interchangeably throughout the book.

Positive and Negative Rights I posit that the stories that are recognized by scholars as falling within the ambit of ‘human rights literature’ are those that focus on negative human rights instead of positive human rights. Negative rights are defined as the “rights to be left alone” (Cook et. al 152). Negative human rights “entitle individuals to behave as they consider right, without subjection to regulation or control by governmental agencies” (152). On the other hand, positive human rights “depend on governmental or other accommodation and provision beyond an individual’s own resources” (152). They rely on “the duty of governmental or other intervention by affirmative acts to facilitate the enjoyment of rights” (152). Tomuschat draws a distinction between negative and positive human rights on the basis of generation: Human rights of the first generation are negative human rights, or civil liberties, which enjoin states to abstain from interfering with personal freedom. Freedom and security of person or freedom of speech are paradigmatic examples of this class of rights. When referring to human rights of the second generation (or ‘positive’ rights) the speaker has in mind economic, or social rights such as the right to work or the right to social security, which entitle individuals or collectivities to certain goods or social services. (25)

Introduction 21 In general, negative human rights include “classical human rights to life, liberty and property” (Mieth 173). Negative rights are premised on the fact that others do not interfere with, or infringe them, whereas positive human rights demand that certain goods or services are actively provided to the human subject, usually by the state and its institutions (Skoble). I have suggested that only stories that focus on and give voice to the loss or violation of negative human rights, such as the right to be safe from “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile” and to be protected from “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” to quote clauses from the UDHR (UN General Assembly), are recognized as human rights narratives by scholars. However, the UDHR also enshrines our human right to “enjoy” positive rights, such as the right to have access to a vibrant cultural life, or as stated in Article 22, the right to “economic, social and cultural rights” that might be “indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality” (UN General Assembly). It is my argument that Kashmiri cultural practitioners also articulate the importance of positive human rights in their life narratives. Instead of narrativizing the usurpation of negative human rights, the Kashmiri narratives under consideration here explicate and exemplify Kashmiris’ desire for positive rights, including the right to produce and claim “artistic production,” and to “participate in the cultural life of the community” (UN General Assembly). Human rights infringements are not depicted as incidents that only curtail negative rights, but also as incidents that hinder a Kashmiri subject’s access to positive human rights, especially the pleasures and rhythms of everyday agrarian, social, literary, and cultural life in the region. The normative definition of a human rights narrative only permits stories that focus on human rights ­violations – and that too of only negative rights – to qualify as human rights ­literature. I consider this definition to be narrow and exclusionary insofar as stories that narrativize positive rights and/or focus on pleasurable lived experience and “happy memories” are not considered useful for the purpose of making human rights claims. I use Kashmiri life narratives to re-­conceptualize the conventional generic bounds of what qualifies as a human rights narrative. I have chosen to focus on Anglophone life narratives because Englishlanguage prose is emerging as the chosen mode of expression for this upcoming generation of Kashmiri cultural practitioners who make use of the generic conventions of different Anglophone literary genres in order to compose their narratives (Shaftel). The Kashmiri rap artist, M.C Kash, in an interview with the BBC, attested to the strategic adoption of English in the artistic and cultural forms that have emerged from Kashmir in recent years: “English is a universal language. Kashmiris know how they have suffered. So, if I went on to rap about it in Kashmiri, that would be useless” (Kash). By speaking in English, Kashmiris extend their addressees from Koshur-speaking local publics to English-speaking

22  Introduction regional and international publics who have become increasingly responsive and receptive to Kashmiri voices in recent times. Basharat Peer writes that only “Kashmir sees the unedited Kashmir” (“Kashmir Unrest” 44). By writing in English, Kashmiris give those outside Kashmir, who have never travelled there, or even heard of it, a glimpse into the physical and psychosocial topography of this unedited Kashmir. This book focuses on life narratives that are set in the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir and that have been composed by authors of both Kashmiri and Indian origin who either identify as Kashmiri and bear filial ties to the region, or affiliate themselves with Kashmiris while operating outside Kashmir, either in India, or in diaspora in parts of North America and Europe. Authors of the texts considered in this study are categorized not only as ‘Kashmiri’ but ‘Kashmircentric’ since some of the writers under discussion do not share a common Kashmiri ethnicity but nevertheless choose to stand in solidarity with Kashmiri subjects and are part of the cultural effort to shift the narrative and language on Kashmir (Kabir, “Postpastoral”). In this thesis, I choose to retain both ‘Kashmiri’ and ‘Kashmircentric’ as identifying labels to categorize this upcoming generation of writers, human rights activists, artists, and public intellectuals because, in the case of certain writers, the term ‘Kashmiri’ does not adequately encompass their multiple, overlapping identities. This book develops a theoretical framework with which to analyze and classify new strains of writing that are being composed by Kashmiris/ Indians in Kashmir as well as abroad. The list of contemporary Kashmiri narratives includes Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies (2002), Jaspreet Singh’s Seventeen Tomatoes: Tales from Kashmir (2004) and Chef (2012), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2008), Anjum Zamarud Habib’s prison narrative Prisoner No. 100 (2010), Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (2011) and The Book of Gold Leaves (2014), Siddhartha Gigoo’s Garden of Solitude (2011), Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Bloodclots (2013), Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half-Mother (2014) and Scattered Souls (2016), Nitasha Kaul’s Residue (2015), four collections of fictional and non-fictional texts titled, From House to Home: Writings of Kashmiri Pandits in Exile (2015), A Long Dream Home: The Persecution, Exile and Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits (2016) and Of Occupation and Resistance: Writing from Kashmir (2015), Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora (2016), Suvir Kaul’s collection of essays, Of Gardens and Graves (2015) and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). A few of the texts listed above are translations of literary texts originally published in the local languages, Koshur or Urdu. Owing to the success and international visibility of Anglophone Kashmiri life narratives, literary texts in the local languages are also being translated into English and marketed to a local and international readership (Shaftel). Suvir Kaul’s collection of essays, for instance, contains translations of poems which were originally published in the regional vernacular, Koshur.

Introduction 23 Similarly, Zamarud Habib’s prison narrative, originally composed in Urdu, was translated for a wider audience into English by the translator, Sahba Husain (Shaftel). In addition to this, regional Kashmiri poetry is also being translated into English and published by international publishing houses. In 2011 for example, the poems of Kashmiri poet Lal Ded were translated into English and published by Penguin Books and in the following year, the poems of the 17th century Kashmiri poet Tahir Ghana were also translated from local Koshur into the English language and were made available to a broader, regional as well as transnational readership (Shaftel).

Moment of Possibility Since 2008, Kashmiri subjects have also positioned themselves as equal stakeholders in the Kashmir conflict through their participation in intifadastyle street movements and through the composition of literary and cultural works (Parthasarathy). Both these acts of citizen activism and engagement were aimed at making Kashmiri voices prominent and visible in the national as well as the transnational public spheres. Anglophone literary works, many of which were published around 2008, enabled Kashmiri cultural practitioners to shift the discussion on Kashmir from the political boardrooms to the metropolitan, English-speaking book market and allowed ordinary Kashmiris to participate in the process of political opinion and decision-making that impacts the fabric of their everyday existence. This proliferation of new writing from Kashmir is part of the experimentation with cultural modes of resistance that began to dominate the scene since around 2008 (Kak xvii). Alongside creative literature, other forms of artistic expression including films, paintings, digital and installation art, digital novels, rap songs, and online poetry began to re-shape the poetics and politics of resistance in Kashmir during this time (Kak xvi). Poetry, films, visual art and a number of blogs, journals, e-papers, and social networking websites emerged as important means of political and cultural engagement. Sanjay Kak’s Jashn-e-Azadi (2007) or “How we Celebrate Freedom” and Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Last Day (2013) explored the roots of conflict in Kashmir. Kak’s and Gigoo’s artistic output exemplifies the eclecticism and intermediality that characterizes Kashmiri cultural production. Gigoo, for example, composes poetry, prose (of which his novel, The Garden of Solitude, is a prominent example) and essays but has also dabbled in film, whereas Kak alternatively experiments with scholarly and journalistic writing and documentaries. In general, political commentators note that armed militancy in the region has been on the wane since the late 1990s (Shukla). However, young Kashmiris still take up arms against the Indian state, and their anger remains nearly as visceral and acute as it was during the volatile

24  Introduction 1990s when armed insurgency broke out in the Valley (Bose, “The evolution”). The mass popularity of militants, such as Burhan Wani, a youthful HM (Hizb-ul-Mujahideen) militant, who used to have a skilfully managed Facebook page and a sizeable local following, remains a fact to be contended with. Wani’s killing at the hands of the Indian security forces in July 2016 led to widespread demonstrations across Kashmir, and to an outpour of fury and anger (Baweja). Brushes with violence remain a part of the everyday existence of ordinary Kashmiri citizens and disrupt the rhythms and rituals of daily life in the region. Local militants are heralded like folk heroes and they continue to enjoy popular support, sympathy, and adulation from the population (Bukhari). Wani and his group of militants were brazen in their support for militancy, uploading pictures of themselves posing with guns onto their social media accounts (Baweja). These pictures went viral, and according to The Hindustan Times, Wani’s Facebook following is a symptom of the emergence of a “new militant brigade in the region,” which is “embracing the power of social media and is unafraid of revealing its identity” (Baweja). Disappearances, curfews, and crackdowns still characterize life in Kashmir and the armed forces still act with impunity in disciplining and controlling Kashmiri bodies. Burhan Wani, for instance, was drawn to militancy after his brother Khalid was tortured by Indian security forces and succumbed to his injuries (Baweja). Kashmiris remain “hemmed in by bunkers, curfews and internet bans” and while navigating this matrix of human rights issues, young Kashmiris in particular still feel the lure of a life of militancy (Baweja). Around 60 percent of the population of Kashmir is under the age of thirty, and while the guerrilla warfare is not as intense now as it was in the last two decades, this young demographic remains viscerally angry and politically and socially disenfranchised (Baweja). I argue that the year 2008 marked a moment of possibility, an efflorescence of political expression and cultural resistance in the Valley. This moment is worthy of being unpacked. Since around 2008, alternative forms of engagement and protest, primarily conducted through journalistic, literary, and social media platforms, emerged as a means of resisting and speaking out against the draconian policies of the Indian state in Kashmir and of drawing attention to the human rights abuses being systematically perpetrated in the region. Basharat Peer, the acclaimed Kashmiri writer and journalist, while speaking in 2011 at Pakistan’s most prolific literary event, the Karachi Literary Festival, discussed these shifting forms of protest in Kashmir: 1990 was a time when Kashmir didn’t know much [about] what violence really is or what it does to you, as a society [and] as individuals. By 2008, we knew it all too well. We had seen violence; we had done violence. We had violence done to ourselves. So as a people, as

Introduction 25 a society there was a lot of thinking about it. What it does do to you, how far does it take you? (Peer) Kashmiris increasingly began to develop new ways of protesting the Indian state’s excesses in Kashmir and new mechanisms of political, social, and cultural engagement emerged. This resistance seemed to flow out of a growing disillusionment with the efficacy of violence as a form of protest, and weariness with the repercussions of both perpetrating and experiencing violence. As Kashmiri cultural practitioners were writing literary works in English and using the international vocabulary of human rights to articulate their claims, Kashmiri online magazines, such as The Kashmir Walla and literary journals such as Kashmir Lit became populated by poets describing and dissecting the experiences of violence in their everyday lives. In the 2011 edition of Kashmir Lit, a Kashmiri poet named Irtif Lone wrote about the trauma of losing a close friend: “lungs not breathing / Phone rang / Kashmiri music, his favourite song / he wasn’t listening” (Lone). In an interview with the US-based program Democracy Now! Sanjay Kak described the transformation of the Kashmiri resistance movement as “cataclysmic in terms of what we saw on the street.” He explained the significance of these changes in the following words: It was also a moment which was accompanied by an explosion in writing about Kashmir . . . It was obvious to all of us [that] the stonethrowing on the street, the intifada on the street, was accompanied by an intifada of the mind . . . a churning, a release. (Kak) He highlighted how the adoption of new modes of protest by the Kashmiri sang-baz, the stone-throwers, was paralleled by a proliferation of literary and scholarly texts on and about Kashmir. Besides the publication of Kashmiri fictional and non-fictional life narratives, a collection of scholarly essays edited by Kak, titled Until my Freedom Has Come (2011), also contributed to the conversation on the changing poetics of resistance in Kashmir. Another anthology of writings followed suit, bearing the polemical title, Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011), which featured essays by Arundhati Roy and Tariq Ali, advocating the human rights of Kashmiris. According to Pankaj Mishra, there were convergences between the “youth on the streets” and those “with their noses in books” (Mishra 6). In this way, he concurred with Kak’s view, insofar as he observes parallels between the street protests and the intellectual activity unfolding in the region. “Life under political oppression,” Mishra wrote, “has begun to yield, in the slow bitter way it does, a rich and intellectual harvest” (Mishra 6).

26  Introduction Kashmiri bloggers remain active on the blogosphere. According to the Indian news website, The Quint, Kashmir has a “thriving blogging culture” with nearly a hundred bloggers writing from the Valley of Kashmir on a diversity of subjects ranging from local politics, human rights, Kashmiri literature, cultural memory, and Kashmiri cuisine (Rattanpal). Online platforms such as The Kashmir Walla and Kashmir Lit continue to provide local and diasporic Kashmiris with the opportunity of contributing literary and non-literary pieces on issues related to Kashmir. In that sense, both these platforms function as alternative media sources that encourage citizen reporting, enabling political and artistic works which would otherwise be subjected to censorship, to be accessible to the general public. These Kashmiri activists and cultural practitioners are part of an emerging generation of young Kashmiri and Kashmircentric voices who have successfully managed to leverage their stories to both national and transnational publics and make Kashmir part of the global conversation again. The language with which Kashmir is discussed, written about, and narrativized has certainly altered. The emergence of alternative forms of dissent has highlighted the possibility of and the need for a dramatic re-negotiation of the forms and the discursive engagement between Kashmiris and the Indian state. A new generation of Kashmiris is attempting to talk back to the state and provide an outlet to their discontent using different mechanisms, while simultaneously looking to access newer publics who may be sympathetic to their political plight. Cultural forms and practices are still being mobilized as vehicles for garnering political clout in both the regional and transnational public sphere by Kashmiri public intellectuals. In Kashmir, as in other regions of conflict and contestation, “culture and cultural resistance” is now playing a significant role in the “larger struggle” for survival and self-determination regardless of the prevailing state of armed militancy in the region (Harlow 10). Cultural resistance is defined as “the practice of using meanings and symbols, that is, culture, to contest and combat a dominant power, often constructing a different vision of the world in the process” (Duncombe, “Cultural Resistance”). According to some scholars, cultural resistance is considered “political resistance” because politics is “essentially a cultural discourse, a shared set of symbols and meanings, that we all abide by. If this is true, then the rewriting of that discourse – which is essentially what cultural resistance does – is a political act in itself” (Duncombe, Cultural Resistance Reader 6). Recent events suggest that the political situation in Kashmir remains changeable, dynamic and highly unpredictable and as such, the need to dissect the evolving poetics of resistance is especially timely. In August 2019 the Indian government, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and a parliament controlled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), revoked Article 370 and Article 35 (A) of the Indian constitution, which ensured Kashmir’s special status within the Indian constitution and

Introduction 27 allowed for a degree of political autonomy for the territory while placing legal barriers on non-Kashmiris from purchasing property in the state of Jammu and Kashmir (Ratcliffe; Sanghvi). Following the abrogation of these legal protections, the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir was split into two provincial units – Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, 35000 military troops were brought into Kashmir, pro-independence Kashmiri leaders were arrested, or placed under house arrest, and widespread curfew was imposed (Ellis-Petersen; Kanjwal, “India’s”). In predictable and authoritarian fashion, which marks India’s descent into a blatantly (rather than covertly) Hindu-majoritarian state, intent on consuming the Kashmiri geo-body, and with it the inconvenient political aspirations of the Kashmiris, landline and cellular phone services were blocked, and internet services and cable television suspended, thus enforcing a complete communication blackout on the people of Kashmir (Ramachandran and Laskar). As I write this, the curfew has entered its fourth month with no hope of respite on the horizon. Due to the lack of internet connectivity Kashmiris in the Valley have been pulled from WhatsApp, which automatically removes users who have been inactive for a period of 120 days (“Kashmir users”). In response to these draconian measures, Kashmiri public intellectuals have mobilized in the diaspora and are at the forefront of mounting a formidable cultural, intellectual, and epistemological resistance against the Indian occupation of Kashmir, and in making sure that the narrative on Kashmir is informed by voices from the Valley. One of the authors I examine in this book, Mirza Waheed, is part of Stand with Kashmir, a diaspora-driven grassroots organization that is closely allied with the people of Kashmir and committed to bringing about an end to the militarization in the region (“Experts”). In October 2019, the US House Subcommittee on Asia held a historic hearing on human rights in Asia with a special focus on Kashmir, and Nitasha Kaul, a Kashmiri writer and economist, author of the novel Residue, participated as a Kashmir expert at this hearing. In light of these emerging developments, it becomes even more exigent to valourize Kashmiri voices over statist Indian and Pakistani ones and to examine the cultural works of Kashmiri writers who have had a long-standing interest in issues of human and civil rights and representation in Kashmir. Hafsa Kanjwal, in a recent article published on Al-Jazeera, states that the inadvertent effect of India’s revocation of Article 370 has been an internationalization of the Kashmir issue, and its reframing as a global issue rather than an internal, bilateral territorial dispute between India and Pakistan: “Ever since the Indian government revoked the region’s special status on August 5, imposed a communication blockade and precipitated fears of a settler-colonial project, the world’s most militarised zone has been internationalised in an unprecedented way” (Kanjwal, “The day”). The Kashmiri cultural practitioners considered in this

28  Introduction book have been leveraging their Anglophone life narratives to multiple local and transnational publics over the past decade to achieve exactly these ends: to reclaim the narrative on Kashmir beyond divisive and trite nationalisms and meaningfully re-insert it into the transnational political discourse. Their efforts continue to shape the current political climate in which, Kashmir, an invisible conflict, has managed to exercise a stranglehold over the global imagination. Kashmiri writers are engaged participants in their capacity as writers, scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals and it is apparent that Modi’s Hindutva-inspired re-structuring and violent re-imagining of Kashmir and the Muslim body politic will be met with highly nuanced, Kashmiri and Kashmircentric cultural and political engagements and afterlives.

Narratives of Pleasure I posit that Kashmiri cultural works offer narratives of pleasure rather than only ones of victimization and bodily pain in order to articulate human rights violations and to foreground the human experience. I have mentioned that the Kashmiri life narratives discussed in this book perform the work of human rights advocacy and make human rights claims. The promise of human rights is envisioned as unfettered access to localized pleasures and artistic practice; conversely, human rights violations are posited as interruptions in the pleasurable pursuits and self-development of the main subjects of these works. Instead of desiring only the bare minimum legal protections from physical defilement and corporeal harm, marginalized bodies are also represented as wanting micro-pleasures, the recuperation of small, incalculable, and innumerable losses. The emerging generation of Kashmiri artists and activists, to be discussed in this book, also reclaim pleasure as a site of artistic and political action. They have developed narratives of pleasure in order to make human rights claims and to perform the work of human rights advocacy. The Kashmiri narratives discussed in this book advocate for the right of Kashmiris to have access to both positive and negative human rights ranging from a right to be protected from torture, to a right to enjoy works of art and culture. Human rights are shown to be important not only because losing them would lead to atrocities and physical pain but also because having human rights restores happiness and enjoyment in the lives of ordinary Kashmiris. Human rights are posited as particular kinds of pleasures in the narratives treated in this book and the process of claiming human rights is represented as an act of claiming the entitlement to these different pleasures. Lori Allen states that there is a connection between “suffering and political entitlement” within the practice of human rights activism (162). She posits that “representations of suffering” produce a “rights-bearing suffering subject” (162). According to Rosanne Kennedy, “the suffering

Introduction 29 subject is . . . palatable to a Western audience and more likely to generate compassionate responses” (61). In contrast to this, the Kashmiri life narratives considered in this book represent the rights-bearing subject as one who is desirous of happiness and sensitive to any loss in pleasure. In other words, pleasure and enjoyment are re-signified as the affective result of being a rights-bearing body and the loss of pleasure in the life narratives discussed in this book is connected to the loss of specific human rights. The narratives that I consider work under the assumption that pleasure and the desire to seek pleasures, especially ones that are denied to us, is an essential part of the human experience. The idea is that all of us, regardless of our specific national, ethnic, gender, religious, linguistic differences, wish to lead fulfilling and pleasurable lives and to seek out happiness in and through our different pursuits. While our ability to access enjoyment and pleasure may not be equal or equitable – an inequality the works discussed here acknowledge and seek to draw attention to – our desire for pleasure certainly is. This shared striving is what makes us human. My corpus demonstrates that the human at the core of human rights law and discourse is ultimately a pleasure-seeking subject who desires to lead a wholesome and fulfilling life. Gowhar Fazili, a Kashmiri scholar and prominent human rights activist, explores the intrinsic potential and potency of pleasure in staging resistance and claiming human rights, as highlighted in the quotation below: Does resistance necessarily have a direct relationship with suffering and inverse relationship with pleasure and happiness? This is a question that is particularly significant for long drawn resistance movements facing a formidable enemy insensitive to and largely unruffled by the exertions of resistance. The engagement with occupation often involves violent and non-violent struggle. Both demand sacrifices that warrant shunning of such mundane pleasures and opportunities taken for granted by the populations reconciled with power. If the struggle extends over multiple decades, it is bound to generate fatigue and disillusionment especially among those who have not voluntarily committed themselves to the life of endless self-abnegation even while they may desire freedom from occupation. While all people want to be free from the indignity of living under occupation and dominance, human nature puts limits on how far individuals and populations may be willing to stretch themselves in their denial of bodily desires and material pleasures that life has to offer. (Fazili, “Can Happiness”) In these words, there is a recognition of the validity and effectiveness of suffering, and by that token of narratives of suffering, in exposing human rights violations in Kashmir. But Fazili also skilfully suggests that

30  Introduction the staging and public performance of pleasure as a subversive act might counteract and remedy the lethargy of loss. The removal of pleasure as a locus of resistance results in exhaustion on the part of marginalized people hoping to reclaim their human rights. In this situation, Fazili revalourizes the power of “bodily desires and material pleasures” as elements of resistance, and potential tactics for securing one’s human rights (Fazili). In fact, he argues for a shift towards pleasure as a means of resistance and human rights activism and recognizes the political economy of pleasure as a method of fulfilment and resistance amongst human rights workers, scholars, and cultural practitioners in the region. I am proposing a radical move to consider pleasure and happiness as an active means of resistance – such pleasurable experiences and happiness around which the subject populations may rally despite the prevalence of occupation, obliterating it through the process of exclusion and omission. The focus on pleasure and happiness in selected Kashmiri human rights stories seems to be rooted in and routed through narratives of local cosmopolitanism in Kashmir. In other words, the life narratives composed by Kashmiri authors discussed in this book combine the vocabulary of human rights with the language of local Kashmiri cosmopolitanism to create a new language with which to write about the conflict in Kashmir and to articulate their dreams, hopes, and losses.

Cosmopolitanism The term cosmopolitanism is an amalgam of two ancient Greek words namely cosmos meaning ‘world’ and polis meaning ‘city’ and is used to denote a “citizen of the world” (Werbner 3). As the word suggests, a cosmopolite is usually an individual, as opposed to a community, who has been able to create relationships and establish solidarity with groups outside its own ethnic group, caste, nationality or religious community. In other words, a cosmopolite, although rooted within a particular social milieu, is thought to have grafted identities and created affiliative ties beyond “blindly given ties of kinship and country” (Cheah 21). According to Appiah, cosmopolitanism is the “idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship” (xv). The Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces the genealogy of cosmopolitanism to the Greek Cynics, particularly Diogenes, who proclaimed that he was a kosmopolites (a citizen of the world) (Inglis 13). Along with them, the Stoics believed that human beings were part of a universal brotherhood regardless of differences of race, ethnicity or

Introduction 31 religion (Inglis 13). For this reason, Stoic philosophers were of the opinion that political systems should govern the world, instead of only a citystate (Inglis 13). Kant, the German Enlightenment philosopher, is also viewed as an influential figure in developing Western cosmopolitan philosophy (Cheah 2122). In his seminal work Perpetual Peace, Kant argued for the formation of a “league of nations” or a “league of peace (foedus pacificum)” which would strive to “make an end of all wars forever” (Kant 139–40). In addition, it would be responsible for “the maintenance and security of the freedom of the state itself and of other states in league with it” (Kant 140). According to Inglis, this genealogy of the development of cosmopolitan philosophy constitutes a “standard narration” and has been perpetuated by contemporary philosophers like Martha Nussbaum who has made Greek classical philosophy relevant to current discussions of political cosmopolitanism (Inglis 13). Inglis argues that this ‘standard narration’ should be contested and its Eurocentrism exposed (12). The need to re-write Eurocentric histories of cosmopolitanism is also emphasized by Walter Mignolo who argues that European cosmopolitanism should be replaced by “de-colonial cosmopolitanism” and “border thinking” (Mignolo 86). According to Mignolo, border thinking involves the invocation of repressed histories that enable us to “confront Kantian cosmopolitanism grounded in territorial and global linear thinking” (86, 94). In addition to this, cosmopolitanism is no longer viewed as the practice of privileged, intellectual (and usually Western) elites. In light of the theoretical shifts in the discipline of anthropology in the 1990s, “new cosmopolitanisms,” which could be rooted, working class, and non-European as well as community-oriented, were highlighted and brought to the fore (Werbner 2). Pnina Werbner’s book, Anthropology and The New Cosmopolitanism, articulates these lived cosmopolitanisms with a difference that are formed at the margins. These new cosmopolitanisms include “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” “actually existing cosmopolitanism,” “situated cosmopolitanism,” “discrepant cosmopolitanism,” “rooted cosmopolitanism,” “postcolonial cosmopolitanism” or even “Asian” and “African cosmopolitanism” (Agathocleous 455; Werbner 14). The term “vernacular cosmopolitanism” was coined by Homi Bhabha in order to contest Martha Nussbaum’s privileging of Stoic humanism and “universal liberal values . . . above family, ethnic group or nation” (Werbner 17). As a counterpoint to Nussbaum, Bhabha postulated an alternative notion of a “cosmopolitan community” which is “envisaged in marginality (195–96). Werbner takes “vernacular cosmopolitanism” to refer to situated and actually-existing practices of cosmopolitanism, which are part of the lived experiences of particular communities (14). The combination of a modifier with the term cosmopolitanism is meant to negotiate its European etymology and history while also acknowledging the existence of ‘other,’ non-European variants. For instance, there appears

32  Introduction to be a productive tension in the term ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ because, on the one hand, it implies a problematic European history as well as notions of elitism and privilege, while on the other hand, the modifier ‘vernacular’ is suggestive of something more localized and grounded (Agathocleous 455). However, according to some critics, the combination of the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ with politically appropriate modifiers has less to do with creating a productive tension and more to do with sidestepping the historical baggage associated with the concept (455). Werbner dismisses the claim that adding a modifier to the word cosmopolitanism is a method of evading its historical origins. Instead she argues that discrepant cosmopolitanisms render the classical and Kantian origins of cosmopolitan discourse relevant again and compel scholars to tease out “what it means to be cosmopolitan at the turn of the twenty-first century.” (15). Furthermore, she argues compellingly that cosmopolitanism is always rooted within a particular socio-cultural milieu (Werbner 13). In other words, she posits that although cosmopolitan discourses need to be decolonized, it is possible, and indeed necessary, to view even the universalist message of Western cosmopolitan discourses as the product of local realities and vocabularies (Werbner 13). The ‘cosmopolitanism in ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ should not be viewed as a semantically stable object, evocative of a hegemonic universalism. Instead of viewing ‘cosmopolitanism’ as the hegemonic binary of ‘vernacular,’ Werbner states that it should be seen as yet another form of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism,’ which is situated in a particular geographical location and conceived of during a specific historical period. Pollock et. al propose to “provincialize cosmopolitanism” by seeking “cosmopolitan genealogies from the non-Christian Sanskrit world” (6). Gurminder Bhambra summarizes attempts by Pollock et. al to provincialize cosmopolitanism as a way to “decentre Europe in our considerations” (323). Following on from this, we see that cosmopolitanism ‘proper’ has been conceived within local parameters and is rooted within specific geo-political circumstances and should be considered vernacular in some sense. As such all cosmopolitanisms – even the normative Classical Greek or Kantian variants – are ultimately vernacular evocations of a transcendent notion of global community. Nevertheless, I argue that European variants of cosmopolitanism, which are embedded within a ‘standard narration,’ ” have a currency and a cultural hegemony that is not shared by ‘other,’ non-European articulations of cosmopolitanism and for this reason, it is important to ‘modify’ cosmopolitanism with words such as ‘rooted’ or ‘vernacular’ as a way of engaging with this historical and cultural hegemony. Moreover, I concur with Pollock, who argues that the word cosmopolitanism has decidedly Greek linguistic roots so as long as the term cosmopolitanism is used to describe a kind of transcendent identity, Graeco-European history will always be intertwined with it by way of etymology (Pollock 20).

Introduction 33 Pollock also highlights the linguistic dimension of ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ ” by comparing the “Sanskrit cosmopolis,” a spatial as well as cultural ‘world’ engendered by Sanskrit, with Latinitas, the intellectual ‘world’ of Latin (Pollock 24). The local cosmopolitanism represented in the life narratives discussed in this book is also rooted in language and linguistic use, as I will go on to explore. In addition to this, Necipoglo argues that cosmopolitanism can also have visual aspects and discusses examples of “visual cosmopolitanism” from the Ottoman period (1). I also propose a new term – textured cosmopolitanism – which is meant to capture the collaborative material aspects of cosmopolitanism and to show that cosmopolitanism can also be touchable and palpable (see Chapter 3).

Cosmopolitanism and Kashmiriyat Kashmiris have a word for a notion of local cosmopolitanism, namely Kashmiriyat. For this reason, I will use the terms ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism,’ ‘local cosmopolitanism,’ and ‘Kashmiriyat’ synonymously in this book. In addition to this, I will also use the terms ‘visual cosmopolitanism’ and ‘textured cosmopolitanism’ when analyzing the visual and material aspects of Kashmiriyat. The term Kashmiriyat however has the same problem of theoretical vagueness that accompanies the term cosmopolitanism and is even more of a semantic minefield due to the political implications that ideological deployments of Kashmiriyat have in the region (Aggarwal 227). There is a palimpsest of meanings, narratives, and cultural memories that are associated with the term. ‘Local cosmopolitanism’ is the closest English equivalent of the notion of Kashmiriyat and adequately captures the ideas of cultural syncretism, itinerancy, mobility, pleasure, and openness, which, I argue, are implied by the term Kashmiriyat and are specifically used with reference to Kashmir. Kashmiriyat is an ‘idea’ that “emphasized the unique history of the Kashmiri people, the syncretism of various religious beliefs in the Vale, and the historical peace between different religions and ethnicities in the Vale” (Arakotaram 34). It has been defined as “a sense of Kashmiriness” (Ellis and Khan), a “Kashmiri consciousness” (Ellis and Khan), “the ethos of being Kashmiri” (Aggarwal), a “cosmopolitan affiliation” (Puri), a hybrid religious identity (Sufi), the cultural “unity of Kashmir” (Ellis and Khan), “a doctrine” with religious origins (Lone), a linguistic identity (Kumar), “Kashmiri culture/identity” (Lone), “a distinct cultural identity” (Shauq qtd. in Hassan) and even a “a cultural space within which Vedic Hinduism and Sufi Islam formed an in-between space” (Khan). A considerable amount of critical scholarship has gone into interrogating and defining the term Kashmiriyat in the past and each scholarly engagement with the term generates a unique definition, and in some cases, a distinctive genealogy of Kashmiriyat.

34  Introduction Neil Aggarwal, in an insightful article, argues that the term Kashmiriyat has “slippery semantics” since it is an “empty signifier” (Aggarwal 227). He defines an empty signifier as “a truth beyond representation and falsification which reflects an imaginary rather than actual phenomenon” (231). Aggarwal is of the view that “frequent usage of the term demonstrates its centrality in conversations about Jammu and Kashmir, but the wielders of the term freely adjust its definition for their own purposes” (Aggarwal 227). He draws upon official statements from the Pakistani and Indian government and the Kashmiri APHC (All Parties Hurriyat Conference), news articles, media reports, critical scholarship as well as laypersons in order to map the way that Kashmiriyat, as a term, has been used, contextualized, and disseminated. Aggarwal also highlights the internal inconsistencies that exist within particular narratives of Kashmiriyat as a cultural, religious, and territorial identity. For instance, he states that it is problematic to posit Kashmiriyat as a ‘unique’ cultural exchange between Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims because “other regions of South Asia have also witnessed such exchanges” (Aggarwal 228). Similarly, religious evocations of Kashmiriyat perpetuated by individuals often privilege the influence of one religion (for instance ‘Sufi Islam’) over another religion (for instance Shaivite Hinduism) depending on their ideological position; consequently “no clear consensus exists on whether Kashmiriyat is more deeply rooted in Hinduism or in Islam” (Aggarwal 229). As far as territorial notions of Kashmiriyat are concerned, these often do not take contemporary political and cultural affiliations into account and the way that these affiliations have evolved since the time of partition (229). Most significantly though, Aggarwal’s article shows how discussions of Kashmiriyat evoke ambiguity and fervour regardless of which side of the argument one chooses to align oneself with. Proponents of Kashmiriyat defend its existence using florid language and impassioned rhetoric, whereas detractors of Kashmiriyat cast its very existence into doubt with equivalent zeal and conviction. In addition to this, articulations of Kashmiriyat often involve a suppression of difference and a lack of acknowledgement of the multiple, intra-religious identities that exist in the region (233). This is conclusively summarized in the following sentence: “Kashmiriyat excludes religious minorities within Jammu and Kashmir and ignores the diversity within Hindus and Muslims, standing in as a poor synecdoche for the aspirations of the state’s entire population” (33). Chitralekha Zutshi levels more of the same criticisms at evocations of Kashmiriyat and contests articulations of the concept, which view it as a fossilized historical formation with roots in the 13th century (55). Zutshi states that “To suggest that a Kashmiri identity, Kashmiriyat, defined as a harmonious blending of religious cultures, has somehow remained unchanged and an integral part of Kashmiri history over

Introduction 35 the centuries, is a historical fallacy” (Zutshi 55). For her Kashmiriyat or indeed any “concept of syncretism, particularly as applied to India’s history, was clearly a product of its time and appears to have outlived its usefulness as an academic construct” (311). In Kashmir’s Contested Pasts, she maintains that “Kashmiriyat does not define Kashmir’s past since it was no different than Punjabiat, Bengaliat, and so on, which were merely sub-identities of Indian national identity” (308). At the same time, she cautions against the erasure of hybrid identity formation and cosmopolitan interactions from the history of Kashmir. “Kashmiriyat,” she writes, “is a bankrupt academic concept, but one cannot use its rejection as a means to erase centuries of inter-religious, interregional, and multi-linguistic interactions that have shaped Kashmir in the past and continue to shape it in the present” (Kashmir’s Contested 313). I would argue that contrary to Zutshi’s claims, Kashmiriyat is far from being an outmoded and redundant concept and Zutshi herself acknowledges the existence of a lived Kashmiriyat encompassed by the “centuries of multi-linguistic interactions” she mentions in the claim above. In fact, I posit that the term Kashmiriyat, both as an academic concept and as lived experience cannot be easily jettisoned, as I will demonstrate with reference to my corpus. Kashmiri writers represent “inter-religious and inter-regional . . . interactions” and as such, attempt to tap into the history of Kashmiriyat, which is shown to be bound up with such interactions. They continue to use and explore different, multivalent narratives of Kashmiriyat in their life narratives and these in turn participate in re-mapping and refurbishing Kashmiriyat as both an analytical concept and a lived practice. Like any other regional or national identity claims, Kashmiriyat should not be viewed as an irrefutable historical monolith. As both Zutshi and Aggarwal have shown, Kashmiriyat is neither as stable nor as monolithic as its proponents or even its detractors would have us believe. In keeping with this, in the literary works examined here, Kashmiriyat is not a given, but its semantics, epistemological parameters and political and literary deployments, continue to change and to shift. Moreover, the exploration of Kashmiri cosmopolitanism and identity by Kashmiri authors within works of literature is an act of reclaiming power. It is an assertion of Kashmirihood in the face of institutionalized repression, nihilism, and violence. The Kashmiri writings studied here selectively mine transnational discourses of human rights as well as local narratives of cosmopolitan identity in order to construct multivalent languages and narratives of pleasure that testify to the centrality of pleasure to the human condition. The protagonists and narrators have an overwhelming desire to enjoy the pleasures and rhythms of everyday life in Kashmir. Their demands surpass the need for bodily autonomy and protection from physical harm and extend to access to the types of pleasures and enjoyment that are perhaps not always considered important or significant enough in political conversations on Kashmir and the human rights of Kashmiris.

36  Introduction These include the pleasures of local craft, romantic love, Bollywood films, regional cuisine and, papier mache art, to name a few.

The Metropolitan Book Market The literary network of the international English-speaking book market has become a key space where Kashmiri art and politics are now being discussed and talked about. Stories from Kashmir analyze the allure of radicalization and the beauty of Kashmiri shawls, in the same breath. Kashmiri life narratives are selectively making their way from Kashmir and its diasporas to newer audiences and finding eager allies and sympathetic listeners, as I will go on to explore in the forthcoming chapters. These stories are consequently able to circulate easily in the literary networks of both the national and transnational public sphere and enter into dialogue with a diverse set of English-speaking readers, both at home and abroad. The explosion of Anglophone Kashmiri and Kashmircentric writing, since 2008, needs to be viewed in relation to the growing visibility of South Asian authors on the global literary scene and the heightened interest in “home-grown” South Asian fiction (Foy). Following the publication of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) to critical acclaim, there has been a “new wave of Pakistani writing” that has captured the imagination of an international readership including novels such as Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) and Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) (Kanwal 200). There is a parallel turn towards Anglophone writing in Bangladesh, a country where writing in English was considered a form of national disloyalty until recently. Kaiser Haq, who curated Wasafiri’s special edition on Bangladeshi writing (2015), claimed that “there is a sudden efflorescence after decades” as far as Bangladeshi literature in English is concerned and that this “efflorescence is conspicuous in the field of fictional and nonfictional prose” (7). In recent times, Anglophone writing from the region is being “received and nurtured,” a fact that is indicative of the country’s “growing cultural confidence” and the cementing of its national identity (Akbar and Ahmed 1). South Asian cultural practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of their own positioning not just as national and/or regional subjects, but as global participants in a transnational conversation on identity and rights. The recent blossoming of Kashmiri writing in English is not only a reflection of the growth of cultural resistance in Kashmir but also of the broader, structural transformations that are re-shaping the world of South Asian writing and publishing. Life narratives and postcolonial novels published by an emerging generation of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and now Kashmiris are beginning to carve out their share of the

Introduction 37 metropolitan book market – a market which has thus far been almost exclusively dominated by local and diasporic Indian literary voices – and have become instrumental in the mobilization of regional reading publics as viable consumers of their literary products. While the physical mobility of South Asian citizens is still heavily reliant on the ever-changing strict visa policies in the region, texts in English are able to travel across bitterly contested national borders and mediate political, social, and aesthetic realities for a diverse and politically engaged South Asian reading public. Chitralekha Zutshi argues that Anglophone Kashmiri texts highlight the persistence of a Kashmiri “narrative public” (Kashmir’s Contested 302). She argues that academics working on Kashmir must necessarily engage with these Anglophone literary narratives and the attendant publics they create, if they wish to “remain relevant during, and indeed contribute something beneficial to, this moment of crisis in Kashmir” (Kashmir’s Contested 302). She defines a Kashmiri narrative public as a “socio-cultural network” within which “historical memory was created and maintained in Kashmir” (247). Whereas Zutshi is concerned with the circulation of Kashmiri narrative texts within the Kashmiri public sphere, I am interested in their movement within the wider, national and transnational public sphere as well. For Zutshi, Kashmiri life narratives in English are part of an existing trajectory of Kashmiri stories and oral narratives. However, it is my contention that the life narratives considered in this book strategically weave local narratives of citizenship and cosmopolitanism with global discourses of human rights so as to render them mobile in the national and transnational public sphere. The networks that circulate and disseminate English language Kashmiri texts are not the same as those that distribute literary works composed in regional languages and have a much wider reach than traditional oral storytelling arenas. For these reasons, I argue that selected examples of Kashmiri life narrative are addressed and relevant to different publics, a local Kashmiri public, Indian and Pakistani publics as well as transnational publics. Throughout this work, I will use the term ‘Kashmiri public’ ‘Indian public’ or ‘Pakistani public’ to indicate regional publics instead of Zutshi’s term “Kashmiri narrative public.” According to Michael Warner a public exists by virtue of the fact that “texts can be picked up at different times and different places by otherwise unrelated people” (51). In other words, the movement of narratives is implied within the notion of a public and while Zutshi uses the term ‘narrative public’ to foreground the role played specifically by written and oral narratives, I find the insertion of the word ‘narrative’ redundant as far as the discussion of publics is concerned. Moreover, a public is a “space of discourse” which exists solely by virtue of “being addressed” (50). As Anglophone texts published by international publishing houses, the narratives studied here address readers in South Asia as well as in the wider, English-speaking

38  Introduction world and because of this, they bring a transnational reading public into being. Nancy Fraser argues that the notion of a Habermasian public sphere assumes a “Westphalian frame” in which the public sphere corresponds with a sovereign nation-state whose chief “interlocutors” are “fellow members of a political community with equal rights to participate in political rights” (Fraser 9, 11). This Westphalian frame cannot be seamlessly “scaled up” when speaking of “discursive arenas that overflow the bounds of both nations and states” because certain important assumptions of public sphere theory do not apply in that case (8). The idea of a public sphere is grounded in the “critical theory of democracy” and thus, such a discursive space is based on the notion that “public opinion” can be mobilized as a “political force” (Fraser 8–9). However public opinion generated by the public of a transnational public sphere may not be legitimate or impactful since members of such a ‘public’ are not necessarily national citizens with equal rights and equal access to civil participation. Since the public sphere does not coincide with a sovereign nation-state, the efficacy of public opinion can also be called into question. Kate Nash argues that Fraser’s main contribution to the theorization of the transnational public sphere is that she compels those who invoke such a sphere to unpack exactly who is included in such a ‘public’ (5). Instead of jettisoning the term “transnational public sphere,” Fraser tries to re-formulate public sphere theory and proposes the “all-affected principle” according to which, in a post-Westphalian arena, “public opinion is legitimate if . . . it results from a communicative process in which all potentially affected can participate as peers, regardless of political citizenship” (30–31). Rosanne Kennedy analyses this all-affected principle in the context of the Palestinian conflict and the Goldstone Mission. The Goldstone Mission was a “UN fact-finding mission, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone” and was established in April 2009 to investigate human rights violations in Palestine during the Gaza War in January 2009 (Urquhart). The findings of the mission were published in the form of the Goldstone Report in September 2009 (Urquhart). Kennedy is of the opinion that because of the Goldstone Mission, and the subsequent circulation of the Goldstone Report, stateless Palestinians were able to “participate as peers in a communicative process of making claims of abuses and constructing memories that circulate in the transnational public sphere” (R. Kennedy 73). Through this participation, they positioned themselves not as victims but as “political subjects” able to generate and influence “public opinion about the conflict” and demand that “Israel and indeed ‘the world’ be held accountable” (R. Kennedy 73). In this book, I argue that by successfully circulating their narratives in the national and transnational public sphere, Kashmiri writers and public intellectuals position themselves as political subjects able to articulate and influence public opinion on Kashmir. Kashmiri authors have been

Introduction 39 successful in transforming the prolific English-language book market into a type of “transnational advocacy network” and its locally and globally situated metropolitan readership into a “witnessing public” (Keck and Sikkink 190; McLagan 194). The underlying purpose behind crafting and circulating highly aesthetic human rights stories is not only to participate themselves in the process of political opinion and decisionmaking on and about Kashmir, but also to invite other distantly located actors to do so as well.

Narrative versus Non-Narrative Forms Certainly, this study is not the only one to analyze Anglophone writing from and about Kashmir and its role in shaping narratives of Kashmiri identity. For instance, Manisha Gangahar’s Kashmir’s Narratives of Conflict: Identity Lost in Space and Time (2014) dissects selected Anglophone literary texts and memoirs produced by the post-insurgency generation and the way these works negotiate fraught questions of Kashmiri religious, regional, and national identity and accompanying legacies of Kashmiriyat. However, Gangahar, in likeness to Zutshi, sounds the deathknell for Kashmiriyat. She argues that the conflict that has unfolded in Kashmir over the past seven decades, has resulted in the loss of “Kashmiriyat . . . in space and in time” and the demise of the syncretic culture that bound ethnically and religiously diverse Kashmiris (Gangahar 1). On the contrary, in this book, I argue that Kashmiriyat has a tremendous relevance in the context of current creative literature from Kashmir. It is my view that narratives of syncretic regional identity in a space of violent contestation are being revised and given new political, social, and aesthetic import in the Kashmiri life narratives discussed in this work. Moreover, Gangahar devotes significant space to evaluating the media coverage of the Kashmir conflict over the past decade and as such, Kashmiri literary narratives are not the only or even the most significant focus of her analysis. In contrast, my book focuses primarily on Kashmiri narratives and attempts to analyze and to develop a theoretical framework for these writings. This book builds on the insights which inform Ananya Kabir’s seminal work, Territory of Desire, in which she explores the discursive means with which the territory of Kashmir came to be so “intensely desired” within the Indo-Pakistani imagination and the way in which Kashmiri cultural producers engage with these historical legacies and discourses of desire (15). Kabir’s monograph is primarily involved in exploring the historical roots and the literary and cultural representation of the “Indian desire for the Valley of Kashmir, and Kashmiri responses to that desire,” whereas in this book, I highlight how Kashmiri cultural practitioners attempt to reach beyond India and to mobilize local Pakistani, Kashmiri, and Indian publics as well as transnational reading publics beyond South Asia (1).

40  Introduction Furthermore, Kabir writes that the “heart of the book’s inquiry” is “collective desire” as expressed and mobilized through Bollywood films, colonial, and postcolonial photography and Kashmiri handicraft and the Kashmiri critique of this desire, whereas in this book, I examine how the cultural capital that Kashmir as a territory has gathered since partition is strategically used to create commercially popular, transnationally mobile, gripping stories about Kashmir (23). The narratives examined in this book, are not only interested in critiquing, but also in capitalizing on the Indian desirability of Kashmir in order to create sympathy for Kashmiri political aspirations and the demand for human rights in India and abroad. Kabir’s monograph “advocate[s] the reconciliatory power of non-­ narrative” forms and focuses exclusively on “fragmentary responses to conflict, such as the artwork, the lyric poem, and the poetic documentary,” while this book focuses primarily on narrative responses (22). She consistently aims to valourize “the object over the text, the image over the word, the lyric and the fragment over the linear sequence” (25). Despite her apparent methodological disavowal of narrative forms, she includes close readings of Rushdie’s novels, Shalimar the Clown and Midnight’s Children, Sudha Koul’s memoir, The Tiger Ladies and a translated collection of Kashmiri short stories, Stranger Beside Me in her analysis, which highlights the prominence of narrative forms within Kashmiri cultural production. As mentioned earlier, since the publication of The Territory of Desire in 2009, it has primarily been narrative forms – in particular the Bildungsroman but also the memoir, the prison narrative, the newspaper article, the book chapter, the blog post, the human rights report – which have emerged as the chosen medium for an emerging generation of Kashmiri activists and cultural practitioners in the past few years. The texts considered in this book offer prime examples of fictional and non-fictional works that instead of colluding with Indian and Pakistanis state narratives, write back to them. They create space for disruptive, resonant, and powerful Kashmiri voices. The “upsurge in quality Kashmiri writing in English” to which Claire Chambers drew attention in 2011, and which has continued till the present moment, is a development which took place after the publication of Kabir’s work and, as such, this new body of life writing from and about Kashmir is not accounted for in her work (Chambers, “The Last”). The fundamental aim of this book is to map this emergent terrain of Kashmiri writing and to uncover the relationship between selected examples of narrative and human rights advocacy. Human rights vocabulary is consistently used within Kashmiri life narratives and the latter are also marketed as literature in the service of human rights, as I will go on to demonstrate in the ensuing chapters of this book. Prior to this, Kashmiri cultural production has not been analyzed within the framework of human rights before, and it is this gap that I hope to fill with my work.

Introduction 41

Kashmiri Life Narratives There has been a historical interest in Western prose texts in Kashmir, much before the publication of English language texts by Kashmiri and Kashmircentric authors, and this is highlighted by the fact that several canonical Western literary works are widely read in Kashmir and have also been translated into Koshur, the vernacular language of the region, to be made accessible to the local readership. Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace are examples of non-Kashmiri texts that have been translated from their original language and published in the Koshur language (Kachru, Kashmiri Literature 96). Kashmiri authors had long been experimenting with the English language and its literary forms. For instance, Kashmiri poet Mahjur employed code-switching between Persian, Kashmiri, and English in his satirical, early 20th century poem, Aha ha Kalarki, whereas his contemporary Dina Nath Nadim used the form and stylistic features of Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets to compose his own verses in the vernacular (Kachru, Kashmiri Literature 50, 70). The existing – albeit limited – historical presence of Anglophone writing and Western literary genres in Kashmir before 2008 does not detract from the fact that the blossoming of new Anglophone writing from Kashmir that we observe around 2008 is important and unprecedented in the field of Kashmiri literature in English. It is also useful to note that this work does not aspire to be a comprehensive and exhaustive study of all Anglophone Kashmiri creative literature published in recent years, since that would lie outside its scope. My survey of the field of Anglophone Kashmiri writing demonstrates that new writing is constantly emerging from Kashmir and its attendant Kashmiri diasporas in the West. This book is primarily centred around Mirza Waheed’s novels, The Collaborator (2011) and The Book of Gold Leaves (2014), Jaspreet Singh’s novel, Chef (2012), Rahul Pandita’s memoir, Our Moon has Bloodclots (2013), Basharat Peer’s memoir, Curfewed Night (2010) and Sudha Koul’s memoir, The Tiger Ladies (2002). I also examine non-literary forms of storytelling within human rights frameworks including human rights reports and testimonies. The corpus provides a representative selection of texts across genres insofar as both fictional and non-fictional genres are included. Within fictional genre types, the subgenre of the novel, particularly the coming of age novel or Bildungsroman is especially prominent. The Bildungsroman has its roots in an 8th century German literary tradition, and non-German critics refer to it using English equivalents such as the “apprenticeship novel,” “novel of education” or “novel of development” (Bolaki 20; Boes 241; Lima 3). Bildung refers to the “humanist concept of formation/education” (Stein 24). As far as non-fictional genre types are concerned, the subgenre of the memoir emerges as one of the most important narrative types.

42  Introduction The memoir is a form of non-fictional narrative in which the focus, unlike autobiography, is less on the “author’s developing self” and more on “the people and events that the author has known or witnessed” (Abrams and Harpham 30). Smith and Watson state that ‘memoir’ is a “malleable” term and is increasingly used by “publishing houses to describe various practices and genres of self life writing” (Reading 3). My corpus reflects the religious and ethnic diversity that characterizes Kashmiri writing in general and reflects the cultural hybridity of Kashmir as a geographical region. For example, I include both Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit writers. Gowhar Fazili argues that due to the pervasive presence of violence in Kashmir, there is a lack of accommodation towards divergent and dissenting voices that fall outside the dominant Kashmiri victim narrative (218). For him, the dominant Kashmiri narrative “has a favourable bias towards the masculine, majoritarian identity” whereas other in-between subjectivities and articulations of anger and fear are intentionally suppressed, glossed over, and/or coopted (218). Recently, following the rise of the #MeToo movement in India, women took powerful men to task for sexual harassment and a Kashmiri journalist, Fahad Shah, was also accused of sexual misconduct by his former employees and a Delhi-based female journalist, Rama Dwivedi (Chatterjee). In response to this, academics affiliated with the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective (CKSC) released a decolonial feminist statement, urging Kashmiri scholars, writers, and activists to make space for female victim narratives rather than attempting to silence them, or maligning the accusers to ‘preserve’ the integrity and cohesion of the resistance: Those who support the movement for Azadi must be wary of dismissing women’s complaints and brushing them under the carpet in the name of protecting the resistance. For a due process to take place, it is important that victims be believed, and space is created where women feel that they are able to voice their experiences without censure, stigma, or rebuke. In lieu of this, instead of only or primarily choosing human rights narratives composed by Kashmiri Muslim male authors, I have chosen a broad sample of authors who speak from their own distinctive subject positions and view the politics of Kashmir through their own lens. The authors of the chosen narratives claim multiple identities, besides ‘Kashmiri.’ Sudha Koul, for example, who is a female Kashmiri Pandit author, can also be studied as an Indian-American or Kashmiri-American writer. Similarly, Jaspreet Singh can be categorized as ‘Kashmircentric’ and ‘Canadian-Indian.’ The selected authors represent a range of regional, national, religious, and ethnic allegiances and identities and, as such, their works can, to a significant extent, be considered representative of

Introduction 43 the larger body of Kashmiri writing emerging from the region and its attendant diasporas. I have, in particular, tried to largely focus on works that have been written by the generation of Kashmiris who came of age during the 1990s, when the violence in Kashmir was at its peak, because it is mostly members of this generation who are attempting to change the way in which ordinary Kashmiris engage with the Indian state and organize and conduct political activity in the national and transnational public sphere. Most importantly, every text in the corpus is focused on a different facet of pleasure and human rights. Each of the works I treat in depth in this book brings a different aspect of the interaction between human rights advocacy, narration, and the issue of pleasure into play. The selected texts represent disparate forms of pleasure – material, visual, and culinary – and tackle a range of issues related to the politics of representation and of rights. Altogether the selected texts enable us to analyze different elements of the relationship between human rights advocacy and representations of pleasure. In the first chapter, titled “Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre: Curfewed Night and Our Moon Has Bloodclots as Kashmiri Bildungsromane,” I examine Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night and Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Bloodclots and highlight how these memoirs can both be classified as non-fictional Bildungsromane. In the second chapter, “Literary Fiction as an Alternative to a Human Rights Report: the Case of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator,” I examine human rights reports published by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch as well as local rights groups. I compare and contrast the mode of storytelling in these reports with the form of narrative-making in Mirza Waheed’s novel, The Collaborator. In addition, I look at three South Asian social justice movements, in Kashmir and outside it, to further adumbrate the features of the pleasurecentric mode of doing human rights activism. In Chapter Three, “Imagining Local Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Human Rights in Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies,” I argue that Koul’s memoir attempts to imagine the state of having human rights, especially the right to cultural participation and gives keener form to the elusive figure of the rightsbearing human person. Koul’s memoir elucidates what it means to have the human right to culture and cultural participation, both of which have been enshrined in the UDHR, and within other instruments of international human rights legislation. My main contention is that works such as The Tiger Ladies can be instrumental in allowing legal practitioners to visualize cultural human rights. In Chapter Four, “Palatable Fictions: Negotiating Narratives of Consumption and Subalternity in Jaspreet Singh’s Chef,” I examine Jaspreet Singh’s novel Chef and argue that the novel deploys visually striking and exoticized depictions of food as a way of exemplifying the relationship between human rights, consumption, and pleasure. I argue that Chef uses regional culinary customs primarily

44  Introduction to highlight the differences between the access to pleasure and enjoyment that is on offer to citizens as opposed to ‘subaltern citizens.’ Finally, in the last chapter, “Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché: Strategic Exoticism in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves,” I explore the way in which Kashmiri literary works negotiate their position as commercially viable products, while also attempting to be agents of human rights activism and social justice. Taking Mirza Waheed’s novel The Book of Gold Leaves as a case study, I uncover the assumed audience of this literary work, the way in which they are subtly catered to and acknowledged within the work, and what role, if any, they are invited to play in the complicated matrix of pleasures and pain that characterizes Waheed’s novel and Kashmir as a region. I argue that Waheed’s work uses strategic exoticism in a truly novel way; it deploys this particular literary technique as a rhetorical mechanism for conducting human rights advocacy. Together, these chapters will show the depth of the relationship between human rights and pleasure and demonstrate how narratives of happiness and not just pain can also be effectively used to do the work of advocacy.

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50  Introduction Snedden, Christopher. The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir. Columbia UP, 2012. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature Novels of Transformation. Ohio State UP, 2004. Steiner, Jacob. “Cover Story: The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir by Christopher Snedden.” Dawn, 4 Aug. 2013. www.dawn.com/news/1033395. Tan, Tai Yong, and Gyanesh Kudaisya. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. Routledge, 2005. Tomuschat, Christian. Human Rights: Between Idealism and Realism. Oxford UP, 2014. UN General Assembly. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” United Nations, 1948, www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. Urquhart, Conal. “The Goldstone Report: A History.” The Guardian, 14 Apr. 2011. www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/14/goldstone-reporthistory. Vij, Shivam. “A Former Stone-Pelter in Kashmir Explains What India Should Do to Calm The Valley.” HuffPost, 8 June 2017. www.huffingtonpost.in/ 2017/06/08/a-former-stone-pelter-inkashmir-explains-what-india-should-dot_a_22132401/. Waheed, Mirza. The Book of Gold Leaves. Penguin, 2014. Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture, vol. 14, no. 1, Jan. 2002, pp. 49–90. Google Scholar, doi:10.1215/08992363-14-1-49. Werbner, Pnina. Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives. Berg, 2008. Whitlock, Gillian. Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions. Oxford UP, 2015. “Who Is a Defender.” United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner. www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/SRHRDefenders/Pages/Defender.aspx. Zinck, Pascal. “Kashmir: Maps for Lost Lovers.” The Other India: Narratives of Terror, Communalism and Violence, edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 143–166. Zutshi, Chitralekha. Kashmir’s Contested Pasts Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination. Oxford UP, 2015. Zutshi, Chitralekha. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. Oxford UP, 2004.

1 Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre Curfewed Night and Our Moon Has Bloodclots as Kashmiri Bildungsromane Basharat Peer’s critically acclaimed memoir, Curfewed Night, was published by Random House Publishers in 2008. William Dalrymple, the award-winning author and historian, in a review of Peer’s work for The Guardian, described Curfewed Night as a “minor masterpiece of autobiography and reportage that [would] surely become the classic account of the conflict” and referred to Peer as the “new star of Indian non-fiction” (Dalrymple). According to Dalrymple, prior to the publication of Peer’s memoir, there was a dearth of Anglophone literature on the Kashmir conflict written by authors of Kashmiri origin (Dalrymple). Kamila Shamsie, the acclaimed Pakistani author, had shared a similar view on the significance of Curfewed Night’s place within the Anglophone Kashmiri literary landscape. In her review, also published by The Guardian, she observes that apart from the Anglophone verses of Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, there were hardly any literary works composed by Kashmiris, and lamented the “unwritten books of the Kashmir experience” (Shamsie, “Curfewed”). Here, she borrows a phrase from Curfewed Night itself, which appears in a passage where the author highlights the absence of literary narratives on Kashmir written by Kashmiris. Curfewed Night is the first non-fictional memoir in English composed by a Kashmiri Muslim born and raised in Kashmir. It is also the first literary text written by a writer who belonged to the generation of young Kashmiris who came of age during the volatile 1990s, and it decidedly focuses on the plight and experiences of this particular generation. However, Curfewed Night is not the first Anglophone prose narrative composed by someone of Kashmiri origin. Salman Rushdie is typically classified as a ‘British,’ ‘British-Indian,’ ‘Indian-British,’ and ‘black British’ author but his Kashmiri roots, and his affiliation to Kashmir, are not usually emphasized in the mainstream press. Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) and Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies (2002) are examples of life narratives composed by Kashmiri authors, which appeared a few years prior to Curfewed Night. Authors such as Basharat Peer have been able to successfully mobilize local and transnational publics through their narrative works, to garner

52  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre considerable critical acclaim and to win prestigious literary accolades in the process. In 2008, Peer won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award (“Basharat”). According to the official website of the prize, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie have referred to it as “the veritable Indian version of the Booker Prize” (“About”). Following the success of Curfewed Night in India, Peer’s memoir was published by Simon and Schuster in the US and by Harper Press in the UK. Basharat Peer has since become a familiar and prominent figure in left-liberal circles. According to The Delhi Walla, a popular online blog that documents the dynamic social lives of upper class elite Delhi literati, Peer and his wife – the acclaimed historian Ananya Vajpeyi – are a “power couple” in the Delhi intellectual scene (Soofi). Basharat Peer’s rise to literary prominence and his propulsion into the limelight, particularly in India, can also be partly attributed to his collaboration with Bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj, in producing the screenplay for the film Haider (Bhatia). This screenplay, which Peer co-wrote with Vishal Bhardwaj, is an adaptation of the Shakespearean revenge tragedy Hamlet (Bhatia). It also heavily borrowed plot elements as well as visual and thematic content from Curfewed Night (Bhatia). Bhardwaj approached Peer, a journalist and a writer unacquainted with cinematic work at the time, to work on the script for Haider, after reading Curfewed Night and being considerably moved by the work (Singh). Haider, a film in which Basharat Peer has a silent cameo and plays a traumatized Kashmiri man who refuses to pass through any doorway without requesting to be stopped and searched, was a critical and commercial success that cast Peer into the national spotlight (Bhatia). Despite facing opposition at home in India from right-wing groups, Haider garnered 58 crore rupees at the Indian box office (“Shahid”). Haider went on to win the People’s Choice Award at the Rome Film Festival in 2014. The film, however, was banned in Pakistan by its censor board, on the bizarre grounds that it challenged “the ideology of Pakistan” (Bhatia). On account of the acclaim it received, Curfewed Night, the memoir upon which the film is based, also became a part of the national conversation and was discussed by prominent local Indian newspapers. Peer has participated extensively in literary festivals on both sides of the border and is frequently invited to speak on Kashmir at the Karachi and Lahore Literary Festivals in Pakistan. Curfewed Night also enjoys a critical following in the United States, where Peer has made prominent appearances at events organized by The Asia Society and at the independent news show, Democracy Now. To a lesser but significant extent, Rahul Pandita, the author of Our Moon Has Bloodclots (2013), a memoir published by Random House India a few years after Curfewed Nights, has also managed to make Kashmiri Pandit victim narratives and their competing human rights claims legible and visible, particularly within the Indian public sphere.

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 53 Rahul Pandita is an Indian journalist and writer of Kashmiri Pandit origin whose family was forced to migrate to Jammu and to leave the Kashmir Valley during the turmoil of the late 1990s, a historical episode commonly referred to as “The Pandit Exodus” (Soni). The Hindustan Times commends the “power of the book,” drawing attention to the way in which it “speaks of the pain of fleeing a beloved home, incorporates moving descriptions of rituals specific to the Shaivite Pandits, and weaves in oral histories and snatches of poetry from, among others, Lal Ded and Agha Shahid Ali” (Narayan, Review). Livemint recognized Our Moon has Bloodclots as a “timely memoir” that relates the “often ignored and unfashionable story of the purge of a thriving minority community backed by Islamist militants in Kashmir” (Biswas). However, while Basharat Peer’s memoir was praised for its showcasing of “Kashmiri voices,” Rahul Pandita’s memoir was received as a controversial text and became embroiled in discussions pertaining to its factual authenticity and historical accuracy (“Failing the test”). Somjyoti Mridha criticized Pandita’s memoir for its “selective appropriation of historical facts and events for record and projection” (53). Most of the critical attention that Our Moon has Bloodclots received post-publication was centred on the debate concerning the factuality of its historical claims and the dissection of its problematic representation of the Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandit subjects residing in the Valley of Kashmir at the time of the exodus (Fazili, Our Memories). Kashmiri author and activist Arif Ayaz Parrey raised the issue of the biographical veracity of Our Moon has Bloodclot in a prominent review of the work, published in Kindle Magazine and satirically titled, “The Imaginarium of Rahul Pandita.” In it, Parrey offers a laconic and tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Pandita’s memoir should be classified as a fictional rather than a non-fictional text. His reasons for stating this are manifold but primarily involve Pandita’s perceived distortion of the historical facts pertaining to the insurgency in Kashmir, the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in the mid1990s and his portrayals of Kashmiri Muslim subjects. In this chapter, I want to shift the discussion of Pandita’s text from its viability and authenticity as a historical source to its function as a literary narrative in the service of human rights. Probing the veracity of the historical account that is constructed by Pandita is, in my opinion, an interminable exercise in which historical claims are quickly followed by counter-claims. Instead, it is much more fruitful to probe the way in which Pandita constructs his literary work such that it is able to create and mobilize space for Kashmiri Pandit stories and victim narratives within Kashmiri, Indian, and ultimately, global publics. It is my contention that the two memoirs, Our Moon has Bloodclots and Curfewed Night, despite the obvious differences in their critical reception, are stylistically and formally similar to one another, and that they can also be classified and studied as nonfictional Bildungsromane,

54  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre a prominent form of life narrative. Building on Slaughter, I argue that Our Moon has Bloodclots appropriates the generic conventions of the coming-of-age novel or the Bildungsroman, in order to advance human rights claims on behalf of the Kashmiri Pandit community.

Historical Context Curfewed Night is a memoir that chronicles the coming of age of the narrator Basharat Peer through the politically volatile 1980s and early 1990s, when Kashmir’s national liberation movement took an increasingly unfortunate and violent turn. In the year 1990, there was what Bose terms a “crucial rupture” between the Indian state and Kashmir, as a result of which large parts of Jammu and Kashmir became engulfed in “guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency” (Bose 42). This “rupture” occurred due to the failure of the electoral process in Kashmir, which led to the brewing of anti-state sentiment and anger among the local population (48). Elections in that year were contested by three major parties, the National Conference (NC), the Congress party and the Muslim United Front (MUF) (Bose 48–49). Both the NC and the Congress party were in an alliance while the MUF had popular support and was predicted to sweep the elections (49). The government allegedly fiddled with the results and resorted to electoral rigging on a massive scale to produce results in their favour (49). Kashmiri citizens were forcefully disqualified from voting, voting booths were captured and closed, and the final vote count was manipulated. In the aftermath of these tactics, the NC-Congress alliance won by a landslide, whereas the MUF only managed to secure four seats in the local legislative assembly (49). In response to suspicions of rigging, there was widespread turmoil and the police force deployed high-handed tactics in order to curb the protests, including arresting the MUF’s electoral candidate Yusuf Shah, and his election manager Yasin Malik (49). Sumantra Bose characterizes the 1987 elections as an “atrocious episode of denial and subversion of democratic rights” and holds these elections responsible for the radicalization of young Kashmiris (Bose 49, 98). Denied lawful, democratic, and peaceful means for political participation and dissent, Kashmiris found violent means for releasing their anger (Bose 49, 98). Upon his release from prison, Yusuf Shah fashioned himself a new name, Syed Salahuddin, after a historical Muslim warrior, and became the commander-in-chief of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), the “largest guerrilla force” in Kashmir (50). His former election manager, Yasin Malik, meanwhile became a ‘core member’ of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), another guerrilla outfit which ultimately “launched insurrection in the Valley” shortly afterwards (50). In the year 1990, the rallying cry of azadi [freedom] resonated in the streets of

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 55 Kashmir and the region became enveloped in sustained mass protests. The JKLF and HM, no longer fringe militant elements, gained popular support and approval and spearheaded an armed guerrilla uprising against the Indian state in the Valley (48–50). During this time, young Kashmiri Muslim men enlisted as members of militant outfits in a show of resistance against the policies of the state, and were consequently targeted by the Indian security forces, including being unlawfully arrested and even routinely tortured in an effort to curb the rising tide of defiant militancy (Peer, Kashmir’s). In order to prevent his being targeted by the army or lured by the militants, the young Basharat Peer, the first-person narrator of Curfewed Night, is sent to Aligarh to complete his higher education, in hopes of joining the Indian Civil Services in the footsteps of his father, Ghulam Ahmad Peer. I will use the author’s first name, “Basharat,” when referring to the narrator of Curfewed Night, and his last name, “Peer,” when referring to the author of the memoir. The same principle will be applied to Our Moon has Bloodclots for which I will use the author’s first name, “Rahul,” when referring to the narrator of the work and “Pandita” when mentioning the author. Upon completing his degree, Basharat moves to Delhi to pursue his lifelong dream of being a journalist (67). Kashmir, however, continues to be “the text and subtext” of his public and private life (Peer, Curfewed 67). In Delhi, he discovers “Indias that [he] liked and cared about. Indias that were unlike the militaristic power” that he had experienced in Kashmir (Peer 66). Curfewed Night lucidly captures the tension between Basharat’s sense of detachment from and visceral anger against the Indian state, and a growing sense of national belonging to India and rootedness within India’s vibrant capital, Delhi. In the last part of the memoir, Basharat returns to Kashmir to become a writer, and takes it upon himself to collect and narrate the stories and testimonies of Kashmiri victims of state atrocity. Pandita’s memoir, Our Moon has Bloodclots, treads similar geographies, from the Valley of Kashmir to Jammu and finally to India, but does so from the marginalized subject position of a Kashmiri Pandit man. Kashmiri Pandits were upper-caste Hindus who used to be the primary minority community living in the Valley of Kashmir, prior to the start of the insurgency (Bose 119). According to figures from a 1981 population census, Kashmiri Pandits constituted 4 percent of the Valley of Kashmir’s total population (119). Rahul Pandita is Basharat Peer’s contemporary and belongs to the generation of Kashmiris who entered adolescence during the politically volatile years of the early 1990s. As a member of an upper caste and highly educated Hindu minority residing in the Muslimmajority Valley of Kashmir during a time of popular insurrection, Rahul, along with members of his community, were targeted and ultimately forced to flee their ancestral homes in the Valley.

56  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre In the early 1990s, approximately a hundred thousand Kashmiri Pandits, fearing for their lives and well-being in Kashmir, left the Valley of Kashmir for Jammu and other Indian cities, particularly the capital city, Delhi (Bose 120). While the actual number of Kashmiri Pandits who were a part of this ‘exodus’ remains a matter of dispute, a significantly large portion of the Pandit population was displaced and made to re-locate in refugee camps in Jammu or to live in relative poverty in India (Schofield 198). Pandita’s memoir bears witness to the experiences of persecution and exile that followed the launch of the Kashmiri resistance movement in the Valley, and the final expulsion of the Pandits from their ancestral homes.

The Bildungsroman in Kashmir Jerome Buckley, in Seasons of Youth, offers a canonical definition of the Bildungsroman in which he describes the genre by invoking its plot structure: A child of some sensibility grows up in the country or in a provincial town, where he finds constraints, social and intellectual, placed upon the free imagination. His family, especially his father, proves doggedly hostile to his creative instincts or flights of fancy, antagonistic to his ambitions, and quite impervious to the new ideas he has gained from unprescribed reading. His first schooling, even if not totally inadequate, may be frustrating insofar as it may suggest options not available to him in his present setting. He therefore, sometimes at a quite early age, leaves the repressive atmosphere of home (and also the relative innocence) to make his way independently in the city. There his real “education” begins, not only his preparation for a career but also . . . his direct experience of urban life. . . . By the time he has decided, after painful soul-searching, the sort of accommodation to the modern world he can honestly make, he has left his adolescence behind and entered upon his maturity. His initiation complete, he may then visit his old home to demonstrate by his presence the degree of his success or the wisdom of his choice. (17–18) The plots of Our Moon has Bloodclots and Curfewed Night, as we have observed, involve similar movements: departure from home (Kashmir), to the city (Delhi) and eventual return back to the fold. Typically, Bildungsromane are assumed to be works of fiction, but in the case of Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots, the texts are non-fictional memoirs that have been composed using the generic conventions of the Bildungsroman. Mark Stein states that non-fictional coming-of-age narratives should be categorized and read under the label of “autobiographical narratives

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 57 or testimonies” and argues that a work needs to be fictional to qualify as a Bildungsroman (28). However, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue that non-fictional life-narratives should not be assumed to “come from a life” but are innately “performative” and construct the self by employing literary tropes drawn from diverse genres such as the slave narratives, narratives of political consciousness, and the coming-of-age novel or Bildungsroman (Smith and Watson, The Trouble 356–57). In other words, they suggest that fictional literary genres may, in fact, serve to organize and emplot the personal, non-fictional stories, autobiographical texts, and testimonies of different speaking subjects. Imposing the premise of fictionality on a text in order to let it be classified as a Bildungsroman seems an unnecessary and limiting generic parameter. In practice, as Smith and Watson highlight, there are many formal and technical crossovers between fictional and non-fictional texts, and for this reason, I position Peer and Pandita’s memoirs as examples of non-fictional life narratives, which adapt the genre of the Bildungsroman, in order to construct effective and powerful human rights stories. Rahul Pandita is also the author of the novel Chinar in my Veins, a digital novel that was published electronically in 2002. On his personal webpage, he categorizes Chinar in my Veins as a Bildungsroman, highlighting the fact that he is familiar with this particular literary form, having already composed a literary work that falls within this genre (“about me”). Both Curfewed Night and Our Moon Has Bloodclots contain reading scenes or mise en abyme scenes in which the narrator is shown reading traditional Bildungsromane. These reading scenes are meant to construct ‘literary genealogies’ between the work in question and traditional literary works (Slaughter 32). Rahul Pandita, in Our Moon has Bloodclots, for instance, is shown perusing A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, which is a canonical English Bildungsroman, while in Curfewed Night, Basharat reads Bildungsromane by Charles Dickens, Daniel Defoe, and Rudyard Kipling. The Bildungsroman is a popular genre type within the body of Anglophone literature we see emerging from Kashmir and the Kashmiri diaspora. Claire Chambers refers to a seminal Kashmiri fictional work, The Collaborator, as a “dark take on the Bildungsroman” (Chambers, “The Last”). Peter Morey, in his article on The Collaborator, follows suit and refers to Mirza Waheed’s novel as a Bildungsroman (98). Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015), a Kashmiri graphic novel, has been classified as a Bildungsroman by Gajarawala because of the way it explores the “seductions of youth, the transition to adulthood, first loves, first jobs, the failures and triumph” (Gajarawala). The deployment of the transnational genre of the Bildungsroman becomes a means of drawing in international as well as local audiences who may be familiar with its genre conventions, and its themes of personal development and organic growth. David Vanderwerken states that one of the most “familiar fictional forms” in

58  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre Western literature is “the story of a young man’s initiation into adulthood” (39). In his view, the form of the Bildungsroman or the comingof-age novel “remains rich, inexhaustible and compelling” and this is evidenced by the fact that the Bildungsroman is a “flexible label for hundreds of works that treat a youth’s apprenticeship to life” (39). There are not only English and Irish variants of the Bildungsroman, as Buckley highlights in his prominent study of the genre, Seasons of Youth, but also Canadian, Spanish-American, black British, postcolonial, and feminist reworkings of the genre, a further testament to the sustained popularity and resourcefulness of this genre type within different critical, national, and cultural contexts. The familiar trope of the protagonist as a tortured artist and a social pariah that one encounters in a Bildungsroman might strike a note of familiarity with an English-speaking readership. The literary ubiquity and cultural familiarity of the Bildungsheld as a “young aesthete,” I argue, turns this character type into what Benedict Anderson refers to as a “social type” (Buckley 240; Anderson, “Nationalism” 122). The protagonist-as-troubled-artist can be considered a “social type,” which is part of a “boundless but grounded universal series” or an “unbound seriality” (Buckley 240; Anderson, “Nationalism” 128). Anderson defines “unbound seriality” as a type of collective identity that includes “open-to-the-world plurals” and “quotidian universals” such as “nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats and workers” (“Nationalism” 117, 121). Anderson largely identifies quotidian universals in the arena of global politics, but such universals can also very easily be identified within the rich literary landscape of Western literature. For example, he draws upon examples of indigenous theatre in the Netherlands Indies at the turn of the 19th century, when local performers began to draw inspiration from “travelling Eurasian and European troupes” (“Nationalism” 122). In particular, Shakespearean tragedies were re-enacted and, in these performances, characters such as Shylock are interpreted “quasi-sociologically” (“Nationalism” 122). He elaborates on these performances in the following words: When indigenous players began to stage, for saleable tickets, vernacular versions of The Merchant of Venice, the draw was precisely the easy mystery of the exotic title . . . Shylock, like most characters in such dramas, could not be presented “iconographically.” There was as yet no convention as to how he should look, dress, talk, and move his body. No Jew had ever figured in traditional drama – no moneylenders either. Hence there was no way of playing Shylock, except, quasi- “sociologically”, as a social type or combination of types. The actor . . . required the help of script and rehearsal to be able to present a plausible Jewish usurer, and this plausibility depended on persuading audiences of the “social verisimilitude” of Shylock – in other words,

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 59 his placeability, replaceability too, within such intersecting universal series as cruel moneylenders, doting fathers, and obsessive misers. (“Nationalism” 122) Here Anderson argues that Shylock functioned as a social type that was characterized as a ‘universal series’ of intersecting stock characters such as “cruel moneylenders, doting fathers and obsessive misers” (“Nationalism” 122). In this process, Shylock lost his historical, religious, or ethnic particularity, and instead of functioning as a Jewish subject living in antiSemitic Europe, turns into a “beguiling synecdoche” (“Nationalism” 123). In a similar fashion, the artistically-inclined Bildungsheld functions as a universal character type that can be removed from its original German contextualizing frame and transported into a different cultural and national context. As the character of the artist-as-troubled-protagonist becomes a social type, it loses its original historical identity, but becomes endowed with a different – though no less distinctive – national, religious and ethnic identity, and in that sense, remains quite rooted and located. At the same time, the artistic Bildungsheld is a “social type” that has an international currency and resonance, which enables both local and international readers to identify it, and to sympathize with their sociopolitical predicament (Anderson, “Nationalism” 128).

The Bildungsroman and Human Rights Schaffer, Smith and Slaughter have claimed that there is a historical collusion between the Bildungsroman and the work of human rights, and this provides another explanation of its selection as a generic form by Kashmiri writers. Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith argue that postcolonial Bildungsromane are examples of “published narratives [that] have fuelled and been fuelled by campaigns for human rights” (Human rights 28). The global dominance of human rights vocabulary and the heightened publication of life narratives in the post-cold war era are closely intertwined developments that mirrored and enabled one another (2). Human rights campaigns and life narratives, such as the Bildungsroman, are “multidimensional domains that merge and intersect at critical points, unfolding within and enfolding one another in an ethical relationship” (2). Joseph Slaughter in his seminal monograph Human Rights Inc, places the Bildungsroman at the very core of the international human rights enterprise. Rather than viewing the Bildungsroman as yet another form of life narrative that is used to articulate and advance human rights, he positions the coming-of-age novel as the “novelistic wing” of human rights (25). The novel of development is represented as normalizing the ideological agenda of human rights and delivering its ideals of dignity and human equality to different international reading publics across the globe (25).

60  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre Slaughter’s exposition of the Bildungsroman positions this genre as a literary form that articulates both positive and negative rights. In his work, he highlights how this genre functions as a tool for plotting and representing not only the loss of human rights in the event of an atrocity, but also the pleasure of enjoying and accessing them. For Slaughter, the aim of the Bildungsroman and of human rights discourses, is the “free and full development of the human personality,” as guaranteed by the UDHR (17). As such, in Human Rights Inc he attempts to capture the “image of the person – the moral creature capable of bearing rights and duties – projected by both law and literature” (17). According to Slaughter, a body bearing and enjoying human rights is usually a subject with a fully developed personality, and this state of enfranchisement can only be achieved when the human subject becomes fully integrated within the norms and civic codes of the nation-state (94). In Slaughter’s reading of Goethe’s canonical German Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, the young Wilhelm becomes a rightsbearing subject at the end of his apprenticeship at the Society of the Tower when he also discovers that the orphan boy, Felix, is his biological progeny (101). At the conclusion of his apprenticeship, Wilhelm re-enters society as “the father of Felix and a meister Buerger, a fully incorporated and capacitated citizen of the Society of the Tower, itself a corporate surrogate for a proto-German bourgeois state” (101). As such, a completed Bildung for Slaughter, “describes a civic course of acculturation by which the individual’s impulses for self-expression and fulfilment are . . . normalized within the social parameters . . . of the modern nation-state” (113). In postcolonial Bildungsromane, the successful linear integration of the citizen within the nation-state is often problematized, but despite this, the “state/citizen bind” is still recognized and acknowledged as the “ultimate horizon of individual and collective emancipation” (126). The coming-of-age novel, as adumbrated by Slaughter, offers a means of enfranchising marginalized subjects, and of turning them into productive and rights-bearing members of the national and international community. The curtailment of human rights is not necessarily represented as a violation of the body of the human rights subject, but as the inability to create a sense of “national belonging” within the subject, and to sustain the “state/citizen bind” (134). Within this analytical exposition, human rights atrocities are represented as events, actions, legal instruments and edicts that repress the national public sphere, delimit “public expression” and make it especially difficult for the human subject to freely consume, produce, and circulate personal and political opinions and to fully belong to a national collectivity (178, 183). The coming-of-age novel’s literary reputation as an ally of human rights, an aspect which Sidonie Smith, Kay Schaffer, and Joseph Slaughter single out within their works, helps explain the importance of this particular genre within Kashmiri literature in English. The international

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 61 visibility of the Bildungsroman as a genre category, and its prominent alliance with human rights discourses, make it an attractive literary form for Kashmiri writers. It is also an interesting generic model for Kashmiri cultural practitioners, because as Slaughter highlights, not only does it articulate human rights vis-à-vis the occurrence of human rights atrocities but also has a unique ability to represent the state of bearing and losing rights. In a similar vein, the Kashmiri Bildungsromane considered in this book give space to both negative and positive human rights and in doing so, break the connection between human rights and human rights atrocities. Human rights in Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots are represented as states of pleasure and enjoyment, and the move from childhood to adulthood, which is so pivotal to the genre of the Bildungsroman, is constructed as a significant shift in the narrator’s access to different pleasures. The Bildungsroman documents the phenomenon of transformation in the life of the subject and elegantly captures a state of mutability and flux and flow. In these memoirs, the theme of changeability and transformation is represented as a state of having, and being deprived of, human rights. As such, human rights violations are not envisaged and imagined exclusively as corporeal and bodily events involving violence, physical subversion, and subjugation, but are, in fact, represented in terms of a deprivation of quotidian pleasures. While I subscribe to the view that the Bildungsroman has distinctive potential to perform the work of human rights, as succinctly articulated by Slaughter in Human Rights Inc, I depart significantly from his view that the Bildungsroman constitutes a “wing” of international human rights discourses only. I make the point that the life narratives discussed in this chapter are not just a wing of international human rights discourses that are imposed from the top but are also a corollary of local human rights narratives that are rooted in narratives of Kashmiri cosmopolitanism.

Aesthetic Pleasure in the Bildungsroman Narrative focalization on pleasure in these two Kashmiri life narratives emanates from both the Bildungsroman as a genre type, and local narratives of local cosmopolitanism that are present in the Valley of Kashmir. Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots, albeit written in the non-fictional genre of the memoir, use the generic conventions of a sub-genre of the Bildungsroman, namely a kuenstlerroman or an ‘artist novel,’ insofar as they document the coming of age of an artist. Manfred Engel defines an artist novel as “any novel in which the hero is an artist (and in which, consequently, art is a central subject” (Engel 292). The boundaries between the generic variants of the Bildungsroman, namely the Entwicklungsroman, the Erziehungsroman, and the Kuenstlerroman, are often blurred in the English literary context, where the

62  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre narrativization of notions of Bildung has historically been “far less rigid” (Buckley 13). The protagonist of a Bildungsroman is frequently an artist and consequently, the Bildungsroman is frequently a type of Kuenstlerroman (Buckley 13). Artistic expression, creativity and imagination emerge as significant thematic concerns in the Bildungsroman, and Kashmiri authors tap into the genre’s rich cache of artistic and aesthetic pleasures. It is not a coincidence that the narrators of both Peer and Pandita’s memoirs are young men with an artistic disposition, eager to explore the pleasures of literary creativity and cultural expression. The Bildungsroman is often classified as a “study of the . . . essential temper of the artist in his progress from early childhood through adolescence” (Buckley 13–14). This genre thematizes the Bildung – or the coming of age – of the artist-protagonist. Bildung is a process of growth and maturation that is steeped in and, to an extent, closely connected to notions of aesthetic pleasure, artistic agency, and self-discovery. Malmgren (1987) isolates and identifies the characteristics that recur in the prototypical figure of the artist-protagonist in a traditional Bildungsroman. He hypothesizes that the artist is usually represented as a “marked man” in either a literal or metaphorical sense. In a literal sense, this could be because of their facial physiognomy, “demeanour,” name or mixed parentage, while in a metaphorical sense, this markedness could be the result of unique intellectual abilities and a powerful imagination (7). The narrator of Curfewed Night is a marked man due to his enjoyment of creative literature, his distinctive taste in books and his welldeveloped and varied reading habits, all of which differentiate him from his peers. As a young child, Basharat preferred to read till the late hours of the night rather than to finish the tedious mathematical “sums” his family expected him to solve (Peer, Curfewed 5). He describes his childhood self as a “shy, bookish boy” or a “bookworm” and it is this quality that marks him out from the rest of his classmates (31). According to McWilliams, “all roads lead back to Wilhelm Meister” in Bildungsroman studies, a statement that underscores the historical importance and the sustained invocation of Goethe’s text within the praxis and theoretical analysis of the Bildungsroman (6). Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which theorists of the Bildungsroman consider the blueprint for the genre, features a protagonist who is a highly sensual pleasure-seeker (McWilliams 7). Despite being the son of a prosperous businessman, Wilhelm does not wish to pursue a career as a merchant. Instead he joins a local theatre troupe, develops a romantic relationship with a conventionally beautiful actress named Mariana and devotes himself wholeheartedly to the different facets of theatrical production and performance. He confesses his fondness for the theatre in the following words: “But for me in particular this time was in truth an epoch; my mind turned all its faculties exclusively to the theatre, and my

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 63 highest happiness was in reading, in writing, or in acting plays” (Goethe 28). The theatre is a source of pleasure, youthful love, and sensuality for Wilhelm, who finds himself irrepressibly drawn towards the life of the theatre, despite growing opposition from his family. He becomes infatuated with Mariana during a theatrical performance, as the warm light of the stage shines on her beautiful skin, and she appears to him to be “the loveliest of creatures” (8). In fact, his early inclination towards the theatre was rooted in his attraction towards Mariana, who seemed to him the gatekeeper to the mysterious and forbidden pleasures of aesthetic art and sensuality. This is highlighted in the following passage: [H]is passion for the theatre was closely bound up with this, his first love for a woman. His youth endowed him with its usual power of enjoyment, and this, in his case, was heightened and kept up by a poetical turn of mind. (8) The protagonist remains enamoured with her and with the theatre even when Mariana discovers that she is pregnant. After learning this, Wilhelm concocts an ill-advised plan to run away with her and become part of a travelling theatrical group and only relinquishes his dream of a career in the theatrical arts once he discovers that Mariana had been unfaithful to him. The focus on artistic pursuit and pleasure leads Seeley to conclude that Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship makes “art the one object of life” because Goethe “was himself an artist, and, as the work is in a great degree autobiographical, art naturally comes into the foreground, and the book becomes especially interesting to artists” (194). In Goethe’s work, as in other traditional Bildungsromane after it, the pursuit of pleasure is a significant part of the self-development of the hero but is usually not posited as an end in itself. Typically, in order to complete the process of Bildung and coming of age, the artist-protagonist must forego their idealistic fancies and their blind pursuit of artistic and sensual pleasures. Pleasure-seeking in the Bildungsroman is represented as a formative but essentially short-term activity. The blind pursuit of happiness and aesthetic enjoyment usually serves to highlight the charming naivety of the young artist to the reader, prior to their socialization and integration into bourgeois society. Wilhelm, Goethe’s precocious hero, who as a young man harboured dreams of reforming the German National Theatre, eventually takes his leave from the world of pleasure, playacting, and performance, and embarks on the more serious business of becoming a gentleman, and with that, a well-rounded national citizen. Leaving the pleasurable world of the theatre following betrayal at the hands of his lover, Wilhelm becomes apprenticed at The Society of the

64  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre Tower, a mysterious Masonic lodge comprised of ‘enlightened noblemen,’ and his ‘graduation’ from this Tower ultimately marks the completion of his Bildung (Boes 284). It is his leave-taking from the theatre and, by implication, his disavowal of its pleasures, as well as his apprenticeship at the Society of the Tower, which together enable him to become a socialized human subject in Goethe’s Bildungsroman. In other words, the traditional mould of the Bildungsroman highlights the fact that the personality development of the protagonist can never reach its logical conclusion until they abandon their adolescent meanderings and naïve pleasures and become functioning citizens of the nation-state.

The Bookcase of Kashmiriyat Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots re-valourize the pleasure and pleasure-seeking found within the traditional model of the Bildungsroman. The enjoyment that Rahul and Basharat experience while reading books from their expansive personal libraries is consistently described in these two memoirs. Rahul, the narrator of Our Moon has Bloodclots, also has an avid interest in books and carries a “well-thumbed copy” of Irving Stone’s novel Lust for Life (1934) with him everywhere, a work which is loosely based on the artistic life of the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh. His choice of a novel that overtly focuses on the temperament and trials of an artist foregrounds his own status as an aspiring creative individual. While travelling to Delhi as an exile following his expulsion from the Valley of Kashmir, Rahul carries “two sets of clothes, books” and a copy of Lust for Life, which is indicative of his exceptional love for literature, even in difficult and testing circumstances (Pandita 66). Basharat, who himself aspires to be writer, enjoys literary works by “Hemingway, Orwell, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev” because their writing reminds him of Kashmir. It becomes instrumental in enabling him to develop a language with which to articulate his experiences of growing up in Kashmir in the 1990s (Peer 63). During his time in university, Basharat longs to participate in the Indian literary scene and to become a part of the “book launches, film festivals and theatre workshops” that take place in Delhi (64). In the meantime, he spends long pleasurable hours in the library, reading literary and journalistic works, and searching for interesting works to peruse and purchase in the “fabulous used-book bazaar on Sundays” (65). “Real education” in a Bildungsroman, according to Buckley, is usually gained through “play, travel, nature, adolescent romance [. . .] imaginative reading” (Buckley 17, 232). These activities, which Buckley identifies as being crucial to the development of the protagonist, are also overt sources of pleasure. In identical fashion, travelling and leisurely reading emerge as important aspects of the narrator’s personal fulfilment and development in Curfewed Night.

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 65 In both memoirs, reading fictional literature also becomes a mode of accessing certain ideas and aesthetic emotions that are unavailable to the protagonists in their educational institutions. Rahul is disdainful of the standardized education his Kashmiri Pandit peers aspire to obtain in the Jammu refugee camp school and is profoundly bored by the grind of classrooms and lectures. Consequently, he spends his days reading the literary works of Flaubert, Nietzsche, Chekhov, Camus, and Avtaar Singh Paash. In a similar vein, Basharat finds the environment in school and university claustrophobic and dull. He describes school as “mundane” with a schedule that comprises of “Breakfast. Classes. Lunch. Classes. Football. Cricket. Homework” (Peer 31). Uninterested in sporting activities, he, like Rahul, chooses to spend “long happy hours” in the library (14). Even after he graduates from high school and enters university, he retains a keen interest in his literature classes, while being wary of formal education at the university, which he declares to be an “uninspiring” place (62). In a traditional Bildungsroman, the hero’s inclination for reading creative literature is paralleled by a distaste for the kind of formal education that is imparted in an academic institution (Buckley 17). This dislike for school is symbolic of an overarching dislike of authority figures (fathers, schoolteachers, headmasters), and is usually the underlying reason for the artist-protagonist’s bout of rebellion and eventual flight from school. In their memoirs, Rahul and Basharat closely adhere to the generic characteristics of a traditional Bildungsheld insofar as they both seek artistic pleasures and intellectual fulfilment outside formal institutions of learning. Rahul’s grandfather in Our Moon has Bloodclots also believes in the value of the experiential and the aesthetic in the development of the subject, and as such, he makes his young grandson sit under an apple tree in their back garden, and recite a paean in praise of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of knowledge and wisdom, before beginning his lessons. The elderly patriarch is unlike the strict, narrow-minded male figure that a reader may be accustomed to encountering in a traditional Bildungsroman. Rahul’s grandfather teaches his adolescent grandson to chant a soulful prayer, in order to prepare his mind for the pursuit of learning: “Vidyam deehe Saraswati . . . Oh Goddess of Learning, grant me knowledge” (343). Encouraging his grandson to read vociferously, to experience the great outdoors, Rahul’s grandfather promotes the traditional idea of Bildung as “self-education” and “growing up and gradual selfdiscovery in the school-without-walls that is experience” (Buckley viii). Implicit in this pragmatic and experiential model of learning is a recognition of pleasure, outdoor play and imaginative reading in the formation and growth of the human subject. Rahul’s ancestral home in the Valley of Kashmir is shown to have an eclectic collection of fictional and non-fictional works including historical treatises, works of religious exegeses, autobiographies and Persian

66  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre and South Asian poetry and prose collections. Many of these have been passed down from one generation to the other: One room in our house was dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Its wooden shelves were lined with books, some of them covered with brown paper. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Arabian Nights. Kalhana’s Rajatarangini. Gandhi’s The Story of my Experiments with Truth. Tagore’s Gitanjali. Phanishwar Nath Renu’s Jaloos. The collected stories of Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto. (373) The bookshelf in Our Moon has Bloodclots functions as an archive, a physical and symbolic embodiment of the cosmopolitan cultural and literary influences that shape regional identity and cultural production in Kashmir. It is a repository of the different cosmopolitan literary works that shape memory, historiography, and lived experience in the region and that have been formative in articulating different notions of Kashmiriyat. Naming the contents of a home library is a recurring strategy used by the Kashmiri authors discussed in this book to unpack the literary and cultural repertoire that has been instrumental in the formation of regional identity in Kashmir, and which also informs their works. Swami Vivekananda, for example, whose works were proudly displayed in Rahul’s bookshelf, was a 19th century Hindu mystic saint. The presence of his works foregrounds the influence of Hindu spirituality within the Kashmiri spiritual, cultural, and social milieu. Works such as Arabian Nights, which contain stories and folktales from Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit sources, emphasize the cultural sway of PersoArabic and Sanskrit historical sources on the vernacular languages and the local culture. Meanwhile, literary works by Munshi Premchand and Manto – both seminal and pioneering figures in Hindi/Urdu ­Literature – highlight the entrenchment of both these languages in Kashmir and emphasize the shared cultural connection of Kashmir with Urdu-speaking and Hindi-speaking parts of Pakistan and India. The inclusion of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini as a staple, cultural ingredient within the literary repertoire of Kashmir invokes the concept of Kashmiriyat. According to Chitralekha Zutshi, the Cultural Academy in Kashmir “chose to sponsor a Kashmiri translation of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini – published in 2005 – to serve as a symbol of Kashmiriyat during a period of heightened religious tension in Kashmir” (304). Rajatarangini, which means “River of Kings,” is a Sanskrit narrative by Kalhana Pandit from 1148 AD and is composed in the Sanskrit kavya style verse form (Zutshi, Translating 6). The historical narrative in Rajatarangini traces the history of Kashmir as a “lake into the mid-twelfth century” and the text has emerged as significant for the “reconstruction of early and medieval Indian history” (6–7).

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 67 The image of the bookcase recurs in Curfewed Night as well, and as Basharat recounts the contents of his father’s library, he puts forward a narrative of Kashmiri cosmopolitanism as a specifically literary phenomenon: Father had built his library over the years. Each book had his name and a book number on the first page in either his scrawly handwriting or in Mother’s neater letters. I had spent long hours in the library. There were great Russian authors in Thick People’s Publishing House hardbacks that were sold in the mobile bookshops run by the Communist Party of India; there were the American and European novelists in slim paperbacks; there were the great Urdu writers Premchand, Manto, Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz. And there were histories, law books, commentaries of politics and religion in South Asia. The most beautiful of my father’s books was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare – a thick edition, leather-bound, with gold-tinted pages. His books were those of a self-taught man, books that had shaped him, helped him build his life; they made him stand out when he talked about worlds and ideas that few men in our world could talk about. Touching their spines, running my fingers along their fonts, feeling the smoothness of their paper and being mesmerized by their stories made me feel closer to Father and that I shared his connection to a magical world. (Peer 42) As before, we encounter Manto and Premchand, but in Basharat’s bookcase the Pakistani socialist poet and dissident, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, is also included. The particularly South Asian ethos of the bookcase is notable, as literary and historical works from both sides of the border are conspicuously well-represented. The image of the bookcases that we encounter in both memoirs could be considered an intertextual reference to the poem, Return to Harmony 3, by Kashmiri-American Anglophone poet, Agha Shahid Ali. In this poem Ali writes of his ancestral home: “On my shelf, by Ritsos and Rilke and Cavafy and Lorca and / Iqbal and Amichai and Paz, my parents are beautiful in their wedding brocades / so startlingly young” (The Country 47). These verses evoke a cosmopolitan selection of literary authors including his personal favourites, Lorca, and celebrated South Asian poet, Muhammad Iqbal. According to Claire Chambers, Shahid Ali had a “cosmopolitan upbringing” and this vivid description of his parents’ literary collection could be an allusion to this, and to the cosmopolitan identity narratives in Kashmir (Chambers, “The Last”). The juxtaposition of the literary works on the shelf with a photograph of the poet’s parents establishes a relationship between the two: it was his parents who introduced him to this eclectic collection of culturally and linguistically diverse texts that inform memory, historiography, and identity in Kashmir. In an interview with Tehelka, Agha Shahid Ali recalled

68  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre how his mother, Sufia Nomani, exposed him to Sufi poetry and ghazals, whereas his father, Agha Ashraf Ali, introduced him to Western writers and philosophers. Sufia, who came from Radauli and Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh, infused the love of South Asian poetry in him whereas his father, who had been raised with Martin Buber, Marx, and Freud, acquainted his son with their philosophical works (Katyal). In likeness to Peer and Pandita, Shahid Ali also had a childhood in which Urdu, Hindi, Kashmiri, Persian, and Anglophone literary works played a special and distinctive role (Katyal). As in Ali’s poem, the recollection of a bookshelf in Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots becomes a means of uncovering the literary and cultural works that inform cosmopolitan Kashmiri identity. While the Bildungsheld in a traditional coming of age novel is usually only interested in Western literary works and cultural production, the narrators of these memoirs are influenced by a much more diverse, non-Eurocentric selection of texts. The literary pleasures found in the Bildungsroman combine with and are routed through the pleasures of Kashmiriyat.

Kashmiriyat: Multiple Narratives of Pleasure Our Moon has Bloodclots elaborates on the nostalgia evoked by the mention of Shahar, a medieval name for Srinagar, which is still used by former Kashmiri inhabitants of the city. This longing for the pleasures of Shahar is a cloaked and implicit yearning for a Kashmiriyat that has been deferred and denied: [T]hat is the habit my father’s generation has: calling Srinagar ‘Shahar’- the city that is home. And when I gently remind father of his mistake, he smiles an embarrassed smile . . . I can only imagine what images the mere mention of Shahar evokes in him. Shahar was our home. Shahar was our shahrag – our jugular. Shahar was us. In Shahar though, by the age children learned the alphabet, they realized there was an irreversible bitterness between Kashmir and India, and that the minority Pandits were often at the receiving end of the wrath this bitterness evoked. We were the punching bags. But we assimilated noiselessly, and whenever one of us became a victim of selective targeting, the rest of us would lie low, hoping for things to normalize. But Shahar was also about friendships, bonding, compassion, and what the elders called ‘lihaaz’, which, in simple terms, means consideration. (Pandita 453) In the passage above, Kashmiriyat is tied to territory, specifically the ‘summer capital’ of Jammu and Kashmir, Srinagar (“Srinagar”). Simultaneously,

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 69 Kashmiriyat is also related to the cosmopolitan conviviality between Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims as indicated by the presence of “friendships, bonding, compassion” between the two communities. It is also connected to language since only the locals of the region are privy to the word “Shahar” as an alternative to its ‘proper’ name, Srinagar. The use of the vernacular creates a sense of community and cohesion in the linguistic in-group and separates the language insiders from the outsiders (Moscatelli et al. 757). Kashmiriyat is also identified as a fragile entity that is easily eroded, spoiled, and contested. Our Moon has Bloodclots articulates the visible tension between the Kashmiri Pandits and the Muslims of the Valley, particularly during the early 1990s, and refers to the Pandit community as the ‘punching bags’ of the Muslim majority population. Rahul foregrounds the fact that many Kashmiri Pandits did not share the national alienation and disillusionment of the Kashmiri Muslim population and the growing political differences created distrust and enmity between the two communities. The “lihaaz” – deference – of Kashmiriyat is shown as mediating, concealing, and to an extent, overcoming these rifts. But according to Rahul, the divisions between the two communities remained palpable, and pulsated under the surface. Kashmiriyat, as narrativized by Pandita, is a cosmopolitan conviviality between the Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits, which was at the same time resilient in the face of changing political climes and susceptible to these shifts. The tradition of oral storytelling and performance is also represented as one of the central markers of Kashmiriyat in both memoirs and is shown as a beloved aspect of everyday lived experience in the Valley. Storytelling, particularly public oration, is one of the mechanisms through which local Kashmiri subjects, particularly children, are made familiar with oral narratives, folktales from Persian, Kashmiri, Hindi, and Arabic sources. According to Zutshi, “storytelling was (and to an extent still is) the way in which events and characters from the past were brought to life and became a part of the everyday narrative of Kashmiri society” (Kashmir’s Contested 242). Typically, “storytellers and performers, including dastan goh, ladishah (ministrels), professional reciters of folktales, folksongs, and the sayings and verses of mystics and mystic poets, and bhands, as well as older men and women, were responsible for a constant recitation and circulation of stories” (Kashmir’s Contested 242). Local stories testify to the cosmopolitan cultural inheritance of Kashmiris. Basharat and Rahul are shown to be well-versed in Persian, Hindi/Urdu and Kashmiri literary traditions and works. Basharat as a child is well acquainted with Persian and Kashmiri legends, including the mythical Persian tale of Shirin and Farhad and their unrequited love (6). His aging grandfather relates these stories to him and his siblings during informal interactions and gatherings at his ancestral home. Poetry, in both Persian and Urdu, adorns the borders of the floor dining cloth – or dastarkhuwan – on

70  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre which Basharat’s family, including his grandfather, uncles, aunts, and cousins sit to have their dinner every day. Kashmiriyat is shown to be rooted in the local literary and culinary culture, and its narratives are transferred through the ordinary practices, rituals, and lived experiences of ethnically and religiously diverse Kashmiri subjects. For example, in Our Moon has Bloodclots, one of the fondest images of Rahul’s life in the Valley, before his migration to Jammu, is a memory of his grandmother, Dedda, stirring her dish with a wooden ladle while reciting the lyrical vaks of Lal Ded (265). Of the stories and poems recollected and narrated in Kashmir, the parables and poems of mystical Sufi poets and spiritual sages assume a special importance and are accorded a distinguished place within the Kashmiri socio-cultural milieu (Kachru, Kashmiri Literature 15). The philosopher-seer Lal Ded or Lalidad (“Granny Lalla”), as she is typically referred to in Kashmir, was born in 1335 and her works are widely acknowledged as inaugurating the poetic tradition within the field of Kashmiri literature (Kachru 15). The vaks that Rahul’s grandmother recited, for example, are a traditional form of Kashmiri poetry, which was composed by Lal Ded and which mixed religious Sufi themes with Saivaite philosophy (15). Early literary works in Kashmir are usually classified under the Saivaite, the Bhakti (devotional) or the Islamic (Sufi) tradition (7). However, none of these traditions, according to Braj Kachru, should be viewed as ‘monolingual’ or ‘monocultural’ because each one engaged in code-switching between Persianized Kashmir and Sanskritized Kashmir and borrowed metaphors, tropes, and poetic forms from mainstream Sanskrit and Persian literature (7–8). In his comprehensive study of Kashmiri literature, Kachru emphasizes that this interweaving of themes, drawn from either Sanskrit or Persian Sufi literary traditions, was a common practice within Kashmiri literary works (9). Lal Ded’s vaks are no different in this regard; they contain elements of mystical Saivaite philosophy, but simultaneously also engage with spiritual Sufi concepts (15). The celebrated Sufi poet and preacher, Sheikh Nooruddin, was Lal Ded’s contemporary, although the exact date of his birth remains unverified (21). He is considered to be the patron saint of Kashmir and is a spiritual figure revered by Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits from the Valley (21). By founding the Rishi Sufi order in Kashmir and composing religiously-themed poems in the vernacular, he played a pivotal role in shaping the contours of Muslim identity and local literature in the region (Zutshi, Languages of 23). These two historical figures – Nooruddin Rishi and Lal Ded – are of importance for our purpose because they are central to Kashmiriyat, which is most commonly conceptualized as a synthesis of Hindu Shaivism and Sufi mysticism (Quraishi). Lal Ded, also known as Lalleshwari, is responsible for articulating “the idea of Kashmiriyat through her verses which have formed the cultural repertoire of generations of Kashmiris” (Zutshi, Languages of 19). Mystical Kashmiri

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 71 personages, of whom the poet Lal Ded and the Sufi reformer Sheikh Nooruddin are distinguished examples, have been immortalized in the folklore and collective memory of Kashmiris as formulating and propounding Kashmiriyat (19). The image of Rahul’s grandmother stirring a pot of delicious food, while reciting Lalleshwari’s poetry, in Our Moon has Bloodclots, shows the part played by oral culture in ensuring that these verses, and the Kashmiriyat associated with them, endure in the collective memory of subsequent generations of Kashmiris. Kachru contends that Lal Ded’s verses have been orally transmitted from one generation to the next with some “changes, additions and interpolations” and there are nearly 146 vaks that have been attributed to her (Kachru 18). He elaborates on the pivotal position of Lal Ded within Kashmiri literary history and memory: The lore of Lalla and her vaks, have . . . continued to be an integral part of discourse and conversation for generations of Kashmiris, irrespective of religion, class and sex. Lalla is as much a part of Kashmiri language, literature and culture as Shakespeare is of English, Hafiz is of Persian, and Kabir and Tulsidas of Hindi. (15) The recitation of vaks while preparing food, and the embossing of Urdu and Hindi verses on the dining cloth in Basharat’s house, around which his family gathered to dine, are both illustrative examples of the inclusion of regional literature into the everyday life and commonplace rituals of ordinary Kashmiris. Rahul nostalgically remembers his kitchen garden in Kashmir, which produced an array of local fruits, herbs, and vegetables including “brinjals, collard greens, chilis, radish, pumpkin, bottle gourd, corn, cucumber, knol-khol and mountain mint” (258). For him, exodus from the Valley means a life of feeling culturally and linguistically alienated in India, but it also means the loss of his modest kitchen garden, with its succulent greens and the adjoining orchard with its sour apples. In Curfewed Night, for example, the locals of the village are represented as tending to and maintaining their beautiful surroundings and seeking pleasure from the landscape and its agrarian produce. The first chapter in Peer’s memoir is tellingly titled “Fragile Fairyland” because in it the writer presents an idealized and sentimental description of his native village, with its “paddy fields green in early summer and golden by autumn” where mustard and rice were grown by the local people (3). Basharat’s community is shown to be closely knit and agrarian; he depicts the women of the village “bent in rows,” singing in unison, as they plant the seasonal crops (Peer 4). Together with his younger brother, Wajahat, he swims in the pond and slides down snow-covered hills, but also lends a hand in the harvesting of the crop (4). Basharat himself is from an affluent family. It can be argued that the image of the locals

72  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre of the village, many of whom belong to different class denominations, tending together to their beautiful surroundings is meant to evoke a sense of Kashmiriyat. Peer’s memoir is interlaced with the pleasures not only of producing fresh edibles as a community, but also of consuming and preparing culinary delights, descriptions of which recur consistently throughout the work. Representations of samovars of “pink salty milk tea,” around which Kashmiris gather to chat and exchange pleasantries, bubble and steam throughout Curfewed Night. Basharat’s own father, for example, gathers his children in the drawing room in the evenings, with a warm, fragrant samovar at his side and narrates stories and poems to them or recounts Kashmiri myths and legends (45). Fireen, a “sweet pudding of almonds, raisins, milk, and semolina topped by poppy seeds” is shown being distributed at the mosque, before the night prayers in Ramadan, whereas kahwa, or black tea, is served before the Eid prayer service (7–8). During shrine-related ceremonies, food and beverages are served to the worshippers and visitors, and shireen or “round white balls of boiled rice and sugar” are tossed on them (17). At the village square, Hasan, the baker is represented serenading passerby with delicious “­ sesame-seed, bagel-like chochevaer,” and making wisecracks while Saifuddin, the town gossip, observes the passerby and the loiterers while being strategically perched at the storefront of his grocery shop (27). The local cosmopolitanism of the Valley, which binds religiously and ethnically diverse Kashmiri subjects, is put on display through representations of fasting, feasting, and merry-making. At places of public and private assembly, such as village squares, shrines, mosques, drawing rooms, and storefronts, locals are shown eating, purchasing, and consuming different culinary wares while reciting poetry, cracking jokes, gossiping, and exchanging greetings. In Our Moon has Bloodclots, when Rahul’s relatives from Jammu visit his family in India, they bring culinary souvenirs in the form of “collard green, raw walnuts, or sesame bagels made by Kashmiri bakers” (450). Similarly, while re-visiting Kashmir as an adult, Rahul would always meet his Kashmiri Muslim friend, Ali Mohammed – or chacha (uncle), as he fondly referred to him, and share a “quintessential Kashmiri meal of rice, roganjosh and collard greens” (2880). The friendship between Rahul, an exiled Kashmiri Pandit, and Chacha, a Kashmiri Muslim from the Valley, embodies Kashmiriyat and is explored through the idiom of the culinary, and is infused with the pleasures of a delectable Kashmiri meal and a lighthearted conversation. During the celebration of religious events such as Eid-ul-Adha and Shivaratri, the Muslims and Pandits of the Valley participate in each other’s rituals, and offer and prepare feasts for one another. Kashmiri Pandits are represented as taking part in the Eid-ul-Adha festivities of their Muslim neighbours and close friends, whereas Kashmiri Muslims are shown to be willing participants in the rituals of the festival of Shivratri. The sharing of religious holidays is demonstrative of the

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 73 bonhomie of Kashmiriyat, and this local cosmopolitanism is constructed through the imagery of food and dining. Shared camaraderie and congeniality within the community is explored through the sharing of culinary dishes that are traditionally prepared on the eve of different holy festivals. Despite this, a sense of underlying social and religious taboos frames this exchange of food and pleasantries. Our Moon has Bloodclots treads in the delicate terrain of inter-religious relationships cautiously, careful not to overstate the claims and bonds of Kashmiriyat. Lamb’s meat is sent uncooked to the narrator’s house, possibly as an acknowledgement of the existence of caste-based fears of consuming food prepared by casteless Kashmiri Muslims (Dhillon). Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots focus on the artistic, imaginative, and sensual pleasures that are typically found in a traditional Bildungsroman, and in likeness to a traditional artist-protagonist, the Kashmiri Bildungsheld dabbles in the pleasures of reading and creative composition. However, the focus on pleasures in these memoirs also emanates from and is shaped by Kashmiriyat, an idea that is made and re-made through representations of the everyday lived experience of ordinary Kashmiris. Many of these experiences involve some form of pleasure – either literary, culinary or pastoral – and in emphasizing the sharing of enjoyment that unites these different manifestations of the local cosmopolitan, Peer and Pandita’s memoirs offer a radical re-definition of Kashmiriyat as the product and process of seeking different types of local pleasures and human rights.

From Local Pleasure to Human Rights Languages of pleasure, I argue, are a mechanism for articulating the human rights of Kashmiris and hence of performing human rights advocacy. As Schaffer and Smith have highlighted in their work, readers of life narratives in the service of human rights respond unambiguously and sympathetically to representations of violence and atrocity (Human Rights 5). But could a similar, if not more enthusiastic response be generated when the events being narrativized also involve pleasure in equal measure, and not simply pain? Peer, for instance, romanticizes the years that preceded the beginnings of the armed insurgency in Kashmir and uses depictions of peaceful pastoral and agrarian life in order to construct a narrative of pleasure. In these representations, access to local pleasure is not just a marker of Kashmiriyat, but also of being a rights-having and rights-enjoying body. Representations of local pleasure, which I have explored in the last two sections, are tied quite closely to ideas about human rights and liberties. Pandita’s memoir also explicates on communal enjoyment, which is a salient marker of having rights. It bears emphasizing that human rights, in both memoirs, are positioned as different types of community-centred pleasures centred around public and

74  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre private storytelling, oral culture, agrarian and pastoral life, and culinary consumption. In Slaughter’s Human Rights Inc, human rights refer exclusively to international human rights law and/or Western and Eurocentric genealogies of human rights. Slaughter’s primary aim is to uncover the “neglected discursive genealogy of human rights that intersects with German idealism and its particular nomination of the bourgeois white male citizen to universal subject” (4). In sharp contrast to this, human rights in Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots refer also to local expressions and articulations of rights and local human rights narratives. Such narratives advocate for a broadening of the ‘universal subject’ of human rights to include other subjects from the margins. Moreover, Slaughter endlessly incorporates and assimilates postcolonial novels into a central discourse on the Bildungsroman functioning as the “natural ally” of international human rights law. He refers to postcolonial Bildungsromane as “ordinary, vulgar versions of the genre” through which marginalized subjects attempt to become enfranchised national citizens and to gain access to the promised land of human rights (93). However, instead of conceptualizing the Kashmiri Bildungsroman as another ‘vulgar’ version of the traditional Bildungsroman, which aspires to be as efficient an ally of international human rights discourses as a traditional German Bildungsroman, I argue that the Kashmiri Bildungsroman is just as much of an ally of local human rights discourses. The two Kashmiri non-fictional Bildungsromane considered here are connected to local human rights discourses and become the mechanism for distributing and disseminating the images and vocabularies of Kashmiriyat in the local, national, and transnational public sphere. The partaking of local pleasure is represented as a signifier of a right-bearing body, and the narratives of pleasure that Kashmiri memoirs construct, enable the reader to imagine the state of having and enjoying human rights. This is further supported by the fact that Curfewed Night establishes connections between narratives of local cosmopolitanism and human rights in order to emphasize the fact that Kashmiriyat can be mobilized as an indigenous discourse of rights that shares many of the ideals of international human rights law. The conviviality and pleasure of Kashmiriyat is represented as the thrill of political engagement and popular protest. An example of this can be found in the following passage from Curfewed Night: On February 1990 Kashmir was in the midst of a full-blown rebellion against India . . . News came from Srinagar that hundreds of thousands of people had marched to pray for independence at the shrine of the patron saint of Kashmir, Nooruddin Rishi, in a town an hour away from Srinagar. All over Kashmir, similar marches to the shrines of Sufi saints were launched. Another day I joined a procession to the shrine of a much-revered Sufi saint, Zain Shah Sahib, at

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 75 Aishmuqam, near my school. A few men led us wearing white cotton shrouds. They seemed to be in a trance, whirling like dervishes, singing pro-independence songs. (Peer 17) Here, Peer depicts the volatile years when the militant insurgency initially peaked in the Valley and “protests followed killings, and killings followed protests” (17). Dressed in Sufi garb, appropriating Sufi dances and movements, and visiting the shrine of Nooruddin Rishi, an important figure in the popular articulation of local cosmopolitanism in the Valley as mentioned earlier, Kashmiri dissidents instantaneously evoke Kashmiriyat. Bystanders and onlookers treat them like Sufi mystics and shrine devotees and consequently shower them with rose petals and boiled rice. Instead of praying for spiritual favours and blessings, these Kashmiri mystics-cum-dissidents use human rights language and ask for ‘independence’ and ‘freedom.’ Participating in quintessentially Kashmiri activities such as visiting Sufi shrines becomes interlinked with protesting against human rights violations in Kashmir and with laying claim to the human rights entitlements that have been denied to local subjects. The crowd of protestors demand azadi (freedom), a popular, oft-invoked rallying cry in the streets of Kashmir, which bears pronounced echoes of the language of the UDHR in which fundamental human rights are articulated as a series of human freedoms. The Kashmiri Sufi shrine or dargah itself functions as a visual epitomization of Sufi Islam and Kashmiri cosmopolitanism (see Chapter 5). As a place of sacred assembly and spirituality for both Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims, the shrine in Peer’s memoir functions as a visible and highly revered stand-in for the local cosmopolitanism of Kashmir. The metaphor of the Kashmiri protestor as a devout Sufi dervish, or spiritual participant, is used here to highlight the cultish, quasi-religious devotion that members of the local community felt towards the Kashmiri resistance movement during the 1990s. More crucially, the shrine serves, in Curfewed Night, as an alternative space to the UNMOGIP (UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan). The UNMOGIP office in Kashmir is usually the place where local rights activists take their human rights pleas and advocate for their specific causes (Ahmad). Human rights language is part of the local, political repertoire of Kashmiri dissidents and activists, and human rights advocacy is seen as an effective mechanism for articulating the demands of victims of human rights atrocities. UNMOGIP is one of the “oldest U.N missions” and monitors a 1949 ceasefire line that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan (Mushtaq). During the course of the 1990s when the Kashmiri azadi movement was gaining popular support in the Valley of Kashmir, processions of street protestors and human rights advocates would often march up to the UNMOGIP office in Srinagar

76  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre in order to voice their demands, and to call upon the UN as a rightsenforcing body to implement its resolutions (Ahmad). In fact, it became utterly commonplace for Kashmiri protestors to write memoranda addressed to the UN Secretary General demanding the enforcement of their human right to self-determination (Ahmad). These memoranda were submitted to the UNMOGIP office in Kashmir and this practice of composing and delivering memoranda continues to the present day (Ahmad). In 2008, when the Kashmiri ‘intifada’ overtook the streets, the UNMOGIP office emerged as the focal point of assembly as well as the addressee of many of the protest movements (Mushtaq). During the course of the year, thousands of Kashmiri activists marched to the UNMOGIP office and demanded that the international human rights body intervene in Kashmir and bring about a halt to the atrocities taking place in the region (Mushtaq). The UNMOGIP office serves a dual function in Kashmir (Mushtaq). It is a physical embodiment of international human rights law and promises of equality and dignity in the region as well as a public platform before which Kashmiris can articulate their resentment and pain and air their concerns as a community (Mushtaq). A crucial element of the political topography of the Valley of Kashmir, the UNMOGIP office even makes a special appearance in the critically acclaimed film Haider. Haider, whose father, a doctor, has been abducted by Indian security forces for operating on a militant, is shown chanting, “Hum hein kay hum nahin” [Do we exist or don’t we?)]outside the gated enclosure and the barbed wire-covered walls of the UNMOGIP office. His slogan, which is a semantic and rhythmic play on Hamlet’s memorable “to be or not to be” soliloquy, demands that Kashmiri subjects be recognized as rights-bearing human beings and their voices be acknowledged and heard by the international community. In Curfewed Night, Kashmiri protestors convene and assemble at a Sufi shrine instead of the UN office and the sleeping saint, Nooruddin Rishi, becomes the addressee of their human rights demands. Languages of human rights, Kashmiriyat, and Sufi spirituality crisscross in Peer’s memoir and the Sufi shrine is represented as an indigenous counterpart of the UNMOGIP office. In the shrine, and the UNMOGIP office, all Kashmiris, regardless of their religious and ethnic persuasion, are equal subjects and by that token, equally worthy of enjoying human rights. The mystical laws of spirituality, like the universal laws of human rights, in a sense, do not discriminate between different human beings, and are sensitive in particular to the plight of marginalized peoples. Moreover, the shrine space, much like the UNMOGIP office, has symbolic value insofar as it visually represents the abstract concepts of universal justice, ethical duty, and human equality. The village square in which shopkeepers and members of a close community has formerly gathered to converse, gossip, and feast are transformed into sites of mass human rights actions and democratic protests.

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 77 Images of Kashmiriyat presented in Curfewed Night – teaming storefronts, convivial crowds, and throngs of devotees at shrines – are remobilized as vivid signifiers of the human rights activism and advocacy at work in the narrative: The crowd itself was a human jumble. The contractor who carried whiskey in a petrol can and the upright lawyer who waited for passerby to greet him, the tailor who entertained the idle youth in his shop with tall stories while prodding away on his sewing machine and the chemist who would fall asleep behind the counter, the old fox who bragged of his connections with congressional politicians in Delhi and the unemployed graduate who appointed himself the ­English-language commentator for the village cricket team’s matches, the Salafi revivalist who sold plastic shoes and the Communist basket weaver with Stalin mustache all marched together, their voices joining in a resounding cry for freedom. Amid the collision of bodies, the holding of hands, the interlocking of eyes in affirmation and confirmation, the merging of a thousand voices, I had ceased to be a shy, bookish boy hunched by the expectations of family. I wasn’t scared of being scolded anymore; I had felt a part of something much bigger. I let myself go fly with the crowd. Azadi! Throughout the winter, almost every Kashmiri man was a Farhad, ready to mould the mountains for his Shirin: freedom! WAR TILL VICTORY was graffitied everywhere in Kashmir; it was painted alongside another slogan: SELF-DETERMINATION IS OUR BIRTHRIGHT! (17–18) In this passage, Peer demonstrates how Kashmiri subjects who were distinctive on account of their professions (chemists, tailors), political and religious affiliations (Salafi, Communist), and economic prospects (wellconnected, unemployed), protested together so that their voices combine into a “resounding cry for freedom.” Here, Kashmiriyat is kept intact by engaging in political action and civic protest in public spaces. Instead of sharing neighbourly gossip and conversation, Kashmiri subjects participate in human rights activism, and share their political aspirations with one another. Interestingly, the passage quoted above also re-frames the story of Shirin and Farhad, a timeless Persian romantic folktale, into a story about universal rights, liberties, and human equality. Shirin-Farhad is a popular legend in Kashmir, which attests to Persian cultural influences in the region and to Kashmiriyat, but here, instead of being a precocious young lover, Farhad is positioned as a disadvantaged Kashmiri subject while Shirin, rather than being his unattainable beloved, functions as the personification of the universal freedoms promised by the UDHR. In this adaptation and appropriation of a timeless Persian oral narrative of Shirin and Farhad into a story about human rights, we can

78  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre observe how narratives of Kashmiriyat are interlinked with human rights discourses, such that Kashmiriyat itself is represented and remobilized as a local discourse of rights.

Representations of Human Rights Violations For Moretti, French coming-of-age novels are characterized by the “transformation principle,” which “privileges change in its own right” and in these Kashmiri Bildungsromane, the “transformation principle” marks changes in access to pleasures and, by extension, to the enjoyment of human rights (7). I have shown how immersion in local pleasure emerges as the marker of a rights-bearing body in these memoirs. As an appendage to this, I will also explore how the interruption of pleasure in Curfewed Night and in Our Moon has Bloodclots is represented to be the result of a human rights infringement. The presence of both armed militancy and state terrorism in Curfewed Night disrupts the rhythms and rituals of idyllic pastoral life and interrupts the protagonist’s personality development. These interruptions are not random occurrences but are represented as symptomatic of the suspension of human rights in the region. Family gatherings around the dastarkhuwan at dinner time, in which Basharat’s grandfather usually related stories and witticisms to the rest of the family, transform into tense events during which the family collectively listens to the BBC World radio service in order to keep abreast with news on extrajudicial killings and curfews in Kashmir. Everyday life, which was saturated with echoes of Lal Ded and Lalleshwari, becomes filled with discussions of paramilitary brutality, disappearances, and human rights atrocities. The pleasures of Kashmiriyat, which were a part of the private and public lives of Kashmiri subjects, are disrupted in the event of a curfew, bringing activity and movement to a standstill. The imposition of curfews in the region is de rigueur and is presented to the reader of the two memoirs as a significant human rights issue. Imposed by the central government, and enforced by local security forces, curfews are a mechanism for halting public gathering and protest, and lead to a complete cessation of normal routines and rhythms (Waheed, “India’s message”). In other words, a curfew arrests life and activity in the Valley, artificially freezing street protests and dissent and imposing a sterile, skin-deep calm on the surroundings. While not causing any physical harm, pain or bodily injury to the narrators of these memoirs, curfews nevertheless disrupt quotidian life and its accompanying rituals. Forced to stay indoors, locals typically hoard supplies of food, milk, and rice in order to have sustenance during the duration of the imposed curfew (Anjum and Varma 57). Kashmiris have revived age-old cultural practices of pickling and preserving of vegetables – referred to as hokhea syun – as a means of extending the longevity of perishable greens

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 79 to survive curfews that may extend for several months at a stretch (57). In Curfewed Night, the imposition of a curfew is vividly described as an arrest of everyday routines and pleasures. The familiar sounds, comforting and repetitive, that characterize the protagonist’s daily life – the sound of chickens clucking, animals grazing in the mountains, and lively storefronts teaming with warmth and ­conversation – are replaced by the dull thud of the baker “slapping” dough, while wishing eternal damnation on the Indian security forces. Sound and cadence become symbolic of movement, liveliness and pleasures, whereas the emptying out of sound signifies stagnation and immobility. Slow lingering conversation in the village square and the pleasures of sharing and consuming Kashmiri lasawa are interrupted as shop fronts are evacuated and abandoned. Images of farmers herding, and livestock grazing are markers of the simple, agrarian life of the locals and the suspension of these routines, following political upheaval, indicates the loss of the idealized pastoral existence Peer represents in the beginning of his memoir. The circumstances before the curfew, the “neighbours herding,” “chatter of village women passing” through the forest, and shopkeepers accosting potential customers and friends embody a state in which human rights are in place and being enjoyed while the suspension of these activities constitutes a violation of these rights. Human rights discourse, which is shown to be entrenched in both international ideals of human rights and local cosmopolitan culture, remains a powerful intertext in these two memoirs. As the plot of Curfewed Night progresses, violence and/or the fear of experiencing violence gradually percolates into the protagonist’s life and interrupts the pleasures of Kashmiriyat. Returning home from school on the school bus everyday turns into a harrowing and traumatic experience for young Basharat. In one particular case, the interruption of pleasures is viscerally represented by using the idiom of sound and by involving the aural faculties of the reader: Kashmiri buses are like noisy cafes, almost everyone knows everyone else, and voices of varying pitches fill the vehicle. The driver played a Bollywood song, its melancholic lyrics floating over the din. A mile into the journey, a paramilitary convoy overtook our bus and hovered just ahead of us. The voices in the bus lowered, and the driver turned off the music. Soldiers had realized that driving close to a civilian bus would keep guerrillas from attacking them. Anxiety filled the bus. Our driver began to pray feverishly. (Peer 38) Bollywood songs punctuate most of the narratives discussed in this book, including Curfewed Night, which thrum and pulsate with their lyrics and melodies. The Bollywood tune, in the above passage, hints at Kashmir’s

80  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre cultural, linguistic, sensory, and indeed, aural ties with mainland India, and highlights the influence of the enormously popular Bollywood ‘dream machine’ in the region, despite the fraughtness of India’s politics on the ground (Chintamani). The polyphony created when this song coalesces with the sound of individuals conversing is an indicator of Kashmiriyat, and the break in these commingling voices marks the moment when the militants and the military begin to assault one another. Overpowered by the stronger, more powerful sound of an explosion followed by the noise of a “barrage of bullets – the lighter sounds Kalashnikovs, the heavier, retaliatory bursts, light machine guns,” the voices of Kashmiris conversing are “lowered” and the fervent Bollywood music dies (Peer, 39). In 2010, Basharat Peer was invited by the Asia Society to discuss and read passages from Curfewed Night and the event was moderated by the acclaimed Indian author, Pankaj Mishra. The Asia Society is a prominent NGO headquartered in New York with offices across the globe in seven countries. Founded by John Rockefeller in 1956, its mission is to increase the knowledge of ‘Asia’ in the United States and to build “partnerships among peoples, leaders and institutions of Asia and the United States in a global context” (“Mission”). The Asia Society’s invitation to Peer highlights his increasing visibility as a Kashmiri writer and journalist in the global literary and cultural landscape and, in particular, in the United States where Curfewed Night became a means of drawing attention to the issue of Kashmir. At the Asia Society event, Peer selected an extended version of the quotation above, which describes a traumatic encounter in his life while he was aboard a school bus en route to his local village. The selection of this particular excerpt in which the everyday pleasures of the protagonist are discourteously interrupted is an example of real-time human rights advocacy through the poignant representation of interrupted pleasure. Book readings are also particularly interesting performances because the passage personally selected by the author functions as a metonymic stand-in for the literary work and serves to give the audience a taste of the work in its entirety. According to Park-Fuller, the “personal narrative as a performance piece is even more like a testimony, for the stage, like the pulpit, the podium or the witness box, provides a platform for the unspoken” (Park-Fuller 23). Here, the “unspoken” relates to the violation of Peer’s human right to “liberty and security” and this infringement of rights is represented in terms of the dying away of a Bollywood melody, and the amplification of artillery fire. When Mishra, the moderator of the event, asked Basharat Peer why Americans should be interested in Kashmir given that it is “geographically quite remote” and geopolitically irrelevant to the local public, Peer responded by drawing attention to the “human reasons of a conflict,” which he considers worthy of being evaluated and sympathized with. “[American] people,” Peer stated, “would care about something which goes wrong in the world.” (Peer 2010). The

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 81 choice of the word “human” is strategic and automatically evokes the human of human rights legislation, and the call to action is issued on the basis of an ethical premise, rather than an overtly political or legal one, which is quite typical of human rights activism and human rights NGOs (Gottlieb et al. 840). We can conclude that the Kashmiri narratives considered in this chapter reclaim and re-valourize pleasure as a site of resistance, power, and human rights. As per the traditional genre model of the Bildungsroman, the loss of pleasure is inevitable, and has a formative effect on the human subject and, by that token, all traditional Bildungsromane can be considered narratives of interrupted pleasure. In a traditional Bildungsroman, this interruption in pleasure is formative and ushers the protagonist from youthful adolescence to maturity and turns them into a socialized member of the national polity. And while Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots stay true to the plot of the traditional Bildungsroman, the interruption of pleasures in the life of the protagonist is not considered a sign or means of maturation, nor is it posited as a desirable step in the process of self-development. Kashmiri subjects, unlike the protagonists in traditional Bildungsromane, do not willingly and consciously abandon different pleasures, but are in fact deprived of the pleasures of self-direction and Kashmiriyat. The interruption of the subject’s pleasures is not an informed decision in the interest of their self-development and self-actualization but is quite simply the result of the violation of their fundamental rights. As such the forsaking of pleasures in these narratives is not a marker of agency and a finished Bildung but is symptomatic of the profound vulnerability of Kashmiri subjects, and the physical and psychic violence meted out on their selves and their bodies. The intimate pleasures of reading with members of the family after an evening meal, which contribute to Basharat’s artistic creativity, as we have seen, are endangered. During the course of a violent confrontation between JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front) militants and the army, Basharat’s beloved library with its heavily-stacked bookcases, and beautiful bound volumes of Shakespearean plays, is also temporarily abandoned by the family. With a few belongings in their possession, the Peer family flee their ancestral home and the violation of their right to safety and security is represented as a loss of the pleasures of reading and imagination, which are central in shaping the rebellious adolescence of the traditional Bildungsheld. The bookcase, as I mentioned earlier, is also a vivid marker of Kashmiriyat, and leaving behind the books is emblematic of the breach of its pleasures. Incidents of violence, such as the one described above, intrude upon their domestic life and interactions, and complicate Basharat’s Bildung as a creative Kashmiri subject. The subjects of Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots do not directly experience physical atrocity and violence, but they are able

82  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre viscerally and powerfully to convey the usurpation of their everyday life, and to represent the state of both possessing rights and losing them as a consequence of living in a violent space. Because of the fact that the protagonist in a traditional Bildungsroman is not an exiled subject, or a human rights victim, the pleasures of creativity, prose, and the imagination are merely a passing, adolescent fancy. But here, in these memoirs, these pleasures emerge as a space of resistance, resilience, and a means of bearing witness to atrocity. The inability to pursue creative expression is a marker of the deteriorating psychological health of the writing subject rather than a sign of their coming of age and incumbent self-development.

Conclusion I have explored how human rights violations are represented in Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots as disruptions and usurpations in the everyday pleasures and lived experiences of Kashmiri subjects. Both works broach the subject of human rights via the theme of pleasure, particularly the local pleasures of Kashmiriyat, and I have offered an exposition of how this cosmopolitanism is mobilized, appropriated, and adapted as a local discourse of human rights. I have demonstrated that the Bildungsroman has been used as a rhetorical vehicle within this new wave of Kashmiri life writing. Peer and Pandita use this traditional literary genre to plot their personal memoirs, bear witness to oppression and tell their stories to the wider world. The ubiquity and recognisability of the novel of development within both regional and international publics lends itself nicely to its adoption by these Kashmiri authors. It ensures the popularity of Kashmiri memoirs in the South Asian region as well as abroad in the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States, by offering readers the opportunity to navigate and situate themselves within the unfamiliar and murky world of Kashmiri politics via a familiar literary genre and its well-established and recognizable literary conventions. Moreover, I have analyzed how the pleasurecentricism of the comingof-age story enables Kashmiri re-workings of the genre to draw upon and encompass local narratives of pleasure, human rights, and identity in the region. The plot structure of the Bildungsroman, which is by definition a narrative of transformation that forecloses pleasures, gives a narrative format with which Kashmiri authors can map and represent the shift from having rights to losing them. Lastly, Kashmiri cultural practitioners capitalize on the Bildungsroman’s literary reputation as a carrier and purveyor of human rights discourses, and use it as an aesthetic vehicle for disseminating, distributing, and championing both local and global languages of rights and pleasures amongst both regional and international readers.

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 83

References “About.” Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS). “About the Award.” Raymond Crossword Book Award, 18 Jan. 2006. crosswordbookawards.com/#about-the-award. “Advocating for Human Rights.” Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. www.humanrightscommission.vic.gov.au/human-rights/ therole-of-the-commission-under-the-charter/advocacy. Ahmad, Wajahat. “Kashmir and the United Nations.” Countercurrents, 27 Aug. 2008, www.countercurrents.org/ahmad270808.htm. Ali, Agha Shahid. The Country without a Post Office: Poems. Norton, 1997. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 1991. Anderson, Benedict. “Nationalism, Identity and the World-in-Motion: On the Logics of Seriality.” Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. U of Minnesota P, 1998, pp. 117–33. Anjum, Aaliya, and Saiba Varma. “Curfewed in Kashmir: Voices from the Valley.” Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, edited by Sanjay Kak. Penguin, 2011, pp. 50–63. Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in PostColonial Literatures. Routledge, 2010. “Basharat Peer.” Simon & Schuster. simonandschuster.com/authors/BasharatPeer/49894498. Bhardwaj, Vishal, director. Haider. UTV Motion Pictures, 2014. Bhatia, Ritika. “Basharat Peer: The Man Who Scripted Haider.” Business Standard, 1 Nov. 2014. www.businessstandard.com/article/specials/basharat-peerthe-man-whoscripted-haider-114103000877_1.html. “Bildungsroman.” OED Online. June 2013. oed.com/view/Entry/18946?redirected From=Bildungsroman. Biswas, Soutik. “Book Review Our Moon Has Blood Clots.” Review of Our Moon Has Bloodclots. Livemint, 31 Jan. 2013. www.livemint.com/Leisure/ 7azsSQihujuZe8vTFpVIjK/BookReview–Our-Moon-Has-Blood-Clots.html. Boes, Tobias. “Modernist Studies and the Bildungsroman: A Historical Survey of Critical Trends.” Literature Compass, vol. 3, no. 2, 2006, pp. 230–43. Bolaki, Stella. Unsettling the “Bildungsroman”: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Rodopi, 2011. Bose, Sumantra. Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace. Harvard UP, 2003. Buckley, Jerome. Seasons of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding. Harvard UP, 1974. Chambers, Claire. “The Last Saffron: Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmir.” Contemporary World Literature, June 2011. www.contemporaryworldliterature.com/ blog/essays/%E2%80. Chintamani, Gautam. “Bollywood: The Dream Machine of a Billion People.” Dawn, 16 May 2012. www.dawn.com/news/718855. Dalrymple, William. “Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer.” The Guardian, 20 June 2010. www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jun/20/curfewed-nightbasharat-peerdalrymple. “Failing the Test: A Personal Memoir of the Kashmir Insurgency.” The Economist, 27 May 2010. www.economist.com/node/16213932.

84  Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre Fazili, Gowhar. “Our Memories Come in the Way of Our Histories: Gowhar Fazili.” Review of Our Moon Has Bloodclots. Kafila, 30 Jan. 2013. www. kafila.online/2013/01/30/our-memoriescome-in-the-way-of-our-histories-gowharfazili/. Gajarawala, Toral. “Kashmir Stories.” Dissent, June 2016. www.dissentmaga zine.org/article/kashmir-stories-munnumalik-sajad-graphic-novel. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. P.F. Collier & Son, 1917. Gottlieb, Nora, et al. “Medical Humanitarianism, Human Rights and Political Advocacy: The Case of the Israeli Open Clinic.” Social Science & Medicine, vol. 74, no. 6, 2012, pp. 839–845. Google Scholar, doi:10.1016/j. socscimed.2011.07.018. Katyal, Akhil. “ ‘I Swear . . . I Have My Hopes’: Agha Shahid Ali’s Delhi Years.” Kafila, 30 Jan. 2011. www.kafila.org/2011/01/30/%E2%80%98i-swear-ihave-myhopes%E2%80%99-agha-shahid-ali%E2%80%99s-delhiyears. Lima, Maria Helena. Decolonizing Genre Caribbean Women Writers and the Bildungsroman. 1993. U of Maryland, PhD dissertation. Malmgren, Carl D. “From Work to Text: The Modernist and Postmodernist Künstlerroman.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 21, no. 1, 1987, pp. 5–28. McWilliams, Ellen. Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman. Ashgate, 2009. Mishra, Pankaj. “Kashmir: ‘A Corner of Hell’.” Asia Society, 12 Apr. 2010. www.asiasociety.org/kashmir-corner-hell. “Mission & History.” Asia Society. www.asiasociety.org/about/mission-history. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. Verso, 1987. Moscatelli, Silvia, et al. “Different Size, Different Language? Linguistic Ingroup Favoritism and Outgroup Derogation by Majority and Minority Groups.” Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, vol. 20, no. 6, 2016, pp. 757–769, doi:10.1177/1368430215625784. Mridha, Somjyoti. “Memories of Home and Persecution: A Study of Recent Kashmiri Pandit Narratives.” The Nehu Journal, XII, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 47–56. Mushtaq, Sheikh. “Massive Protest at U.N. Office in Kashmir.” Reuters, 18 Aug. 2008, www.reuters.com/article/us-kashmir-protests/massive-protest-at-u-noffice-in-kashmir-idUSISL22699520080818. Narayan, Manjula. “Review: Our Moon Has Blood Clots.” Review of Our Moon Has Bloodclots. Hindustan Times, 19 Jan. 2013. www.hindustantimes.com/books/ review-our-moon-has-bloodclots/story-6IDCugmB6heFDJDJ7NN08N.html. Pandita, Rahul. Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. Random House, 2013. Pandita, Rahul. Rahul Pandita. rahulpandita.com/about-me/. Park-Fuller, Linda M. “Performing Absence: The Staged Personal Narrative as Testimony.” Text and Performance Quarterly. vol. 20, no. 1, 2000, pp. 20–42, doi:10.1080/10462930009366281. Parrey, Arif Ayaz. “The Imaginarium of Rahul Pandita.” Kindle Magazine, 3 Apr. 2013. www.kindlemag.in/the-imaginariumof-rahul-pandita/. Peer, Basharat. “Kashmir’s Forever War.” Granta Magazine, 27 Sept. 2010. granta.com/kashmirs-forever-war/. Peer, Basharat. “Kashmir Unrest: A Letter to an Unknown Indian.” Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, edited by Sanjay Kak, Penguin, 2011, pp. 43–56.

Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre 85 Quraishi, Humra. Kashmir: The Untold Story. Penguin Books, 2004. Schofield, Victoria. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War. I.B. Tauris, 2003. Seeley, J R. “Criticisms and Interpretations.” Bartleby, www.bartleby.com/ebook/ adobe/314.pdf. Shamsie, Kamila. “Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir by Basharat Peer.” The Guardian, 5 June 2010. www.theguardian. com/books/2010/jun/05/curfewed-nightbasharat-peer-review. Simon, Irène. “David Copperfield: A Künstlerroman?” The Review of English Studies, vol. 43, no. 169, 1 Feb. 1992, pp. 40–56. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/517489. Singh, Harneet. “ ‘Kashmir Is the Hamlet of My Film,’ says Vishal Bhardwaj on Haider.” The Indian Express, 5 Oct. 2014. www.indianexpress.com/article/ entertainment/bollywood/kashmir-is-the-hamlet-of-my-film/. Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Fordham UP, 2007. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “The Trouble with Autobiography: Cautionary Notes for Narrative Theorists.” A Companion to Narrative Theory, edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Blackwell, 2005. pp. 356–71. Soni, Aayush. “Pandita’s Book on a Kashmir Exodus.” The Wall Street Journal, 22 Jan. 2013. www.blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2013/01/22/rahul-pandit asbook-on-a-kashmir-exodus/. Soofi, Mayank Austen. “Netherfield Ball- Power Couple Ananya Vajpeyi and Basharat Peer and Former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, India International Center.” The Delhi Wallah, 27 June 2016. www.thedelhiwalla.com/ 2016/06/27/netherfield-ball-powercouple-ananya-vajpeyi-and-basharat-peerformer-primeminister-narasimha-rao-india-international-center/. “Srinagar.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11 Aug. 2014. www.britannica.com/place/ Srinagar. Stein, Mark. Black British Literature Novels of Transformation. Ohio State UP, 2004. Vanderwerken, David. “Wiesel’s Night as Anti-Bildungsroman.” Elie Wiesel’s Night, edited by Harold Bloom. Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2010, pp. 39–46. Waheed, Mirza. “India’s Message to Kashmir: The Noose Can Extend beyond the Gallows.” The Guardian, 15 Feb. 2013. www.theguardian.com/comment isfree/2013/feb/15/indiakashmir-afzal-guru-hanging. Zutshi, Chitralekha. Kashmir’s Contested Pasts Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination. Oxford UP, 2015. Zutshi, Chitralekha. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. Oxford UP, 2004. Zutshi, Chitralekha. “Translating the Past: Rethinking Rajatarangini Narratives in Colonial India.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 70, no. 1, 2011, pp. 5–27. JSTOR, doi:10.1017/s0021911810002998.

2 Literary Fiction as an Alternative to a Human Rights Report The Case of Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator

The contested territory of Kashmir, as indicated in my general introduction, is one of the most densely militarized regions in the world. The Indian state has continued to maintain its military presence in Jammu and Kashmir for the last two decades and according to modest estimates, there are nearly 700,000 military troops stationed in the region at the present moment (Kak, Until 4). Heavily-armed members of the armed forces patrol the landscape in their military vehicles while army bunkers penetrate public spaces as well as residential areas and local neighbourhoods (4). There have been cases reported of the Indian army turning local schools into army camps and stationing soldiers at the entrance, and of their transforming colonial mansions and offices into clandestine torture chambers (Ganai; Yasir). The heightened presence of barbed wire fences, military checkpoints, and armoured vehicles perpetrate an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, surveillance, and control in the region and function as unwelcoming visual signifiers of the Indian state in Kashmir (Dorabji and Rehman). Since 1989, almost 100,000 Kashmiri Pandits have migrated from the Valley of Kashmir to escape the violence enveloping their cities, ­re-locating to squalid refugee camps or choosing to reside in relative poverty in major Indian cities, while approximately 60,000 Kashmiri Muslims have been killed extrajudicially and nearly 7,000 have gone missing (Kaul 204). Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have been instrumental in bringing the human rights abuses taking place in Kashmir to the forefront of international attention and have consistently drawn attention to the subjugation of Kashmiri Pandits at the hands of Kashmiri militants, as well as the mistreatment of Kashmiri Muslims by members of the Indian armed forces. Alongside these international organizations, local rights groups in Kashmir have also made significant efforts to expose the systematic violations of human rights in the Valley of Kashmir. In December 2009, the International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in IndianAdministered Kashmir (IPTK), a Kashmir-based human rights group,

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  87 published its findings in a human rights report titled “Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian-Administered Kashmir.” The IPTK is a constituent of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), an umbrella organization comprising different “nonprofit, campaign, research and advocacy organizations based in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir” (“About”). In 2011, the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) confirmed the findings of the IPTK’s human rights report in its own report which stated that 2,730 unidentified bodies were buried in mass graves in the three districts mentioned in the IPTK. The same year, Mirza Waheed, a London-based Kashmiri writer and journalist working for the BBC, published his debut novel The Collaborator, which described the presence of mass graves in the Valley of Kashmir and represented the youthful bodies lying there in these burial sites in evocative and moving prose (“Mirza Waheed”). To a certain extent, human rights reports and Kashmiri works of fiction have identical goals and use similar means of dissemination and distribution to reach their target audiences, which include government bodies as well as members of civil society (“the power”). Both types of texts identify, describe, and document human rights violations with the aim of distributing these findings to local, regional, and transnational publics and drawing attention to the suffering of ordinary Kashmiris. Human rights reports rely on the “journalistic public sphere” and are often prominently featured by blogs, cable news networks, and online and print newspapers, which serve to disseminate their findings and to dissect the moral, political, and ethical implications of the human rights issues being raised by these reports (Blaagaard 190). They try to trigger the “boomerang effect of transnational advocacy” by using human rights agents, activists, lawyers, foundations, social movements, churches, trade unions, media advocacy organizations, and NGOs to propagate and broadcast their results to different publics (Keck and Sikkink 2, 9). Fictional works of literature also have access to the journalistic public sphere and make use of the global press’ interest in contemporary literary fiction to propagate their fictionalized human rights ‘findings’ to their readers. The Collaborator, for example, has been extensively reviewed by prominent international newspapers such as The Guardian, The New York Times, The Telegraph and The Independent as well as by regional newspapers and magazines such as Outlook India, Dawn and The Kashmir Walla. This expansive coverage gives us a sense of the wide readership, appeal, and literary reach of the text in question and its use of the English-language book market to reach its target audiences. The metropolitan book market in this case functions as a surrogate ‘transnational advocacy network’ with writers, readers, publishers, literary scholars, and academics functioning as agents responsible for the spreading, unpacking, and interpreting the fraught experiences and human rights

88  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator issues described in the texts and for the sharing of information and ideas. In conjunction with this, universities, academic conferences, book readings, seminars, literary festivals, and literary award ceremonies function as locations in which these intellectual exchanges and engagements take place and conversations on Kashmir unfold. In this respect, both literary narratives and human rights reports can be considered active and equal participants in the human rights project. This argument is further supported by Amnesty International’s former Secretary General, Irene Khan’s statement on the poetics of human rights claim-making. She states that human rights claims do not necessarily have to be made using only legal precepts and law alone but should foreground the human experience and exploit the power of the testimonial voice in order to be more efficacious, impactful, and morally persuasive. Bringing these issues to the fore she argues the following: Our challenge is to . . . reframe the debate on human rights, not only in terms of law but in terms of what is right and what is wrong . . . as a moral argument based on fundamental values. . . . Human rights is about values not only laws and systems, it is about voice not only text. It is about the lived experience, it is about galvanizing public imagination and energy. . . . In the end, the absolute prohibition of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment rests on moral grounds. Torture is not wrong because it violates the Convention against Torture – it is wrong because . . . it debases humanity. (Khan) However, human rights organizations and the reports they produce are effective primarily because both rely on international human rights legislation to couch the ethical appeals that they put forward (Dudai 790). Dudai refers to this situation as “the catch-22” of human rights reports (790). He states that even though the effectiveness of human rights NGOs has to do with their deployment of human rights jargon and the invocation of international law clauses, it is really moral and ethical concerns that drive human rights organizations to engage with human rights issues in the first place (790). First-person testimonies, to an extent, resolve and mediate the tension between the emotional impulse that drives the production of human rights reports, and an NGO’s exclusive reliance on legal discourse and scientific data to buttress their arguments (790). Rosanne Kennedy argues that in this era of “human rights and rapid media transmission, human rights reports are an important site for the production and transnational circulation of testimonies, and the construction of a transnational memory of human rights violations” (52). These testimonies are one of the “trademarks” and crucial defining features of the human rights report (Dudai 790). They are frequently used by NGOs and human rights workers to

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  89 provide the reader with subjective and highly personalized language to strike an emotional chord with them and let them hear the unmediated and unfiltered “voice” of the victim (790). Storytelling appears to be a powerful tool within human rights advocacy through human rights reports as well as through literature. Traditional human rights reports, much like creative fiction, involve elements of narrativity and storytelling insofar as they include “unedited testimonies of victims” (790). Testimonies have become a “transnational culture form” that are “crucial to the process of documenting violations, constructing memories, and soliciting witnessing publics in human rights campaigns” (R. Kennedy 51). Testimonial narratives usually tell a story, or a fragment of a story, in the hopes of attracting readers and offering them “emotional, nonlegal language,” which they can understand and respond to (Dudai 790). Kennedy writes that, “while the official report privileges the language of fact, the testimonies evoke emotion and produce affect” (R. Kennedy 66). However, testimonies constitute a small part of human rights reports, and are not able to fully resolve or overcome the dissonance between the emotional call to bear witness that drives a human rights report, and its use of legalistic language and international conventions (Dudai 790). Moreover, as Irene Khan’s critique highlights, they do not go far enough in depicting the everyday lived reality of the human rights subject, or in giving the reader an insight into the structural and psychosocial inequalities that characterize their lives. The use of numbers and legal precepts lends the findings of the report authenticity and scientific persuasiveness but can also be alienating and inaccessible to the reader. There are similarities in the aims and international visibility of human rights reports and creative fiction, but the form and rhetorical strategies used by these two types of narrative are quite distinctive. It is my contention that The Collaborator functions as a novelistic alternative for a traditional human rights report and offers human rights practitioners at the global level a different model for performing the work of human rights advocacy. The Collaborator deploys a language of pleasures rather than of physical pain, torture, and victimization to represent human rights abuses. The publishing and promotion of this work is an example of local rights activism that attempts to re-shape the contours of human rights advocacy on an international level. It is a vivid example of how insights from local advocacy, which in this case uses the medium of fictional literature, could be translated into international and global human rights contexts, where it would potentially transform the normative generic conventions of human rights advocacy campaigns on a global scale (Bagchi 106). In this chapter, I posit that human rights workers would do well to appropriate the rhetorical strategies of literary fiction in order to make their reports more poignant, moving, and impactful for civic society and to increase their powers of persuasion.

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Narratives of Pleasure in South Asian Activism Mirza Waheed’s Bildungsroman, The Collaborator, documents the coming of age of its nameless Kashmiri protagonist as he undergoes the traumatic loss of his close friends and the destruction of his ancestral village, Nowgam. The novel is set in the same time period as Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots and also describes the experience of entering adolescence in the 1980s and early 1990s when political strife and violence enveloped Kashmir. Waheed’s novel is a powerful and persuasive work of fiction, which like the memoirs discussed earlier, deploys a narrative of pleasure in order to advocate for the human rights of Kashmiris. This language of pleasure is conceived of and constructed as a melancholic and pleasurecentric temporality that is rooted in localized narratives of cosmopolitan identity or Kashmiriyat. By ‘pleasurecentric temporality,’ I mean that the temporal flow in the novel is organized through a focalization on recurring and repetitive experiences and representations of pleasure. The Collaborator contains, for example, vivid dreams, ghostly visitations, reminiscences, and supernatural hallucinations, many of which are connected to experiences and memories of pleasure, particularly those that were enjoyed, performed, and enacted in public spaces. Sequences of dreams and hallucinatory flashbacks interrupt the linear progression of the novel and of nationalhistorical time, inducing the protagonist as well as the reader to linger over and be nostalgic for past pleasures. I draw upon Elizabeth Freeman’s argument that bodies are vessels of pleasure that can derail the chrononormative thrust of linear, nationalhistorical time (7, 16). Chrononormativity is defined as the linear organization of “individual human bodies towards maximum productivity” that can be disrupted “by bodies and their pleasures” (16). I aim to highlight how The Collaborator re-positions the figure of the body in human rights discourse not just as corpus delicti, as an abject, wounded and corporeal entity, but also as a vessel of pleasures and a tool for disrupting and skewing linear temporality. Mirza Waheed’s text departs from the international model of advocacy which, in order to secure the sympathy of its audiences, focuses almost exclusively on testimonies of corporeal pain and suffering endured by the human rights victim in order to secure the empathy of its audiences. Instead of focusing only on the suffering of the abject subject, and on the traces of this pain on their bodily remains, The Collaborator restores the life and identities to the unclaimed cadavers lying in mass graves in Kashmir. The Kashmiri subjects’ existence is viewed through the lens of enjoyment rather than solely from the perspective of their demise and the violence perpetrated upon their corporeal existence. Rather than viewing The Collaborator as an isolated example of the use of representations and enactments of local pleasure to advocate for

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  91 human rights, I argue that The Collaborator should be analyzed alongside similar practices of advocacy both in Kashmir, for example, the Kashmir Bicycle Movement, and in the South Asian region in general, particularly in the arena of feminist activism. I focus especially on South Asian feminist movements such as ‘Why Loiter’ in India, and ‘Girls at Dhabas’ in Pakistan that deploy an idiom of enjoyment to claim and occupy public spaces within South Asian metropolises. The thematic focus on pleasures in The Collaborator is rooted in localized notions of cosmopolitan identity or Kashmiriyat, such as we have observed in the last chapter. I will attempt to show how this focus is also connected to a pleasurecentric shift in local human rights advocacy campaigns in South Asia. In other words, human rights advocacy in Kashmir is developing a pleasurecentric aesthetic, and this aesthetic is grounded in representations and re-workings of local cosmopolitanism, while also sharing broader linkages and similarities with on the ground advocacy movements in Kashmir as well as in Pakistan and India. The advocacy performed through Anglophone Kashmiri works of fiction, and through South Asian feminist initiatives, can have profound and potentially long-lasting implications for the way in which the work of human rights activism is typically understood and practiced internationally (Bagchi 106–7). I use examples of pleasurecentric advocacy campaigns in South Asia conducted through Anglophone fiction, as well as through online and offline social rights activism, in order to foreground how human rights ideas and languages emanating from the centre are forged and grafted into local contexts, and how the activism conducted in these local contexts has the potential to shift forms of advocacy and practice that are de rigueur on the international level (Bagchi 107). Models of human rights advocacy that are embedded in local ways of knowing and seeing the world have the potential to append and possibly even suggest an alternative to the dominant suffering-centred model of doing international human rights advocacy. I will first examine the formal structure and the rhetorical techniques used by the human rights report published by the IPTK to articulate and represent human rights atrocities in Kashmir. I will analyze the use of legal terminology and representations of corporeal pain, torture, and bodily suffering to advocate for the human rights of Kashmiris. Following on from this, I will analyze the construction of a language of pleasure and affect in The Collaborator as a means of appealing to the emotions of ordinary readers, of contextualizing human rights atrocities, and ultimately of restoring the identities of the “bare life” lying in unnamed mass graves in the Valley (Agamben 10). I will look at the activities of a local movement for reclaiming public spaces in the region, the Kashmiri Bicycle Movement, and draw connections between local acts of activism in Kashmir, and transnational feminist movements in Pakistan and India.

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The Vernacularization of Human Rights Michael Ignatieff argues that human rights have become the “lingua franca of global moral thought, as English has become the lingua franca of the global economy” (320). Comparing human rights discourses to the English language also foregrounds the hypermobility of international human rights and the way in which they are translated, adopted, and transplanted into different local cultural contexts. However, ‘English’ today no longer refers exclusively to the standard British English of the former imperial centre, but also refers to the varieties of English spoken in various postcolonial regions of the world (Ashcroft et al. 8). The English spoken by Jamaicans is significantly different from the one spoken by Maoris, Canadians or Kenyans and these global Englishes have an impact on standard English and continue to shape and re-shape its linguistic contours. It is my contention that in much the same way that postcolonial Englishes transform the standardized British English of the imperial centre, human rights activism undertaken in the ‘peripheries’ also has an impact on the human rights advocacy and the articulation of rights on an international level (Bagchi 107). Local ‘speakers’ of human rights language do not straightforwardly mimic and speak a standard code of human rights but bring their own inflections and particularities to the international discourse of human rights. Human rights norms are not just transmitted into different regions, and directly translated into specific socio-political contexts, but the idiom of rights in different geographical regions also impacts the way in which human rights are articulated and promoted in the centre (107). Locallyplaced human rights workers and activists also transfer their own ideas about rights and activism from the local to the global, instead of only the other way around (107). Levitt and Merry have argued that global human rights norms are adopted by local activists in a process of “cultural circulation and translation,” which they refer to as “vernacularization” (443). They examine the way in which strategies of human rights advocacy and ideas of human rights are transplanted and appropriated in different social, cultural, and national contexts by activists and human rights organizations operating on the ground (443). These located activists and NGOs are vernacularizers who mediate international human rights norms and practices of advocacy to suit diverse socio-political locations and contexts for a range of different purposes (449). These translators should ideally be “conversant with both sides of the exchange,” transfer ideas between the peripheries and the centre, and control the “flow of information back and forth” (449). Furthermore, they should possess the expertise to translate human rights norms into local languages of human rights and justice and enable these ideas to have more resonance within local publics and thus reach a wider audience (448). Vernacularizers are types of cultural brokers insofar as they “stand guard over the crucial junctures

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  93 of synapses of relationships which connect the local system to the larger whole” (Wolf 1075). Scholars have criticized the largely unidirectional transfer of human rights norms from the global to the local, as theorized by Levitt and Merry. Barnita Bagchi has criticized the ‘top-down approach’ to vernacularization, as propounded by them, on the grounds that “rights activism at the local level contributes to how rights are articulated and enshrined internationally” (Bagchi 107). In a similar vein, Lena Khor, for example, has argued that human rights should be viewed as “fluid, changeable and mutable” because they “seem to travel multidirectionally back and forth between an international human rights regime and peoples and their societies, as well as within the regime, peoples and their societies” (3). By building on these existing critiques of the top-down model of the global diffusion of human rights, this chapter will examine how human rights ideas and languages, emanating from the centre, can be forged and grafted into local contexts, and secondly, how activism, conducted in local contexts, has the potential to shift forms of advocacy and practice that are de rigueur on the international level. This chapter analyzes three “pleasurecentric advocacy campaigns” (my term) in the South Asian region, conducted through Anglophone fiction, and through online and offline rights activism. I define “pleasurecentric advocacy” as human rights advocacy conducted through narratives and stories of pleasure and enjoyment that seek to imagine the lived experience of the human rights victim beyond experiences of abjection, physical victimization, and corporeal pain. The pleasurecentric model of advocacy tries to focalize on the pleasures of everyday life and to articulate human rights atrocities holistically in terms of their ability to interrupt a life and deprive it of enjoyment and pleasure. In the last chapter, we examined the way in which Curfewed Night and Our Moon has Bloodclots also engage in a form of pleasurecentric advocacy insofar as they broached the subject of having and losing human rights via the theme of enjoyment. In this chapter, I narrow my focus to analyze a particular type of pleasurecentric advocacy which is based on the reclamation of rights through the performance of pleasure in public spaces, and to comprehensively substantiate on the workings of this model of advocacy, I use examples drawn from the regional and transnational public sphere.

Human Rights Reports of the HRW and IPTK Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have been instrumental in bringing the human rights atrocities taking place in Kashmir to the forefront of international attention, and in highlighting the subjugation of a marginalized community. In September 2006, HRW published a report entitled “Everyone Lives in Fear: Patterns of Immunity in Jammu and Kashmir,” which drew attention to the systematic human rights abuses being perpetrated in

94  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator the region by the Indian armed forces, particularly the high incidents of extrajudicial killings and gendered violence (Ganguly). The report was the culmination of two years of extensive field research conducted by HRW’s team on the ground, and the compilation of data collected through telephone and email and in meetings with other NGOs and highranking government officials (Ganguly). Human rights reports typically focus on “sensitive, emotional [and] controversial topics” and the human rights report produced by the HRW is no different insofar as it investigates the issue of extra-judicial killings and institutionalized violence in Kashmir (Dudai 784). The text of the HRW report consists of a trenchant, legal analysis of the human rights situation in Kashmir, alongside unedited first-person and/or eyewitness testimonies from victims and bystanders who either experienced an atrocity directly, or observed it taking place (783–84). Poignant eyewitness accounts and testimonies provide the reader with “non-legal language” in order to win over their sympathy and move them into solidarity with the cause being advocated (790). These accounts are examples of the centrality of effective storytelling within a human rights framework. First-person testimonies usually describe a violent and/ or harrowing incident in which the human rights of the witness or of another subject were infringed and violated. A testimony can be defined as a “declaration of personal experience in the absence of that experience,” which may serve as a “tool for uncovering hidden truths” (ParkFuller 21). Parsing the field notes for moving testimonies is an essential part of drafting a human rights report and Dudai writes that: “Everyone who wrote a report would recognize it: the stage when you look for the most emotive, testimonial passage to insert between Geneva Convention this and International Covenant that” (791). Most of the testimonies included within the HRW’s report explicitly foreground, as illustrated in the following quotation, the physical pain and suffering of the victim: “They wanted revenge and so they tortured my brother and then they killed him. His ribs and legs were fractured and there was a red mark around his neck. They must have strangled him (Ganguly).” Others describe the gendered and sexualized nature of the violence intended to emasculate and sexually humiliate young Kashmiri males. Here too, the physicality of the encounter and the corporeal pain endured by the subject are at the forefront of these first-person narratives: I curse my brother for what he brought upon me. But more than that I curse the soldiers. I was only a boy at that time. They would strip me, make my lie naked on the floor, kick and beat me, split my legs wide apart and leave me tied up like that for hours. When I thought I could not bear any more pain, they would give me electric shocks. (Ganguly)

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  95 Narratives of suffering are at the core of international human rights campaigns and discourses and go hand in hand with each other. In her text, Human Rights and the Body: Hidden in Plain Sight (2014), Mooney posits that human rights discourses and practices should be looked at primarily through the frame of the human body (2). For her, “human embodiment and suffering” is universal and central to the human condition (2). The purpose of human rights law and politics is widely believed to be the prevention of “human suffering [especially bodily suffering] of both acute and chronic kinds” (Moore and Goldberg 1). Judith Butler argues that global vulnerability should be the “basis of humanism” (42). She uses the phrases “common human vulnerability” and “common corporeal vulnerability” interchangeably to describe a sense of community borne out of a shared susceptibility to bodily harm and violence (Butler 20, 30, 42). Wendy Brown theorizes human rights as a “defense against power and a protection against pain, deprivation or suffering” (454). She posits that human rights are primarily [a]n instrument for abating the grievous suffering of targeted individuals and groups, stanching the flow of human blood, diminishing cries of human pain, unbending the crouch of human fear – who could argue with this, especially when the historical present features so much politically let blood, politically inflicted pain. (Brown 452) Pramod K. Nayar states that “affective accounts of suffering . . . retain . . . purchase in global consciousness” (18). Human rights narratives are instrumental in the recognition of the “universality of human suffering” (4). In fact, Moore and Goldberg have gone as far as to argue that the expansion of human rights discourses means that “leaps of both literacy and translation are needed to facilitate the shareability of and thus response-ability to suffering” (12). Put another way, this means that the diffusion and vernacularization of global rights discourses is connected to the translation and distribution of stories of corporeal suffering, on one hand, and the generation of an effective and coherent global response to these narratives of pain, on the other.

Corpus Delicti: The Body as Witness The focus on documenting and describing bodily suffering within human rights contexts is connected to the significance of corpora delicti in the human rights advocacy paradigm. Renshaw argues that “the body-aswitness has become a trope of the reckonings that follow acts of violence” (10). In a situation where human rights atrocities have occurred,

96  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator the body functions as the absent/present witness to acts of violence (14). Renshaw outlines this in the following words: The privileging of physical evidence, including human remains, in investigations into the traumatic past is thought to counteract some of the anxieties around the fallibility of human memory, the act of witnessing, and the construction of narratives about the past in testimony. (Renshaw 14) Thomas Laqueur refers to the body as “corpus delicti” and argues that it has “assumed . . . prominence in how we think about human rights violations” (76). He quotes the Campbell Black Law Dictionary according to which corpus delicti refers to the “body or substance of a crime which ordinarily includes two elements: the act and the criminal agency of the act” (Laqueur 75). Laqueur highlights how the unearthing of corpus delicti – and the facts surrounding its state – has “become a central and much publicized aspect of international human rights work” (75). Contemporary human rights are focused almost exclusively on dead bodies and corpora delicti have a “privileged space in human rights discourse” (Gates-Madsen 56–57). The bodies of human rights victims are “physical evidence” of the crimes committed against them and as burial and forensic sites where these bodies have been buried often constitute the locus of human rights inquiries (57). Human rights workers consider the corpus delicti to be the “particular, corporeal and substantial fact” that establishes the perpetration of a human rights atrocity (Laqueur 76). The corpus delicti is an “articulate witness to a crime” that has been committed (77). He stands at “ground zero” and experts must use his remains to build and develop a “narrative of truth and specificity” (76). Laqueur refers to the corpus delicti as the “kernel of truth,” which can be used to “write a narrative with political, juridical, and more intimate, memorial and therapeutic consequences” (76).

IPTK Local rights groups in Kashmir have also appropriated the generic conventions of the international human rights report, and its canonical focus on narratives of suffering and corpora delicti to create affect is transported wholesale within their publications. The IPTK’S 2009 human rights report extensively tabulated the presence of mass graves in Kashmir. The IPTK is made up of local human rights activists, academics, lawyers as well as lay participants from Kashmiri civil society. It aims to discover, investigate, and dissect instances of “institutionalized violence, social trauma and human rights abuses” in the Jammu and Kashmir region (“Premise”). In their report, the IPTK investigated and confirmed the existence of 2,700 mass graves in three districts in ­Kashmir – Kupwara, Bandipore and Baramulla – located close to the Line

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  97 of Control. The IPTK’s report makes use of “next-of-kin, community and collective testimony,” photographic evidence and archival research as part of its fact-finding mission to categorically prove the existence of unmarked mass graves in Kashmir (Chatterji et al. 11). It is divided into six chapters, and each chapter begins with a coloured, high-resolution photograph of unmarked graves, close to residential areas and/or on unnamed mountain slopes, and these photographs are accompanied by labels outlining the location of the graves. The aim of this human rights report is the scientific tabulation of the corpora delicti, their numbers and their distribution in villages in each of the four local districts. Table 2.1 is taken from the IPTK’s human rights report and documents the distribution and number of bodies discovered during the human rights investigation. There is a latent and discursive power in numbers. Brian Root argues that “human rights fact-finding is a largely quantitative affair” and it is common to find “casualty count studies, victim surveys and advanced statistical analyses” within human rights advocacy work (356). Numbers offer the reader a sense of certainty and “precision” and are an integral component of human rights advocacy work (356). Quoting numbers, which often seem opaque and irrefutable, is a “powerful political tool” that can be used to convince and audience of the truthfulness of the claims being made (357). Root writes that, “the power of statistical analysis within the advocacy is clear: numbers, usually big numbers, compel attention. Human rights advocacy organizations understand this and attempt to cite numbers wherever possible” (359). The IPTK’s report also uses a combination of testimony and forensic analysis of the gravesites to construct a narrative of the crime. An eyewitness, for example, testifies to the fact that “[o]nce a completely scorched body was brought from Gagnoosa village and was handed over to us. The deceased had been scorched by army troops in the grass in Gagnoosa and then we buried that torched body here” (Chatterji et al. 49). In addition, the investigators and forensic experts utilize the body as a “kernel of truth” and arrive at the conclusion that the remains are, at times, incinerated and/or burnt in order to conceal their identities and make the process of identifying them difficult, if not impossible (30). The investigators use physical evidence related to the body, as well as testimonies regarding the appearance of the body at the moment of discovery, to piece together a narrative about the circumstances of its demise. Testimonies included in the report contribute to its emotional and affective appeal and emphasize the physical suffering endured by the victims, prior to their death. For example: The left side of his face was mutilated. I suppose they had fired bullets in his head. His shirt was burnt, his eyes had been gouged out, and many parts of his body bore injury marks as if he had been hit by explosives. (16)

Total 23 w. 112 + bodies

2 [total 6 bodies]

4 [total 30 bodies]

17 [total 76 + bodies]

Graves with more than two bodies

Source: Table in Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian-Administered Kashmir, International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir, 2 Dec. 2009

Total 3 districts 55 villages

Total 154 w. 308 bodies

6

82 (65.6 percent)

Bandipora 8 villages investigated Total 2373 (87.9 percent)

8

1278 (87.9 percent)

Kupwara 14 villages investigated

140

1013 (90.3 percent)

1122 w. 1321 bodies 1453 w. 1487 125 w. 135 bodies Total 2700 w. 2943+ bodies

Baramulla 33 villages investigated

Graves with bodies

Unnamed graves (of those documented)

Graves documented by the IPTK

District

Table 2.1 Distribution of mass graves in Kashmir

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  99 The human right report’s generic focus on descriptions and testimonies that emphasize suffering and bodily pain is translated – carried across – from the global to the local, and for this reason, the rhetorical language of the HRW’s report bears a striking resemblance to that of the IPTK’s report, despite the differences in their overall findings. The Kashmiri subject is presented as an abject victim of physical violence in both reports. For Mooney, the human in human rights is a suffering, corporeal human body, over and above anything else. She states in clear terms that: “The human who should be the subject of human rights is a person who lives, breathes, eats and suffers. The human we need to consider is ultimately the person, every person in pain” (Mooney 10). And this “person in pain” is precisely the human figure that is represented through the human rights reports published by HRW and the IPTK in order to stir the emotions of their readers and make claims on their moral conscience. Human rights reports generally address legal practitioners as well as other NGOs but are also covered by the press and their legal findings watered down and remediated for a lay audience. McLagan states that human rights organizations are part of a “circulatory matrix, or dedicated communications infrastructure, out of which human rights claims are generated and through which they travel” (192). According to her, this circulatory matrix constitutes “multiple layers – commercial, nonprofit, non-governmental, intergovernmental, and c­ommunity . . . these circuits provide the scaffolding for the making public of human rights violations” (192). Similarly, the HRW and the IPTK are also part of a “circulatory matrix” that includes governmental and nongovernmental bodies, legal practitioners, and members of the ‘community,’ including human rights activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens, all of whom are the addressees of their findings. Ann Murphy argues that corporeal vulnerability constitutes a powerful basis for articulations of shared humanism (589). This would explain why the body in pain, or in danger of sustaining pain, constitutes a locus for mass human rights action and advocacy. Murphy quotes works by Butler and Cavarero in which Murphy observes the emergence of a “new corporeal humanism” that is “grounded in the ontological fact of vulnerability, dispossession and exposure” (589). This “new corporeal humanism,” she maintains, is also “attentive to the differences that mark bodies, and respectful of the radically different ways that vulnerability and dispossession are lived [by marginalized subjects].” (589). “Bodies,” she writes, “are understood as part of a global community in which each is vulnerable to the other” (589). As mentioned earlier, Butler argues that human bodies are fundamentally vulnerable and the experience and acknowledgement of this vulnerability and precariousness is what makes us feel interconnected and relatable as human beings (Precarious 20). Murphy maintains that “it is the recognition of the vulnerability that every unique body evinces that grounds the humanistic ethic” of both

100  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator Cavarero and Butler. However, according to Murphy, neither goes as far as to connect their conceptualization of human vulnerability and fragility to the concept of human rights. But they do “gesture towards the possibility of a humanistic ethic that finds its provocation in an anonymous state of corporeal vulnerability” (578). The argument that the shared vulnerability of our human bodies connects us is immediately resonant and intelligible and functions as a motivation for protecting bodies from harm and rendering them worthy, deserving and above all, in need of fundamental human rights. In line with this, the human rights reports that we have discussed in this chapter also use vivid testimonies to emphasize the vulnerability of human bodies to harm and to motivate their audiences to action. The centrality of narratives of suffering in reports, we can then conclude, is grounded in the fact that these narratives provide evidence of past crimes while compelling readers to be moved by the findings.

Human Rights Advocacy Through Literary Fiction Typically, literary works that position themselves in human rights frameworks and attempt to do the work of human rights try to construct a fictionalized narrative of the crime by utilizing the physical traces left on the victim’s body (Moore, Vulnerability 130). Michael Ondaatje’s critically acclaimed, postcolonial novel Anil’s Ghost is an example of an author undertaking “the dangerous work of piecing together a history for a corpse unearthed in a government-controlled area during Sri Lanka’s long civil war” (130). The Collaborator also represents and narrativizes the corpora delicti that lie in mass, open graves in the Valley of Kashmir, but instead of using these human remains to construct a narrative only of the crime, Waheed restores their names and stories to these corporeal remains, in an attempt to re-assign meaning and memory to them. Kashmiri subjects, instead of functioning merely as decontextualized numbers or unclaimed bodies lying in mass graves are represented as interrupted lives. The novel is set in the late 1980s when the Kashmiri freedom or azadi movement was gaining momentum and popular support in the Valley of Kashmir. During this period, the unnamed protagonist lived a protected life in Nowgam – a “tiny, sparse hamlet” – nestling in the Kashmir Valley which was, at the time, shielded from the political turmoil enveloping the large urban centres in Kashmir (Waheed, The Collaborator 27). Narrated in the first person, The Collaborator describes the serene and solitary existence of its protagonist who, alongside his friends Hussain, Gul, Ashfaq, and Mohammed, a group of lively adolescents, spends his time playing cricket, composing and reciting poetry and swimming in the “languid stream[s]” that flow from scenic, snow-capped peaks (Waheed 7). The serenity of their lives is interrupted by the militarization of the border regions. The local Gujjar population is seen as complicit with the

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  101 Kashmiri militants crossing into Pakistan from the major urban centres and towns to receive military training and for this reason, the Indian army subjects the community to curfews and crackdowns. As a result of these tactics of punishment and control, the otherwise itinerant, detached, and largely apolitical Gujjar community becomes politicized in the novel. The elusive promises of azadi begin to resonate with the protagonist’s friends and eventually all of them, with the notable exception of the nameless protagonist, become freedom fighters. Meanwhile, this protagonist stays behind in Nowgam and bears witness to the destruction of his native village and the disappearance and killing of his young, childhood friends. Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator is a particular but representative case of a fictional life narrative that has been mobilized as a vehicle for garnering political traction and gaining clout in both the regional and transnational public sphere. As mentioned earlier, Waheed’s novel functions as an imaginative counterpart to reports discussed above, a claim that is supported by the author himself. A year after the release of The Collaborator, on 6th July, 2012, Mirza Waheed’s article, “India’s Bloodstained Democracy,” was published in The New York Times. In this article, Waheed describes the findings of the State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) regarding the presence of unmarked mass graves in Kashmir in four districts located close to the Line of Control (LOC) (Waheed “India’s”) The findings of the SHRC basically confirmed the “landmark” findings in IPTK’s human rights report (Waheed, “Where”). In this article, Waheed reframes The Collaborator as a fictional counterpart of the human rights reports published by the SHRC and the IPTK. The following paragraph highlights this: Last September, a lawmaker in Indian-controlled Kashmir stood up in the state’s legislative assembly and spoke of a valley filled with human carcasses near his home constituency in the mountains: “In our area, there are big gorges, where there are the bones of several hundred people who were eaten by crows.” I read about this in faraway London and was filled with a chill – I had written of a similar valley, a fictional one, in my novel about the lost boys of Kashmir. The assembly was debating a report on the uncovering of more than 2,000 unmarked and mass graves. (Waheed “India’s”) Here, Waheed vexes the boundaries between literary fiction and legal reports and positions The Collaborator as a fictionalized account of the findings of the IPTK and SHRC. Exploiting the power of fiction to represent the pleasures of lived experience, and to construct a powerful human subject, Mirza Waheed humanizes the corpora delicti lying in the Valley. Unlike the human rights reports published by the IPTK and HRW, The Collaborator constructs a narrative of pleasure, rather than of bodily

102  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator suffering and pain, and uses this narrative to capture the imagination, sympathy, and solidarity of its regional and transnational readers. The passage below emphasizes the fact that bodies of victims are more than a statistic in a mass grave, but are the corporeal remains of once living beings: The other day I even started talking to my skeletal audience. You know, they look at you with their mid-sentence grins and teeth and you feel someone just said something. . . . Sad dismal demeaned reflections of their former selves. (10) Corpora delicti have value beyond providing evidentiary data on a human rights crime. They have “mid-sentence grins” showing the fact that their lives and their sentences have been suddenly interrupted in medias res. Kashmiri bodies are described as being “demeaned reflections of their former selves” and The Collaborator constructs a trajectory of the lived reality of these former selves, before they were reduced to their primal, corporeal identities. The novel highlights the limitations of using corpora delicti as the primary basis for doing human rights advocacy work. For example, when a Delhi TV crew are expected to arrive in Kashmir for the sake of filming foreign militants, Captain Kadian reveals how human remains lying in open graves can be manipulated and their identities modified: “I can fucking make any maderchod look like an Afghan. The dead don’t speak, remember and I still have plenty of old photos and clothes” (Waheed 9). Wilson highlights the fallibility of what Renshaw calls the “forensic paradigm” of human rights work and, in a certain sense, his critique is in line with Captain Kadian’s observation that bodies cannot speak to us directly. According to Wilson, in order to investigate human rights atrocities and to re-construct the past, the “scientific positivism” represented by forensic exhumations should be made subordinate to “the more profound application of historical analysis” (58). Put somewhat differently, the body itself cannot be the only “kernel of truth” or the only means of accessing the past because it is a ­de-contextualized entity that can only tell us so much (Laqueur 76). This incapacity of the body to narrate the circumstances of its own oppression must necessarily be supplemented by historical reconstructions in order to obtain a fuller, more fleshed out representation of past atrocity (Renshaw 13). Renshaw also considers it simple-minded to believe that the body enables forensic experts, scientists and human rights workers to have access to the unadulterated past in a way that first-person testimonies cannot because, in her words, “bodies and objects from mass graves are not simply ‘revealed’ during exhumation but are continuously represented and framed to support particular historical narratives” (14). Here, she refers primarily to the framing and “mediation [of forensic evidence] through

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  103 acts of selections and framing” undertaken by human rights agents who, we can safely assume, do not have insidious intentions (14). On the other hand, Kadian and his officers lack the pristine motives of human rights workers and are, in fact, complicit in the crimes that have been visited upon Kashmiri bodies. In line with this, the presentation of evidence goes beyond the act of “framing,”as identified by Renshaw, and extends to the active concealment and even destruction of any incriminatory proof that is uncovered. With this perspective in the backdrop, The Collaborator re-emphasizes the importance of forensic data but also personal narrative and testimony in investigating and representing human rights atrocities.

Melancholic Temporalities This focus on pleasures, as I have argued in the previous chapter, is rooted in local narratives of rights. In Curfewed Night, we observed how partaking in the pleasures of the land through activities such as ploughing and harvesting and loitering in teaming city squares and before storefronts emerge as examples of embodied cosmopolitanism. The reconceptualization of Kashmiriyat as a type of rights-based, pleasure-seeking in physical space is explored in greater depth in Waheed’s novel, which taps into the subversive and resistive power of pleasure and constructs melancholic temporalities that disrupt linear, narrative progression. The unnamed protagonist of The Collaborator is melancholic for past pleasures. Freud defines mourning as “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty” (Freud, Mourning 244). Typically, during the course of mourning, the subject “activates” memories of the lost object and this “hyperremembering” allows the subject to comprehend what has been lost (Freud 255; Clewell 44). Following this, the libido slowly and painstakingly detaches itself from the loved object and, in a move, which is considered positive and life-affirming, re-invests its energies into a new, replacement object. In opposition to mourning, melancholia is defined as a fraught and seemingly endless process characterized by a “painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of selfregarding feelings” in the sufferer (Freud, Mourning 243). It is marked by a failure to acknowledge and accept the loss of the loved object. Both mourning and melancholia are reactions to the loss of pleasure and happiness, but in the case of melancholia, the melancholic subject refuses to forget and relinquish the memories of these pleasures. While it might appear that melancholia, which is characterized by a lack of interest in the ‘outside world’ and a failure to participate in everyday life, is the binary opposite of pleasure and vitality, I argue that melancholia is in fact rooted in an overwhelming attachment to the source and object

104  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator of pleasure. It is not as much a rejection of life, and a withdrawal from formerly beloved rituals and activities, as it is testament to the importance of pleasure in ensuring the physical and emotional well-being of the human subject. Certain literary scholars have identified the strategic political and ethical import of melancholia. Tammy Clewell, for example, examines Freud’s theory in light of depictions of mourning and bereavement in contemporary fiction and arrives at the conclusion that closure, consolation, and redemption are no longer sought in certain works of literature (Clewell 53, 57). Creative texts may even seek to prolong the pain and affective experience of mourning in order to foreground the “social politics and personal ethics entailed in loss” (Clewell 53). She makes us aware of the ethical usefulness of interminable mourning and highlights how resisting the enticement of consolation could, instead of harming the subject, engender agency in them (53). Eric Santner has argued that human subjectivity is fundamentally melancholic (Forter 135–37). Similarly, Jahan Ramazani argues that modernist poems display “melancholic mourning,” which he defines as a type of mourning that does not seek consolation (qtd. in Clewell 54). Philip Novak proposes that for African Americans, melancholia is a means of remembering and reconstructing cultural norms, mores, and values that were repressed or erased by their former white oppressors (Forter 137). In keeping with this, José Esteban Muñoz states that especially for marginalized communities, “melancholia is not a pathology or a self-absorbed mood that inhibits activism, but . . . a mechanism that helps us (re)construct identity and take our dead to the various battles we must wage in their names” (qtd. in Forter 137). Eva Tettenborn takes the same view of melancholia as Novak and Muñoz, and states that melancholic figures in contemporary African American literary works should not be pathologized but should be perceived as “subjects engaged in acts of political resistance to dominant versions of memory and historiography” (102). I am going to apply these insights on the positive function of melancholia to Waheed’s novel. The cyclical and repetitive narrative structure of The Collaborator, for example, creates a melancholic temporality that subverts the linear flow of time. The novel’s plot has a melancholic structure that does not follow the diktat of calendrical, national-historical time and this is evinced in the formal organization of the chapters in the novel. Waheed’s novel constantly oscillates between the past and the present. It is divided into three parts, each of which consists of a series of individual chapters, and these parts are titled “Now and Then . . .”, “Then . . .” and “Now . . .”. The first part constantly moves back and forth between the protagonist’s childhood, a period that coincides with political calm in the Valley, and his adolescence, which, in sharp contrast to the earlier calm, is marred by the beginning of militant insurgency and the departure of his

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  105 beloved friends to Pakistan to receive guerilla training. Even though the later chapters of the novel, namely “Then . . .” and “Now . . .” imply a linear plot progression, here too, the sequence of events defies teleological development. Prolepsis, analepsis, hallucinations, dream sequences, and ghostly sightings skew linear temporal progression in The Collaborator. These flashbacks, flashforwards, and hallucinatory episodes usually pertain to memories and experiences of pleasure that are created, enjoyed, and enacted in the public space. The novel breaks linear narrative flow to foreground and to reclaim the pleasures of the public space, and the contested borderlands in which they are enacted and enjoyed as well as force the reader to ruminate over performances of pleasure. For example, The Collaborator is punctuated by repetitive recollections of the protagonist’s childhood friends. The act of rewinding the stolen hours spent with his best friend Hussain before his departure is a form of Freudian ‘hyperremembering’ whereby memories of the lost beloved are summoned and recollected. During the early years of the insurgency, Gul, Hussain, Asfaq, and Mohammed disappear one after the other. Hussain is believed to have crossed the border into Pakistan to receive armed training and his other friends are suspected to have followed suit. The novel explores the ambiguity and uncertainty of their fate without giving any clear indication of what ultimately befell them, whether they survived and if they managed to return home alive. Meanwhile, the protagonist is left behind to make sense of their disappearance and to negotiate his feelings of deep loss and betrayal, following their unexpected flight from their ancestral village of Nowgam. He fears finding the corpses of his friends in one of the mass graves in the Valley and imagines them lying mutilated at the bottom of the Jhelum River, which he perceives as a watery grave that carries human remains. However, instead of letting his friends become consigned to a pile of corporeal debris, and to be a nameless part of the “detritus,” the protagonist brings his friends to life by fleshing out their unique personalities and recalling pleasurable past experiences with them (19). In particular, he remembers the joy of running, hiking, and resting on the slopes of the Valley and, through this, is able to momentarily forget the troubled geopolitics of the region: In my childhood, it was very easy to ignore the Pakistani and Indian checkposts on either side; you forgot about them the moment you stepped on new, untouched, fresh-from-dried dew grass and ran downhill for a few minutes before making generous boot marks – I liked long 8s and floral designs – all over the place. They were faroff, distant, almost unreal. . . . And by the time we had assumed full ownership of the place and didn’t care who was or wasn’t peering at us from some ugly check-post out there on the mountainside. After

106  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator swimming in the chilly water, we would lie down on the thick carpet of grass for ages, looking at the really really blue sky. (Waheed 7) Melancholic for past pleasures enjoyed in the company of his friends, the protagonist re-enacts them in his mind. By enjoying the public space through shared physical activities, the protagonist and his friends reclaim territory for their own happiness and fulfilment. They make “generous boot marks” in the ground, ignore the constant surveillance of Indian and Pakistani soldiers, and “assume full ownership of the place,” all of which are indications of the reclamation of Kashmiri space through the performance and enactment of youthful joy. As such, the protagonists are able to momentarily transform the barbed wire borderland of Kashmir, which is shown as being obsessively surveilled and controlled by Indian and Pakistani troops, into a place of pleasure, where young Kashmiris can hike, swim, jump, slide and have some semblance of a normal adolescence. The protagonist-narrator remembers instances of Hussain singing in the mountains, while the rest of them lay in the grass and enjoyed his tuneful and melodious renditions. Hussain, who was the protagonist’s best friend, is represented as a likeable, physically attractive young man, with a terse conservative father, who is averse to the former’s desire to become a professional singer and to move to a major Indian metropole to pursue his dreams. Hussain is “the gifted one, the charmer, the bright future of his household, the big hope of . . . [a] small nondescript hamlet” and his disappearance in particular is a severe blow to the protagonist (39). Hussain “would sit by the river, feet playing a strange tune in the water and sing to the mountains, while we . . . we would just sit back” (28). In Chapter 6, “Hussain and I,” the protagonist has a flashback of an expedition that Hussain and he undertook to visit a mystical shepherd called Azad Range WahWah, who lived on the Koh-i-Gam or “mountain of sorrow” (82). He remembers the journey fondly, especially the buoyant Hussain who happily trekked ahead of him, enjoying the pastoral beauty of the land: He hummed constantly, slapping a fir on the way, plucking a berry from here, tearing off a wiry branch from there, kicking a pine cone, marking small signs on the winding footpath . . . and talking to me now and then from up ahead. (83) Hussain is shown to be more familiar with the mountainous terrain than the protagonist, and because of this, is able to scale the slopes with greater ease, self-reliance, and elegance. During the climb, he enjoys his surroundings by picking berries and kicking pine cones. This is meant to “mark [. . .] small signs on the winding path” and to reclaim and

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  107 appropriate Kashmiri physical space for the utilization and pleasure of Kashmiris. The novel carefully highlights the tactile relationship that Hussain has with the objects in his vicinity, with the trees and with the land. Hussain is usually represented interacting with the beautiful landscape by either singing a mellifluous ditty to the mountains, swimming in the river or gazing at the trees in rapt silence. The protagonist reminisces over the weeks that followed school examinations during which his friends “passed many days exactly as [they] . . . liked” (104). They played cricket from early morning till sundown, swam until their ears buzzed, “talked away whole evenings until Baba sent for me, [ate] unripe cherries from Gul Khan’s orchard . . . made Hussain sing till his throat gave” and stole apples from neighbouring orchards (104). The escapades with his friends that the protagonist remembers in the novel usually involve different, pleasurable physical activities in the public space and through these enactments of pleasure, the five of them collectively assert their right to their own land and to the pleasures associated with it. It is these memories that come to haunt the protagonist once his friends leave the Valley, suddenly, without bidding him goodbye or offering a reason for their ill-advised leave-taking. Distraught and alone, he walks familiar mountain paths and recalls how only a few weeks ago, “the valley had reverberated with Hussain’s song and Mohammed’s laughter and Ashfaq’s whistles; only a few nights ago, the village, the street, the street corner, had warmed with our conversation” (157). In the quotation above, laughter, song and conversation emerge as means of occupying and taking ownership of space and articulating the Kashmiri right to safety and “freedom of movement,” which have been promised by the UDHR (“UN”).

Hauntings The unnamed protagonist does not merely dwell on moments of fleeting pleasure and enjoyment enjoyed in the public space, but also re-enacts some of these moments after his friends have departed for Pakistan. For instance, he tries re-living their pleasurable escapades in the Jhelum river and taking “one last dip” in the “stream of . . . [his] childhood” (Waheed 19). He refers to the river as his “personal Hades”; drawing a parallel between the Jhelum river and the Greek realm of the underworld (19). By invoking this Greek mythological reference, he turns the river into a liminal space that straddles the gap between the land of the living and the dead. The protagonist wades into the river until even his head is submerged and he enters the realm of the deceased who surround him in “a choric huddle” (19). In this way, the river becomes a metaphor for the melancholic subject’s link with the lost object, a connection that is forged by clinging onto the object of loss as part of a “hallucinatory wishful psychosis” (Freud, Mourning 244).

108  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator His friends appear as ghosts energetically swimming in the river, as they used to, but now in a grievously injured albeit familiar form. Hussain, who was described as “handsome, lean, delicate” and a “dear singer,” has “blood smeared all over and his throat is slit” (20). Mohammed, referred to as “merry and full of big-boy bravado” appears without his eyes and hands (20). Meanwhile, Gul Khan, who was described as having “exemplary powers with all the girls,” has lost his face below his nose, and his beautiful eyes are closed (20). Ashfaq, the “classic melancholic, the brooding thinker” has holes all over his body (20–21). It is not just the protagonist who is nostalgic for the past. The ghosts themselves wish to re-connect with their former lives and try to stand shoulder to shoulder in a “friend circle” in the river (20). These young men attempt to leave the underworld and to re-enact moments of pleasure, and through this, break the linear narrativity of the literary text. Despite focalizing on pleasure, here we can observe how The Collaborator allows for the possibility of loss, bodily pain and suffering to co-exist alongside representations of pleasure. There is in this episode a cautious acknowledgement on the part of the protagonist of the fact that his friends might have become victims of human rights atrocities and be yet another set of abject bodies littering the landscape. At the same time, he does not want them to be known only as the sum total of their bodily injuries, and as such, he reveals to the reader how they were as persons, prior to the human rights violation that reduced them to unidentified broken bodies in the river.

Hallucinations One of the central fictional subjects that the novel presents to the reader is Rouf Qadri, a young Kashmiri man, whose remains lie rotting in an open mass grave. His cadaver is humanized and contextualized for the reader through representations of a series of visceral hallucinations that the protagonist experiences at the scene of the atrocity. Like the injured bodies of his friends that the protagonist imagines in the Jhelum river, the human remains in the mass graves that we encounter in The Collaborator do not share the anonymity of numbers that characterize the human rights reports published by the IPTK and HRW. Instead of being represented exclusively as a body that has experienced intense pain and corporeal torture, the author represents the unclaimed Kashmiri cadaver as a youthful, vain, and handsome Kashmiri man who reeked of hair oil and had even styled his locks before setting out on a dangerous, guerrilla mission. In a lucid and haunting passage, the protagonist describes Rouf Qadri, who lies in an open grave in the Valley: In one of my first trips down to the valley, I felt exhausted and fell asleep alongside one of freshly arrived boys. He smelled of hair oil. He had probably combed his hair back before leaving on his mission.

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  109 I talked to him or maybe I didn’t, for I don’t know how long I slept in his company. . . . His watch was still ticking and the time was quarter past three. 19 April 1993. In my wakeful dream, he said he was from Sopore and his name was Rouf Ahmad Qadri. (Waheed 18) Here, the identifying marker of the deceased body is not the fact of their brutal killing, but the presence of “Dabur hair oil,” the grooming condiment commonly deployed as a makeshift styling gel, in the dead man’s lush hair. We get an embodied sense of not just his wounded physicality, but also his personality. The still-ticking watch functions as a metaphor for the beating heart and endows the cadaver with a sort of post-mortem existence, which coupled with his freshly combed hair, contributes to the life-like appearance of his decomposing body. The narrator recounts Rouf’s descriptions of a privileged, upper-middle class existence prior to becoming a militant: He might have told me more about himself, his family, his life, his days in Sopore, in chotta London, his friends, his love life even – maybe, maybe, he would have told me how he grew up in that rich fruit town and how he’d had such a prosperous life. He would have told me how he was driven to school in a green Ambassador by his wealthy father’s driver, wearing his new red tweeds and grey wool trousers . . . he would have told me about his visits outside Kashmir as well, when he went to Delhi, or even as far as Bombay, with his father – who travelled to big cities in India selling his apple-laden trucks for lakhs of rupees – and how his father took him to the cinema to see an English film and how they travelled by the train, even took a plane to Delhi, and saw all the big things in the world, the cities, the tall buildings, the big cars, the bright markets. (Waheed 150) In the above passage, The Collaborator offers the reader a crucial vista on the lived experience of Rouf Qadri in the form of the circumstances preceding his extrajudicial killing. In this example, we have a representation not just of the scattered and de-contextualized corporeal remains but also of the living person, the young boy from a comfortable, upperclass background who drove to school in an expensive car and watched Hollywood films with his father. While the testimony in a human rights report is listed by way of direct speech, this particular narration is mediated and recounted by the protagonist. However, it is not comparable to a first-person testimony to the extent that it is a fictional narration that tries to map the life of an imagined subject. As such, it obviously has no overt legal or juridical value. Moreover, the narrator in this case is not a traditional human rights worker but an unreliable narrator, who likely

110  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator suffers from untreated PTSD and whose hallucinations are not a straightforward or truthful recollection of material reality. The point however is not to grant this particular testimonial narrative the legal stature of testimony, but to view it as an attempt to reconstruct and represent parts of the victim’s lives, which transcend the fact of their bodily disintegration and dismemberment. In other words, those aspects of the subject’s life which are typically not given space within human rights stories are delved into and discussed. The extrajudicial killing of Rouf is not represented exclusively as a physical trace on his bodily remains – a suspicious-looking wound, or a violent gash – but is constructed as the interruption of his everyday routines and pleasures. Waheed offers the reader an alternative language to speak about human rights atrocities and crimes against humanity besides the purely legislative, and/or suffering-cantered vocabulary of human rights. We meet and converse with wounded bodies in Waheed’s novel but these bodies have, to paraphrase Shakespeare, “shuffled off” or at least, in some sense, surpassed, their “mortal coil” (158). Rouf Qadri is a metonymic stand-in for the multiple corpora delicti, the bodies of Kashmiris that were unearthed in mass graves in the region over the last few years. This is indicated by the fact that Mirza Waheed refers to the youths lying unclaimed in the Valley, as “scores of Roufs,” each with their own background, their “family” their “life,” their “friends” and their love lives (150). Waheed’s novel is an example of local human rights advocacy conducted through the medium of fiction. Rather than merely translating and adopting the global norms of human rights advocacy work, this fictional text offers readers and international human rights workers a starkly different language for performing the work of human rights and winning over the sympathy and interest of its publics. Victims of human rights are represented as more than damaged bodies punctuating a distant, macabre geography, with only their tortured limbs and body parts to bear witness to their traumatic past. Within the text, they emerge as life-like and highly articulate beings whose stories, personal memories, and pleasures in a land considered to be a pastoral paradise are gradually re-discovered and re-imagined. Pleasure, as a binary opposite of pain, can be “really language building” according to Scarry (“The Body” 224). In an interview, she discusses how intense pleasure, unlike pain, is conducive to narrative-making: [E]ven intense sexual desire is productive of narratives, as witnessed by the fact that we’ve got a huge number of wonderful stories about being love, and even acute desire is included in these stories. If you think of other kinds of bodily pleasure, such as eating, one again sees the fact that from Homer forward, people in a state of pleasure are often not alone with their food, but in a very social situation – having a dinner party, moving into the highest levels of argument

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  111 and invention. This is an indication that pleasure tends to be worldbuilding and pain to be world-destroying. (Scarry 224–25) Nancy Gates-Madsen states that there is a “fundamental tension in human rights discourse between focusing on the body of a disappeared person as evidence of a crime or as an individual with a unique life story” (54). She quotes the example of the testimonial text I Remember Julia (1996), in which Eric Carlson traces the circumstances of the death and the lived experiences of Julia, an Argentinian medical student, by collecting oral testimonies from people who had been associated with her, including her family and loved ones, in order to construct a portrait of the person before she became yet another victim of the Argentinian military dictatorship (54). Gates-Madsen states that, “a focus on material remains precludes consideration of the lives and politics of the missing,” and, as such, may not be sufficient in giving us a comprehensive sense of their personhood (57). The Collaborator, like I Remember Julia, acknowledges the victimization or death of the subject, but it also offers the reader a richer, more comprehensive view of the identity and experiences of the subject. I Remember Julia collects testimonies connected to Julia’s political life and her identity as a medical student whereas Waheed’s novel, instead of only probing the many identities of the human rights victim, specifically represents and narrativizes experiences of pleasure, and it is this pleasurecentric impulse, which to an extent differentiates it from Carlson’s testimonial narrative. The insights and rhetorical strategies utilized and employed by creative fiction can be potentially carried over and translated into the legal realm of human rights advocacy and research. The Collaborator questions the language of physical victimization and the suffering-centred plots that are used in the testimonies that we usually find in traditional human rights reports. This novel subverts the global norms of human rights advocacy by providing us with a different language, and a radically altered strategy to articulate and publicize human rights violations and to create awareness about the issues faced by victims of human rights atrocity.

Kashmir Bicycle Movement The pleasure-centred mode of advocacy that we observe in The Collaborator is related to and has linkages with the transformation in human rights advocacy in Kashmir as well as in the South Asian region, particularly in the arena of feminist struggle and contestation. In this section, I will explore the activism undertaken by advocacy groups such as Kashmir Bicycle Movement in Kashmir, Girls at Dhabas in Pakistan, and Why Loiter in India in order to show their resonance with Waheed’s novel.

112  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator The Kashmiri Bicycle Movement emerged as a Facebook group in June 2013, and was founded by Kashmiri writer, scholar, and activist, Gowhar Fazili (M. Fazili). Fazili, a figure we have encountered already, is responsible for promoting the use of “joyous means of asserting . . . identity and independence” in Kashmir (Fazili, “Can Happiness”). In other words, he recommends using performances of pleasure as a way of staging resistance and giving the cyclist a “sense of Azadi” (“About”). The word azadi [freedom] here refers to an embodied pleasure and supports my claim that for a new generation of Kashmiri activists, ‘freedom’ or attaining freedom denotes reclaiming former pleasures. I posit that the Kashmiri scholars and writers considered in this book imagine rights as a series of freedoms that involve pleasure. For them, universal human rights denote both negative and positive human rights that give the human being access to pleasure, enjoyment and a dignified existence rather than offering only the bare minimum legal protections against grievous harm and bodily injury. Theorizing azadi as pleasure is also a shift away from the vows and promises to laying down one’s life for azadi, or to snatch azadi away from the violent oppressors – a popular chant in the streets of Kashmir (“cheen kay rahain gay azadi”) (Vij). The idea of azadi as being able to ride bicycles through the public space offers a way out of the violence and retaliatory violence that has been used to stake a claim over fundamental human rights in Kashmir over the past two decades. One of the objectives of the Kashmiri Bicycle Movement is also to “reclaim streets of Kashmir for people, displace cars and restore pride in riding bicycles” (“About”). The Facebook group is the platform through which Kashmiris organize group cycling events, decide on meeting points and post photographs of their cycling expeditions. While the protagonist and his friends in The Collaborator reclaim territory through pleasurable activities enacted in the public space, environmental activists such as Fazili use cycling to create a sense of enjoyment and camaraderie, and to transform streets into spaces of pleasure rather than of near-constant fear and surveillance. However, since 2013, the activity of the group has waned and the last status urging the need to organize a group event was posted in July 2015 and reads as follows: “Let us resume our Zalgur trips after Ramzaan-ulMubarak in August Inshallah! Please keep your cycles well oiled.” But the founding of the group shows a moment of possibility, and an opportunity to engage with and reclaim Kashmiri landscape without resorting to forms of armed or stonepelting violence and to putting one’s body in physical danger. There are definitive resonances between the activities of the Kashmiri Bicycle Movement and the way The Collaborator’s protagonist and his friends attempt to engage with Kashmiri space and territory through hiking, swimming, sauntering in the mountains or even singing to them. The Kashmir Bicycle Movement is an example of human rights activism, which, I posit, it clearly aspires to be. The mention of the word

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  113 azadi [freedom] in the “About” section of The Kashmir Bicycle Movement clearly evokes a human rights framework. As mentioned previously, the word freedom, particularly mentioned in the context of Kashmir, is a reference to the UDHR and the discourse of human rights. The desire for azadi is commonly interpreted as a desire for the restoration of the “haqe-khud-iradiat” of Kashmiris, a term which is the direct lexical translation of “the right to self-determination.” This demand derives its moral and ethical force and persuasive power from the global legibility and legitimacy of universal human rights. As such, to my mind, the Kashmir Bicycle Movement can be typified as an indigenous human rights advocacy movement, which successfully publicizes the inaccessibility of public spaces in Kashmir by focusing on the loss of the pleasure of cycling and strolling in public spaces. In other words, in both claiming rights and foregrounding their absence, Kashmiri human rights practitioners on the Kashmir Bicycle Movement Facebook page made use of narratives of (interrupted) pleasure to make their point.

Feminist Initiatives in South Asia: Why Loiter and Girls at Dhabas The traditional, paternalistic dialogue on women’s rights and mobility in South Asia typically focuses on the protection of women against rape, assault, and other forms of sexual violence (Chatterjee). This discourse has been turned on its head by local advocacy groups that conversely focus on the pleasures experienced by women, particularly those that are enacted, performed, and claimed in public spaces. Here again, we have an example of a local rights movements reclaiming the idiom and language of pleasures as a potential tool for doing human rights advocacy, generating public interest and pushing for the rights of women in the region. In doing this, these feminist collectives offer an alternative to the globally dominant model of advocacy work, which relies on moving testimonies pertaining to bodily suffering endured by the victimized subject. This section explores activism undertaken by two advocacy groups, Girls at Dhabas in Pakistan and Why Loiter in India, both of whom have, to an extent, re-figured the conversation on gender rights and freedoms in the region. The activist movement Why Loiter frame acts of loitering, lingering, and loafing in public spaces as canny, feminist initiatives that are central to the achievement of equal rights. As such, they encourage women from across religious, class, caste, and ethnic lines to saunter, linger and loaf in public. This movement was inspired by a scholarly work bearing the same name, titled Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets in which Phadke et al. argue the following: Pleasure, in and of itself, is low on the list of priorities of not just city planners, but also feminists. Feminists are often wary of demanding

114  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator pleasure as it be might be seen as frivolous or worse irrelevant to a discussion on urbanism. Loitering then is not very likely to find a place in a feminist list of demands. . . . However, the struggle against violence and the quest for pleasure cannot be separate things. The quest for pleasures actually strengthens our struggle against violence, framing it in the language of rights rather than protection. . . . We seek to claim not just the right to work but the right to play – the right to unadulterated and unsanctioned pleasure. (183) Why Loiter transformed into #Why Loiter, an activist movement conducted in the public space, as well as on the Internet and social media platforms. It encouraged, documented, and promoted women loitering together and seeking to enjoy themselves in public spaces. The Why Loiter community and events were founded and organized by Neha Singh, a Mumbai-based author and activist, who alongside a group of female friends, went to a public park that was usually populated by men and lay in the grass (Faure). Later, they took photographs, and uploaded the evidence of their pleasurable loitering on social media. This generated public interest and resulted in the formation of a WhatsApp group and eventually a popular Facebook page, which to date has 5,772 members, with many more joining the ranks every day (Faure). Participants on the Why Loiter Facebook page organize loitering events at public places, tea-houses, street corners, and parks. For instance, one post on the group reads: “Join us tomorrow for a #pleasurepockets walk in #ahmedabad” and includes the time, the date and the location of congregation alongside a picture of young, middle-class women loitering at the seaside. An Indian woman named Neetole Mitra posts a smiling selfie of herself unaccompanied at the seaside, or indulging in street-side dining, close to a crowded railway station in Chennai. These acts of claiming space have attracted the attention of the local press including news outlets such as Scroll, The Hindu, India Express, and DNA India, to name a few, as well as international media houses, such as BBC News, which covered their New Year’s Eve loitering event, called #IWillGoOut which was organized through Why Loiter and through other feminist platforms, and encouraged women to step out into the streets and celebrate New Year’s Eve in public. Figure 2.1 is a poster for the #IWillGoOut protest event designed by Aruna Sekhar and Shilo Shiv Suleman for the Fearless Collective on 6 January 2017 and subsequently shared on social media. The Feminist Collective is a group of artists and writers who use artistic and aesthetic means to protest against gender violence (“The Fearless”). The poster features a sari-clad woman with her arms stretched in a gesture of relaxed abandon while textual blurbs appear close to her limbs bearing messages such as “I want to walk with abandon” and “I want to raise

Figure 2.1 “Poster for #IWillGoOut.” Source: Fearless Collective, 6 Jan 2017. https://www.facebook.com/fearlesscollective/ photos/a.752871124765231/1333102596742078/?type=3&theater Credit: Art by Shilo Shiv Suleman and poetry by Aruna Sekhar, Fearless Collective, 2017

116  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator my eyes to the stars,” which attempt to stake a claim to the pleasures of public spaces. The Why Loiter movement has carried across into Pakistan and, in 2015, a Karachi resident, Sadia Khatri, founded a corresponding movement called Girls at Dhabas, which encouraged women to claim public space by drinking tea at dhabas (street-side eateries) that are typically only frequented by and accessible to young men. The dhaba is symbolic of all public spaces, including parks, playgrounds, public walkways, inner city paths, alleys, and street corners, that are male-dominated and inaccessible or generally unwelcoming, to women at all hours or at selected hours of the day. The movement on the ground is coordinated through the Girls at Dhabas Facebook group and invites women to send submissions in the form of photographs of themselves loitering, playing cricket, cycling, and dining in public spaces. Like Why Loiter, Girls at Dhabas has created enormous traction for intersectional feminism and gender rights within Pakistan, and has been covered extensively by the local press, including prominent English national dailies, such as The News and Dawn. Adriana Cavarero states that there is a relationship between friendship, particularly female friendship, and storytelling: “I will tell you my story in order to make you capable of telling it to me. The narratable self’s desire for narration manifests itself in autobiographical exercises in order to entrust one’s own story to another’s storytelling” (114). In the case of Why Loiter and Girls at Dhabas, the friendship and pleasure that is engendered by enactments, performances, and documentations of collective loitering is conducive to the production of personal narratives. Unlike pain, which as Scarry argues, is the enemy of narrativity, friendship creates physical, emotional and psychic space for the subject to engage with and articulate the full breadth and complexity of their experiences.

Pleasurecentric Advocacy The cross-fertilization of the Why Loiter social movement is a testament to the viability and currency of this pleasurecentric model of human rights advocacy in which the subject is not just a victim of physical or psychic violence, but a being with autonomy, creativity and agency who is seeking to become positively enfranchised through access to different interpersonal, social, political, and communal pleasures. In other words, narratives of pleasure have a special resonance amongst regional publics. Sameera Khan, the author of Why Loiter, argues that the message that these local feminist movements wish to convey to local and international publics is that their lives and everyday social realities are not solely defined by violence, assault, and victimhood but are infinitely more multifaceted, complex, and pleasurable (Arya). Girls at Dhabas and Why Loiter take us beyond the trope of the female subject as an abject victim of sociopolitical and patriarchal violence.

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  117 The activism carried out by Why Loiter and Girls at Dhabas shows us that the work of translating rights does not only involve a hierarchical transfer of international human rights norms into local contexts, but rather a mutual vernacularization of legal norms in which the local also has the opportunity to transform the global and vice versa. Local and international rights vocabularies should be understood as being constantly engaged in an interminable process of dialogue, contestation, valourization and transmission across varied but ultimately interconnected discursive spaces. The Kashmiri Bicycle Movement functions as an example of a local movement that is affiliatively linked to transnational activist movements such as Girls at Dhabas and Why Loiter and attempts to create a “transnational advocacy network” to promote and highlight the human rights of Kashmiris. According to Sperling et. al, “transnational advocacy networks” are important in creating “a globalizing civil society, in which borders between states become permeable to international political activity” (1155). Kashmiri human rights practitioners are participating in concurrent transnational human rights movements in order to establish alliances with them, mobilize their respective publics in solidarity with the cause of abject Kashmiris and bring about a shift in the way human rights advocacy operates locally and internationally. Kabir states that “[t]he cycle becomes an unlikely yet beautifully appropriate mobile vehicular mode of reclaiming place and identity” (“Reclaiming”). However, as we have observed, there appears to be nothing unlikely about the bicycle and the pleasurable mobilities that it enables in Kashmir because there are, in fact, concurrent transnational movements taking place in India and Pakistan, that make use of this familiar model of mobilitycentred pleasurecentric advocacy. In addition to this, there is a historical tradition of rights advocacy and pleasurable mobility pre-dating Girls at Dhabas, particularly within first-wave feminist activism. With the availability of the bicycle, women in 19th century England, for example, were free to leave the confines of their homes, escape their domestic duties and the watchful gaze of chaperones to experience pleasure and “develop physical fitness” (Abrahams). In 1896, Susan B. Anthony, the American women’s rights activist, is said to have recognized the emancipatory capabilities of the bicycle at the turn of the century, and remarked that, “I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. I rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a bike. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes” (qtd. in Dawson). Concurring with this claim, Abrahams argues that the invention of the bicycle coincided with first-wave feminism such that “by the end of the 19th century, bicycles had become symbolically linked to women’s suffrage, in a way that is often forgotten today” (Abrahams). The Kashmir Bicycle Movement can be considered a contemporary reimagining of pleasurable feminist mobilities that were engendered, for

118  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator example, in metropolitan terrains in 19th century America. In addition to this, it is also affiliatively linked to contemporary feminist movements such as Girls at Dhabas and Why Loiter, which are being used to reclaim space and human rights in South Asian cities by resuscitating and recreating pleasurecentric feminist mobilities. Works such as Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator and initiatives such as the Kashmir Bicycle Movement, Girls at Dhabas and Why Loiter show the importance of publicizing social issues by attracting and appealing to diverse audiences and building regional and transnational alliances. The Kashmiri Bicycle Movement is a local rights movement that participates in and affiliates itself with transnational rights movements and vocabularies of pleasure in order to create many different publics – local, regional, and international – to serve as the addressees of their human rights claim-making. The Kashmir Bicycle Movement also attests to the importance of local knowledge and to the role of creativity, pleasure, and playfulness in the work of grassroots human rights activism. It highlights the subversive potential of pleasure in creating and effecting change. At the same time, the pleasurecentric aesthetic of the South Asian advocacy movements considered in this chapter has the potential to transform the norms, modes, and practices of human rights advocacy on a global level. As I have shown, there are historical antecedents to the pleasurecentric mode of rights advocacy, particularly within feminist activism in which everyday pleasures were seen as integral to the autonomy and well-being of the self. These forms of historical feminist activism are redeployed and recreated within the context of a contemporary zone of conflict by the Kashmir Bicycle Movement.

Conclusion In the realm of social movements, the Kashmir Bicycle Movement, Girls at Dhabas and Why Loiter are examples of local advocacy initiatives that deviate significantly from the prevalent, suffering-centred mode of advocacy, which is carried out by international organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and evidenced by the type of testimonies that are generally included in their human rights reports. As far as literary narrative is concerned, Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator can be considered a textualized alternative or in certain cases, a counterpart to the more familiar and mainstream human rights genre of the human rights report. Ignoring the rules of linear progression, this novel skews temporality in order to focus the reader’s attention on particular eruptions and usurpations of pleasure. It is able to take liberties with time and logical causal development, which would not be possible within a conventional human rights report. It relies heavily on the creation of affect in the reader, and less on statistics and legal statutes. Moreover, this novel takes us beyond the trope of the “body in pain” and

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  119 can be considered a different type of human rights story, which takes its cues from experiences of pleasures and the interruption of these pleasure rather than only the fact of pain (Scarry 47). Instances of local activism, whether conducted through Facebook groups, on-the-ground protests, street mobilizations, or through literary fiction, have the potential to transform our understanding of the types of narratives that can operate within the field of human rights. Moreover, The Kashmiri Bicycle Movement and its Facebook page participate in transnational rights movements and through this, attempt to mobilize national and transnational publics and create alliances within and beyond Kashmir. In this sense, these movements mirror the Kashmiri life narratives treated in this book, which as I have demonstrated, also have many different attendant publics and, as I will explore in my final chapter, cater to the demands of a diverse, transnational English-speaking readership.

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Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator  121 Kennedy, Rosanne. “Moving Testimony: Human Rights, Palestinian Memory, and the Transnational Public Sphere.” Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, edited by Chiara De Cesari and Ann Rigney. De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 51–78. Khan, Irene. “Human Rights and Civil Society: The Last Frontier.” London School of Economics. London, 2005, www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/public Events/pdf/20050119-Khan-HumanRights.pdf. Khor, Lena. Human Rights Discourse in a Global Network: Books Beyond Borders. Ashgate, 2013. Laqueur, Thomas W. “The Dead Body and Human Rights.” The Body, edited by Sean T. Sweeney and Ian Hodder. Cambridge UP, 2002, pp. 75–93. Levitt, Peggy, and Sally Merry. “Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States.” Global Networks, vol. 9, no. 4, 2009, pp. 441–61, doi:10.1111/j.1471-0374.2009.00263.x. Literature and Human Rights. Amnesty International. www.amnesty.org.uk/ literature-and-human-rights. “Mirza Waheed.” Penguin Books. www.penguin.co.uk/authors/mirzawaheed/ 42989/. Mooney, Annabelle. Human Rights and the Body: Hidden in Plain Sight. Ashgate, 2014. Moore, Alexandra Schultheis. Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture. Routledge, 2016. Morey, Peter. “Hamlet in Paradise: The Politics of Procrastination in Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator.” Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora: Secularism, Religion, Representations, edited by Claire Chambers and Caroline Herbert. Routledge, 2014, pp. 97–112. Murphy, Ann V. “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism.” Hypatia, vol. 26, no. 3, Dec. 2011, pp. 575–90. JSTOR, doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011. 01202.x. Park-Fuller, Linda M. “Performing Absence: The Staged Personal Narrative as Testimony.” Text and Performance Quarterly, vol. 20, no. 1, 2000, pp. 20–42, doi:10.1080/10462930009366281. Phadke, Shilpa, Sameera Khan, and Shilpa Ranade. Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. Penguin, 2011. Premise and Objectives. International People’s Tribunal in Human Rights and Justice in Indian-Administered Kashmir, 5 Apr. 2008. www.kashmirprocess. org/premise.html. Renshaw, Layla. Exhuming Loss: Memory, Materiality and Mass Graves of the Spanish Civil War. Left Coast, 2011. Root, Brian. “Numbers Are Only Human: Lessons for Human Rights Practitioners from the Quantitative Literacy Movement.” The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, edited by Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey. Oxford UP, 2016, pp. 356–76. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1988. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, edited by Philip Edwards. Cambridge UP, 2003. Smith, Elizabeth Irene. “ ‘The Body in Pain’: An Interview with Elaine Scarry.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, Sept. 2006, pp. 223–37.

122  Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator Sperling, Valerie, et al. “Constructing Global Feminism: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Russian Women’s Activism.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 26, no. 4, 2001, pp. 1155–1186., doi:10.1086/495651. Tettenborn, Éva. “Melancholia as Resistance in Contemporary African American Literature.” MELUS, vol. 31, no. 3, Fall 2006, pp. 101–21. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/30029653. “Using Fiction to Teach Human Rights.” Amnesty International. www.amnesty. org.uk/files/webfm/Documents/Education/1introduction_to_the_resource. pdf?O3YEAXOK.IxiWktVQd1UgJv_Gb8jhPpW Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. Penguin, 2011. Waheed, Mirza. “India’s Blood-Stained Democracy.” The New York Times, 6 July 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/indias-blood stained-democracy.html. Waheed, Mirza. “Where 5,000 Graves Don’t Speak.” Outlook India, 17 June 2012. www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/where5000-graves-dont-speak/ 281223. Wilson, Richard. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge UP, 2008. Wolf, Eric R. “Aspects of Group Relations in a Complex Society: Mexico.” American Anthropologist, vol. 58, no. 6, 1956, pp. 1065–78. Yasir, Sameer. “Schools in Kashmir Turn into Armed Fortresses as Students Watch in Muted Horror.” Firstpost, 29 Aug. 2016. www.firstpost.com/india/ schools-in-kashmir-turn-into-armedfortresses-as-students-watch-in-mutedhorror-2980890.html.

3 Imagining Local Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Human Rights in Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies

In the past two chapters, we have explored how representations of the Kashmiri subject as immersed in Kashmiriyat are meant to be perceived as markers of a positively enfranchised, rights-bearing body. In Curfewed Night, Our Moon has Bloodclots, and The Collaborator we are confronted with depictions of the loss as well as the realization of human rights ideals and are provided with visions of a just, humane, and equitable society. As such, the cosmopolitan emerges as a locally rooted discourse of rights, which shares many of the objectives of international human rights practices and discourse. Representations of cosmopolitan culture in the Kashmiri life narratives considered in this book give the reader a real and palpable sense of the human rights vision at play. These representations are the flesh on the bare bones of the utopian, and often ambiguous ideals that international human rights legal regimes claim to espouse and protect. In a similar vein, Sudha Koul’s memoir, The Tiger Ladies, posits the human of human rights as a Kashmiri subject and tries to imagine and represent this elusive, right-bearing figure. Wendy Brown argues that one of the problems with human rights work has to do with how “vague and unenforceable” human rights are (Brown 451). The Tiger Ladies attempts, in part, to remedy the vagueness of human rights and to imagine the state of enjoying human rights. In particular, Koul’s memoir elucidates what it means to enjoy the human right to culture and cultural participation, both of which have been enshrined in the UDHR and within other instruments of international human rights legislation. Cultural rights remain an especially “underdeveloped” body of legal doctrine whose meaning is ambivalent and whose enforcement remains a fraught area of debate (Francioni 3). It is my contention that a memoir such as The Tiger Ladies can help legal practitioners to visualize cultural human rights and through this, enable them to tackle issues relating to the meaning and the international enforcement of these rights. The Tiger Ladies was published in 2002 and is the first Anglophone memoir composed by a writer of Kashmiri origin. It traces the lives of three generations of Kashmiri Pandit women from the perspective of the

124  Imagining Cultural Human Rights memoir’s author, Sudha. In comparison to the life narratives we have encountered in the past chapters, Koul’s work conducts a deeper exploration of the state of having human rights, particularly the right to cultural participation and attempts to give keener shape and form to the figure of the rights-bearing human person. The Tiger Ladies depicts a period prior to the 1990s when Kashmiris could still, to an extent, enjoy fundamental human rights. Koul’s text deploys the Kashmiri language, as well as Kashmiri literary and material culture in order to make cultural human rights imaginable. Kashmiri fabrics, particularly the iconic Kashmiri shawl as well as relatively unfamiliar artisanal objects that have less touristic value but are a significant part of the everyday life, domestic rituals and practices of Kashmiris, are mentioned and represented within the text. Immersion in material culture, language, and local cosmopolitanism is represented as an indicator of enjoying human rights. Through these representations, Koul’s narrative compels us to probe the meaning of the human right to a “vibrant cultural life” as promised and expounded by the UDHR. The Tiger Ladies has received scant scholarly attention over the years. Ananya Kabir dismisses the work as a “lovingly written memoir” that is problematically complicit in the subjugation of Kashmiri Muslim bodies and the consumption of their artisanal labour while being conspicuously silent on the question of Kashmiri Pandit privilege (165). “Sudha Koul’s prose in Tiger Ladies” Kabir writes, “dwells on the priceless shawls ordered by the family [B]ut . . . the Kashmiri Muslim artisan waiting for their decisions fits uneasily into the Kouls’ opulent living room and into the remembering text” (Territory, 165). She draws attention to the reappearance of the artisan’s daughter at Srinagar’s Government Women’s College as a result of a change in economic circumstances, a change which, according to her, the author “appears ill-equipped to digest,” because historically Kashmiri Pandits have enjoyed a “monopoly on linguistic as much as economic capital” and been considered “Kashmiri society’s traditional custodians of the word” (165). Keeping this Foucauldian power/knowledge nexus in mind, encountering a socioeconomically disadvantaged Kashmiri Muslim woman in the hallowed halls of her local women’s college is an uncomfortable and discomfiting experience. While Koul’s memoir may not go far enough in engaging with the fraught issue of Kashmiri Pandit privilege at the cost of Kashmiri Muslim political and social disenfranchisement, I posit that it should not be discarded as yet another complicitous literary text that perpetuates redundant sociopolitical and religious hegemonies in Kashmir. In this chapter, I highlight how The Tiger Ladies, despite its inability to adequately address and confront the Pandit question of economic and epistemological power and privilege, is still the richest and most descriptive narrative account within the body of Kashmiri writing of the lived

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 125 cosmopolitanism of the Valley before the 1990s. It deftly adumbrates, at times naively, the bonds of a shared language and visual and material culture, which used to bind Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits across generations and for this reason, should be considered a historically valuable literary archive. Claire Chambers has praised The Tiger Ladies for offering us a narrative of female subjectivity in a field of Kashmiri literary and cultural production that has thus far been dominated by “an exclusively masculine world of representations of Kashmir” (Chambers, “Silent”). Nitasha Kaul’s novel Residue, which is the first Anglophone novel written by a Kashmiri woman, has a male Kashmiri Muslim protagonist who drives the action of the plot and remains the main focal point of the fictional text. Mirza Waheed’s female characters, such as Roohi in The Book of Gold Leaves, or Mouj in The Collaborator, usually lack the complexity, agency, and initiative afforded to the male characters. The Tiger Ladies counters the androcentrism that dominates Kashmiri fictional and nonfictional life narratives by situating the Kashmiri woman as the subject of international human rights and as the producer and consumer of local cosmopolitan culture. Kashmiri female subjectivities are positioned as the subjects of human rights and local cosmopolitan discourses and because of this, Koul’s life narrative has aesthetic and political functions that are worth interrogating and analyzing.

The Tiger Ladies: a Bildungsroman Sudha Koul’s memoir can also be considered a non-fictional Bildungsroman insofar as it traces the development of its narrator from childhood to young adulthood following her departure from home to the city and eventually to the United States where she resides with her husband, Kishen, and her two daughters. Her self-development or Bildung is framed by the tumultuous political events taking place in the Valley of Kashmir following the partition of the subcontinent and the botched division of Kashmir between India and Pakistan. Like Saleem Sinai, the fictional protagonist of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Sudha was also born in the year 1947 when the subcontinent had been newly partitioned; an event that is described as the “tearing apart” of India “at the chest” (Koul 30). Her mother goes into labour specifically on the night that tribal armies from the north-west areas of Pakistan make incursions into Kashmir and Sudha is safely delivered once they have been driven out of the region. Her birth therefore signals the passing of the “perilous hour,” which refers to both the event of labour as well as the political convulsions that Kashmir is undergoing at the time of her birth (31). The paralleling of these two events highlights how her destiny is bound up with the destiny of Kashmir in much the same way that Sinai’s ill-timed birth connected his fate to that of India.

126  Imagining Cultural Human Rights The narrator’s childhood is spent at the house of the family matriarch, Dhanna, who is her maternal grandmother. She is described as a wizened woman with a mouth that is “milky, toothless and harmless,” but despite her docile appearance, she has a quick temper and a vivacious temperament that persists in her old age (37). Dhanna is responsible for raising the young Sudha and for teaching her local Kashmiri customs and domestic rituals as well as the secrets of Kashmiri cuisine. Sudha’s coming of age is linked with the political coming of age of Kashmir. As she writes, “As [I] become a teenager, so does Kashmir in its democratic incarnation. Like me, our surroundings are changing” (68). The most tangible change during this period is the redistribution of Kashmiri land from the wealthy landowners to their destitute wards, the farmhands, who have tilled the land for millennia without having a claim to ownership over the produce. Sudha’s family, who are also Pandit landowners, experience a reduction in their economic stature as a result of these land reforms. During this time, Sudha enrolls in a private Irish Catholic school in order to become fluent in English. As a narrator, she intersperses the child’s perspective on the Catholic school with her view as an adult; the latter is more cognizant of the colonial hangover of the nuns and the redundant knowledge that they impart to their students. After graduating from school, Sudha gains admission to a prestigious women’s college and pursues a university degree. However, her mother is only concerned with the issue of her nuptials and views her university education as a “rite of passage” before she is married to a suitable partner (112). Amidst Sudha’s personal challenges, political trouble brews in the background and intrudes into her life in increasingly conspicuous ways. She is only able to take the final exam for her master’s degree “in bits and pieces” because a series of curfews interfere with the scheduling of exams and suspend the predictable rhythms of daily life in the Valley (Koul 141). Following her graduation, Sudha is appointed as a lecturer in a university in New Delhi and has to leave her native Kashmir in order to move to the “dust-laden heat of the plains” (Koul 145). During this time, she also takes the Indian civil service examination and eventually becomes the first Kashmiri woman to be appointed to the administrative services (146–47). Eventually she is posted to Lucknow, a city in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and takes up administrative responsibilities which, according to her traditional mother, should have been rightly shouldered by a man. Meanwhile, inter-ethnic rifts and communalism have spread in Kashmir and following her marriage, Sudha is keen to migrate to the United States with her husband, Kishen. The sense of physical and linguistic displacement that the narrator experiences is compounded by experiences of racism in her adopted city. However, with the passage of time and the birth of her daughters, Sudha feels more rooted in the United States, as her daughters, who are second-generation migrants, “bring America” into her house (177).

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 127

Culture and Human Rights The right to culture and cultural participation has been enshrined within specific legal statutes. Article 27 of the UDHR, for example, proclaims a human being’s right to a vibrant cultural life (UN). The right to cultural participation as a right to language, community, and material culture ensures the dignity of the human person as envisioned and enshrined in the UDHR. Cultural human rights share a core principle with other political and civil rights insofar as they recognize that the human person has ‘worth’ and should lead a life that is fulfilling. The Preamble of the UDHR encapsulates this in the following words: Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. (UN) In this pledge, the drafters of the UDHR grapple with a vision of human happiness and delineate a path to enfranchisement and positive development. They emphasize that human life should be dignified, that human beings should have equal rights and that ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ should characterize their everyday lives. Cultural rights are examples of positive human rights. Irina elaborates on the role of culture within human rights legislation: “the idea of a right to culture as an individual right to take part in cultural life . . . has been reaffirmed several times in international instruments as a right to take part in cultural life, as a right to equal treatment and participation in cultural activities” (40). UNESCO has “soft law instruments” on the subject of cultural rights. These include the 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity and the 2003 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage” (Francioni 2). The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights lists the right of minorities to “enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion, or to use their own language.” Similarly, cultural human rights are further enshrined in Article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which states that everyone has the right to “take part in cultural life” and to “benefit from the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” This right to culture is mentioned in Article 30 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (abbreviated as CRC in the rest of this chapter), which states that “a child belonging to . . . a minority or who is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with other members of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to profess and practice

128  Imagining Cultural Human Rights his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language.” Article 13 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) states that women and men have the right to “participate in recreational activities, sports and all aspects of cultural life.” The use of the word “enjoy” in Article 30 of the CRC highlights that participation in cultural life is linked to the idea of pleasure and enjoyment. Listing participation in cultural life alongside other recreational and pleasurable pursuits in Article 13 of the CEDAW also supports my core thesis that human rights ultimately seek to make the life of human beings not just tolerable but also pleasurable. In addition to providing the minimum legal protections against bodily harm, human rights discourses and regimes also seek to enhance and protect the happiness of human subjects. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (ICCPR) mentions cultural human rights in Article 30, which states that persons with disabilities have the right to (a) Enjoy access to cultural materials in accessible formats; (b) Enjoy access to television programmes, films, theatre and other cultural activities, in accessible formats; (c) Enjoy access to places for cultural performances or services, such as theatres, museums, cinemas, libraries and tourism services, and, as far as possible, enjoy access to monuments and sites of national cultural importance. (qtd. in Nafziger et al. 68) Here, the right to participation in cultural activities is articulated as a right to access the pleasures of film, theatres, museums, cinemas, and “sites of national importance.” Usually the right to cultural participation is conceived of as an individual right, as highlighted by the wording of Article 27 of the ICCPR. But in response to this conception, the Human Rights Committee (HRC), which oversees the implementation of the ICCPR, has repeatedly reiterated that “the right of enjoyment of culture, practice of religion or use of language can only be realized meaningfully when exercised in a community, that is as a group” (qtd. in Vrdoljak 60). Despite being seen as significant for both individuals and larger communities, Francioni argues that “cultural rights have attracted much less attention and cultural elaboration” as opposed to civil, political, and socioeconomic rights (1). This point is further reiterated by Keefee who states that “scant attention” has been paid to the study of the human right to a vibrant cultural life (904). He points out the lack of literature analyzing and elaborating on the meaning of the provisions of international law in which these rights are enshrined (904). Irina summarizes the reasons for this neglect in the following words: “The modest attention to cultural rights by the various international human rights institutions mandated to expound the content and significance of those rights

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 129 reinforces a deep-seated sentiment about the irrelevance or superfluity of cultural rights”(42). Another reason for the neglect of the human right to culture is rooted in the historical positioning of culture as the binary opposite of universal human rights. Culture and cultural participation, instead of being viewed as universal human rights, or as enabling the dissemination of human rights, are seen as “hampering and debilitating, possibly violating the right to enjoy the rights and freedoms guaranteed in international human rights law” (Irina 42). The section on “Culture and Human Rights” on the UNESCO website begins with a quotation from the UNESCO 2001 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity: “No one may invoke cultural diversity to infringe upon human rights guaranteed by international law, nor limit their scope.” Instead of outlining the types of cultural rights promised by human rights law and/or articulating how local culture and international law can collaborate and cooperate with one another, the section begins with a disclaimer stating that cultural diversity cannot be invoked as an excuse to infringe on human rights. Instead of putting forward a statement about what culture is, or what cultural rights are, the section on ‘culture and human rights’ strikes a cautionary note by articulating what culture is not and cannot do. This introductory text on the UNESCO website, in a sense, captures the deep distrust of and antagonism towards culture that exists within human rights legal history and legislation. Francioni argues that this suspicion of culture and cultural practices within human rights discourses and law may be rooted in culture’s ability to contradict internationally given human rights: “Cultural rights or claims are also liable to come into conflict with other established and generally recognized individual rights” (3). The suspicion of culture as a set of norms, practices, and discourses, which could potentially delimit or diminish the enforcement and legal reach of human rights also drives most scholarly debates on the subject of ‘culture and human rights.’ In fact, much of the discussion on ‘culture’ as a legal category, and a universal human right, takes place exclusively within the context of the contentious “cultural relativism” debate. Cultural relativism is defined as “a doctrine that holds that (at least some) . . . [cultural] variations are exempt from legitimate criticism by outsiders, a doctrine that is strongly supported by notions of communal autonomy and self-determination” (Donnelly 400). This doctrine, on the face of it, contradicts the central premise of human rights insofar as they are meant to be universally applicable to all human beings, regardless of their cultural, religious or ethnic background (400). Donnelly states that the “two extreme positions on cultural relativism can be called radical cultural relativism and radical universalism” (400). Radical cultural relativism would deny the authority of any universally codified body of law and would only recognize the relevance of culture as a source of morality, ethics, and standards of behavior whereas radical universalism would

130  Imagining Cultural Human Rights reject all cultural edicts wholesale on the principle that they negate the fundamental universality of human rights (400). In truth, the relationship between human rights and culture exists on a continuum between these two dichotomous views (401). In fact, Donnelly argues that the UDHR itself is an embodiment of a “weak cultural relativist position” insofar as it declares “human rights as prima facie universal but recognizes culture as a limited source of exceptions and principles of interpretation” (402). The antagonism between cultural precepts and human rights can be traced back to the time when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was being drafted in 1947 (Ignatieff The Attack 102). The Saudi Delegation took issue with Article 16, which relates to marriage choice, and Article 18, which pertains to freedom of religion, and argued that the “draft delegation had, for the most part, taken into consideration, only the standards recognized by Western civilization and had ignored more ancient civilizations” (103). However, rather than embodying a radical standoff between human rights and culture, the efforts to curtail the spread and legitimacy of human rights by local elites is frequently a mechanism of self-interest and self-preservation (Donnelly 412). Donnelly highlights how arguments supporting cultural relativism are often made by “economic and political elites that have long since left traditional culture behind” (411). “Appeals to traditional practices and values,” he writes, “all too often are a mere cloak for self-interest or arbitrary rule” (412). Michael Ignatieff, in his article, “The Attack on Human Rights,” begins by identifying what he refers to as “the cultural challenge to the universality of human rights,” which, according to him, emanates primarily from “Asia, Islam and Western postmodernism” (102). Countries such as Malaysia and Singapore, he contends, “reject Western ideas of democracy and individual rights in favor of an Asian route to development and prosperity – a route that depends on authoritarian government and authoritarian family structures” (105). Here, “Islam” and “Asia” are treated like internally consistent, largely homogenous cultural monoliths, which is misleading and an oversimplification of these uneven religious, national, and cultural terrains. I propose that life narratives such as The Tiger Ladies compel scholars working in the field of human rights to be attentive to the languages that are used to theorize ‘culture’ as an idea and a practice. Moreover, the inability to adequately deal with the question of the legal scope and the enforceability of cultural rights and to straightforwardly decipher the place of these rights within the overarching legal framework of human rights is also grounded in overly reductive and simplistic accounts of what constitutes local culture and cultural participation in a given societal context. In this chapter, I try to steer the discussion away from culture as a set of norms and social practices that could potentially negate and even challenge the central assumptions of international human rights, and

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 131 instead try to elaborate on the cultural rights promised by international statutes, and to show how cultural practices can in fact share the aims of human rights law. There are certainly plenty of instances, as Francioni argues, where cultural diversity is used as an excuse to infringe upon the human rights of women and minorities. Conversely, as I shall also try to highlight, local culture and Kashmiriyat may in fact, in certain instances, advance the cause of international human rights (15). I highlight how a text like The Tiger Ladies captures the ability of culture to create a sense of community and belonging, and to make the everyday lives of human beings happier and more pleasurable, which is also what international human rights legislations, at their core, aim to do. As mentioned earlier, human rights should not only be associated with human rights violations and infringements because part of the vision of human rights is also to propound and positively articulate ideas of human happiness, fulfilment, and dignified existence. Life narratives such as The Tiger Ladies helps us to narrativize this vision while concomitantly rendering cultural human rights more intelligible and understandable for its reading publics.

Language and Identity The right to speak in one’s own vernacular language is often listed as a key human right and is an important element of the cultural life of the Valley of Kashmir. The UN Independent Expert on minority issues, Rita Izsák, states that “Language is particularly important to linguistic minority communities seeking to maintain their distinct group and cultural identity, sometimes under conditions of marginalization, exclusion and discrimination” (“Protection”). Language is represented as a strong mobilizing and unifying force in The Tiger Ladies, which draws individuals together in a display of Kashmiriyat. The Kashmiri language is referred to as ‘Koshur’ or ‘Kashur’ by its native speakers and as ‘Kashmiri’ in other regional languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Punjabi (Kachru, The Dying 3). The Tiger Ladies posits Kashmiriyat as a cosmopolitan linguistic identity with language being the carrier of shared cultural values and regional specificities. This work explores the way language use in the Kashmiri mandala can be a means of asserting one’s identity. Koul makes use of code-switching in the memoir to create a sense of a vernacular community of Kashmiris, who share a common language, which allows them to form cosmopolitan relationships with one another. The code-switching in the memoir is also a representation of oral speech and reflective of the cultural cosmopolitanism of the Valley of Kashmir. Code-switching is defined as switching from one language or linguistic dialect to another and is considered to be a normal part of the speech of a bilingual individual (“Code-switching”, Albakry 221).

132  Imagining Cultural Human Rights However, some postcolonial critics view code-switching in postcolonial texts as a consciously deployed literary technique used to achieve certain aesthetic and political effects (Albakry 221). Rofel defines entrepreneurial cosmopolitanism in China as the ability to code-switch between Chinese and English (Rofel 449). Devarenne states that code-switching and code-­mixing constitutes “a show of cosmopolitanism” insofar as it highlights the speaker’s “linguistic agility” (399). In a similar vein, McCormick argues that an “analysis of bilingual dialogue suggests that speakers’ willingness to mix and switch language is not simply a matter of convenience but also serves stylistic purposes and can be used as an expression of identity or to signal subtle shifts in footing” (100). Codeswitching in The Tiger Ladies can be considered a representation of the cultural cosmopolitanism of the Valley of Kashmir. According to Braj Kachru, code-switching in a literary text can take certain distinctive forms such as “the use of native similes and metaphors,” “the transfer of rhetorical devices for personalizing speech interaction,” “the translation of proverbs, idioms, and other devices,” “the use of culturally dependent speech styles,” and “the use of syntactic devices” (The Bilingual’s 133). The Koshur words in The Tiger Ladies refer to physical objects (kangri, shikara), local vegetation (hatab, booyne), Kashmiri clothing (pheran), sages (Rishis), poets (Lal Ded), nature spirits (yaksha), Kashmiri culinary cuisine (Roghanjosh, Khechhri, khir, halwa puri), religious holidays (Shivratri), customs (isbandh), Kashmiri plays (Bombur Yemberzal), musical instruments (mizrab, tumbakhnari). While Kachru’s framework focuses on how cultural particularities are transposed into postcolonial texts through the inclusion of, for instance, speech styles, idioms, metaphors and similes, a survey of the instances of code-switching in The Tiger Ladies leads us to make an important observation: the Koshur words, instead of being representative of idiomatic speech, are often used to refer to physical phenomena, particularly Kashmiri material culture. Language and language use in Sudha Koul’s memoir is connected to cultural and artisanal objects. An example is the Koshur word kangri, which is mentioned in the following way: “Not everyone can afford a wood-burning stove at home, but all carry our own kangri, a small handy portable firepot around which a basket with handles is woven in red and green wicker” (Koul 7). The word kangri is italicized and followed by a lengthy gloss explaining its meaning and physical appearance. Ashcroft, Tiffin, and Griffiths in their seminal work The Empire Writes Back (2002) identified certain linguistic strategies of appropriation used by postcolonial authors in their texts. Of these, explaining the meaning of the word in a gloss within the sentence, instead of inside parentheses, is Koul’s preferred mode of codeswitching. Glossing is defined as the “parenthetic inclusion of individual words” and is considered “the most obvious authorial intrusion in cross-cultural texts.” (Ashcroft et al.

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 133 60). The purpose of using words from the author’s vernacular within postcolonial texts is to “foreground” the “continual reality of cultural distance” (60). According to Ashcroft et al., the glossed word is a type of metonymy because it stands for the “latent presence” of a particular culture (61).

Totemic Metonymy The word kangri can be considered a metonymic representative of the distinctiveness of Kashmiri material culture within The Tiger Ladies. The physical wood-burning stove that the word kangri signifies is a cultural object that is only found in Kashmir and has no equivalent in other parts of South Asia. The kangri can be considered a particular type of metonymy, namely totemic metonymy, insofar as it constitutes a ‘part’ which stands in for the ‘whole’ of Kashmiri culture. Life narratives such as The Tiger Ladies makes use of what I refer to as totemic metonymy as a means of interring and inscribing Kashmiri material culture into the literary text. Totemic metonymy is the inclusion of italicized words from Koshur, Urdu/Hindi and Persian into the text where they function as metonymic stand-ins for Kashmiri regional culture as a whole. Fiona Douglas uses the term “linguistic totem” in the context of Scottish literature and argues that because of Scotland’s fraught historical relationship with England, the choice of language within a Scottish literary text is a deeply political decision: Language can act as a strong cultural identifier and can function as a rallying point, an emblem of in-group solidarity, or a linguistic totem. By using Scottish words, a speaker signals that they are part of the wider discourse community that is Scotland. (2) Ian Brown concurs with this view and states that “linguistic choice is not only an artistic decision, but a cultural and often – both now and in the past – a political one” (79). Similarly, Koshur words in the narratives discussed in this book function as linguistic totems because they indicate an affiliation with particular language communities and readers at the expense of other out-groups and reading publics. In addition to this, most of the Koshur words deployed within The Tiger Ladies refer to Kashmiri material culture – to the objects and crafts – that characterize Kashmiri cultural life, and as such the linguistic totems in this life narrative have a metonymic function. They function as pars pro toto, as linguistic signifiers emblematic and symbolic of Kashmiri regional culture. This is not only the case with the Kashmiri word kangri or woodburning stove. Other instances of code-switching between Koshur and English in the memoir also occur when a Kashmiri cultural object or

134  Imagining Cultural Human Rights local custom is being mentioned and described. An example of this is the word pheran: “She throws the apron of her ankle-length pheran on my feet to make sure I am warm” (6). Instead of glossing the word pheran, the author allows it to remain untranslated; its meaning can only be partially inferred through its position and use in the sentence. The insertion of an untranslated word is a widely deployed technique in postcolonial texts and is defined by Ashcroft et. al as “selective lexical fidelity” (63). Like glossing, the inclusion of untranslated words is also meant to foreground the cultural distinctiveness of the text, but in this case, the “alterity which is implicit in the gloss” is made explicit (64). Interpreting the word pheran compels the reader into an “active engagement with the horizons of the culture in which the texts have meaning” (64). However, Ashcroft et al. assume that the addressee or implied audience of the postcolonial text in question does not belong to the cultural context in which the text is situated. I am in agreement with the opinion that the use of glossing and untranslated words in The Tiger Ladies is meant to emphasize the distinctiveness of Kashmiri culture. However, in my opinion, the text’s main purpose is not to write back to the Empire but instead, to engage a Koshur-speaking audience and to articulate a language-based narrative of Kashmiriyat. The author articulates this ­language-based Kashmiriyat in the following sentence: There is no question of Kashmiris betraying other Kashmiris to some wild mountain people just because we are Hindus and they are Muslims. Our language and culture has bound us Kashmiris so strongly together that all other people, regardless of religion, are strangers to us. If someone does not understand our language, our stories, our songs and are food, they are foreigners to us. (Koul 28) In this excerpt, Koul is recounting a historical event – the attack of tribals from Pakistan’s northern areas, following partition – who despite being Muslim were opposed and driven out by the Muslims and Hindus of the Valley. Her explanation for this is the Valley’s cosmopolitan culture or Kashmiriyat (although she does not explicitly mention the term) that is grounded in shared language use. This Kashmiriyat, which according to Koul encompasses shared oral narratives, folklore, cultural norms, and material culture, is articulated and expressed in the Kashmiri language. In keeping with this view of Kashmiriyat, it can be observed that nearly all the Koshur words included in the text refer to distinctively Kashmiri artifacts, cultural objects, culinary dishes, religious holidays and historical personages. Due to this, the Koshur words in the text (the signifier) as well as the entities they refer to (the referents) can both be considered metonymic stand-ins for Kashmiri culture. The right to their own “language,”

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 135 “stories,” and “songs” that Koul mentions, is part of cultural human rights and as we observe throughout the text, are essential to the wellbeing and happiness of Kashmiri subjects.

Code-switching Prasad writes that code-switching in a South Asian novel can serve a range of uses: [It] may be used to reveal to the listener the regional identity of the speaker, thus enabling the speaker to establish kinship if the listener belongs to the same region. Code-switching can also be used to reveal class and religion. Conversely, codeswitching can also be resorted to in order to conceal the speaker’s region, class or religion. Thus, codeswitching may be used in a conversation to establish affinity with one or more persons while excluding others who do not belong to this linguistic or class or religious group. (47) In The Tiger Ladies, the instances of code-switching from English to Koshur are meant to “establish kinship” between Koshur speakers and to establish a visible link between language use and regional identity. Koul states that the rulers of Kashmir are “from a different culture and do not speak our language” and for this reason were regarded as “foreigners” by native Kashmiri-speakers (Koul 28). In this way, it can be seen that the text tries to represent a sense of cosmopolitan, inter-religious affinity between the Koshur-speaking Kashmiri Muslims and Hindus of the Valley. Prasad, in accordance with the idea of language use as a signifier of identity, argues that linguistic affiliation is a double-edged sword because affiliating with one linguistic group entails “excluding others” who speak a different language and consequently belong to a different culture. However, in The Tiger Ladies, acts of selective affiliation do not necessarily imply difference but can also be reflective of the linguistic hybridity of the region. As mentioned earlier, the code switching in the memoir is not only between Koshur and English, but in certain instances, also extends to Persian, Hindi, and Urdu words. An example of this is the word isbandh: “Our wedding incense is a handful of seed that we throw on live coals, A Persian habit with a Persian name. We use isbandh to dispense the evil eye or evil spirits” (124). Similarly, words in Hindi and Urdu that are indicative of traditional clothing are also included and glossed in the text: “The ensemble was called salwar kameez dupatta. Some of the Muslim girls from the inner city arrived wearing burqa over their clothes [. . .]” (103). Anglo-Indian words such as “tanga” (tonga) can also be located in the text as well as

136  Imagining Cultural Human Rights the names of shared subcontinental culinary dishes such as khechhri (rice dish), khir (rice pudding) and halwa puri (sweetmeat). These are selected examples and the text contains many others. By code-switching between ‘standard’ English and Hindi, Urdu, and Persian the text highlights the distinctive multilingualism present in the Valley. Zutshi writes that “between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries . . . Sanskrit became the language of tradition, Persian the language of literary-­narrative culture, and Kashmiri the language of intimacy and poetry” (Kashmir’s Contested 6). Koul describes the motley of tongues spoken in the Valley and their practical uses: We do not have our own script, even though we have a great literary tradition that has been followed in borrowed scripts. Now we all use English and Urdu and Hindi when we write. Intimate conversations are held in Kashmiri, formal ones in Urdu, and when someone wants to shut down the opposition in an authoritative way, a couple of sentences in English usually does the trick. The English are gone but not forgotten. (Koul 50) The instances of code-switching in the text also foreground the cultural ties that Kashmir has with other parts of India and Pakistan where these languages are widely spoken, and this linguistic and cultural overlap, interestingly enough, is posited as a marker of local cosmopolitanism and Kashmiriyat. The paragraph above highlights that, in addition to having linguistic and cultural overlaps with non-Kashmiri territories, the Koshur speakers in the Vale also share a colonial past with them. To investigate further how language creates kinship, let us consider another instance of code-switching in the text. While at university, Sudha, an avid thespian, enacts “Wilde, Moliere, Shakespeare, Hindi and Urdu plays, Kashmiri operas and drama, and [her] favourite, comedies” (Koul 99). The selection of plays and playwrights highlights the cosmopolitan cultural influences present in the Valley, which informed much of the literary production of the region. The author, however, states that she enjoyed the Kashmiri opera: I must admit that I enjoyed plays in the native languages the most, particularly the comedies. There is no joke as good as a joke in the vernacular. One of our oft-requested theatrical productions is a contemporary Kashmiri opera called Bombur Yemberzal or The Narcissus and the Bumble Bee which celebrates Kashmir as a free garden where a thousand flowers bloom. So popular is the opera that phrases from the libretto find their way into our language almost immediately. (Koul 99)

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 137 This play by a celebrated Kashmiri author, Dina Nath Nadim, was the first opera in the Kashmiri language and was performed in 1953. The choice of this popular Kashmiri play, which promoted the vernacular as a suitable medium for literary work, is meant to foreground the importance of the Koshur language in crafting identity. Koul shifts from the first-person personal pronoun “I” (for e.g., “I enjoyed plays in the native language”) to “our” (for e.g., “Our language”) to highlight how her individual preference for, and enjoyment of, vernacular literature is paralleled by a wider approval of vernacular theatre in Kashmir. The word “enjoy” lays further emphasis on the fact that consuming literary and linguistic culture as a community is a pleasurable experience and consequently, integral to the human rights vision.

Cosmopolitan Women’s Spaces The Tiger Ladies glosses words from Koshur, which appear in the Roman script but are foregrounded in the text through italicization. A mapping of the instances of code-switching in The Tiger Ladies seems to suggest that many of the Koshur words used by the author refer to women’s spaces and/or are related to the artisanship, rituals, and interactions that take place within these personal spaces. In “Cosmopolitanisms,” Breckenridge et al. try to reimagine Western cosmopolitanism and coin the term, cosmofeminism, an amalgam of the terms, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘feminism,’ which can be defined as a notion of cosmopolitanism as a function of the private sphere (8). They argue that “any cosmofeminism would have to create a critically engaged space that is not a screen for globalization or an antidote to nationalism but is rather a focus on projects of the intimate sphere conceived as part of the cosmopolitan” (8). Breckenridge et al. viewed domesticity as a “vital interlocutor and not just an interloper in law, politics and public ethics” (Breckenridge et. al 9). The Kashmiriyat performed in women’s personal spaces in The Tiger Ladies can be considered an example of the way in which “spheres of intimacy generate legitimate pressure on any understanding of cosmopolitan solidarities and networks” (9). Stivens argues that the neglect of the question of gender within cosmopolitan studies has to do with the conception of the cosmopolitan as “a man; an individual who has the ability to live anywhere and the capacity to tolerate and understand the barbarism of others” (89). Moreover, Stivens is of the opinion that gender has not been sufficiently addressed in cosmopolitan literature for the reason that there exists a “long-term disdain in political thought for what is deemed ‘the private’, ‘domestic’ or ‘intimate’, still often assumed to be ‘women’s business’ within a universal domestic domain” (89). On the other hand, feminist scholarship has also not sufficiently engaged with cosmopolitan theories because it is critical of the universal logic and colonial origins of these theories (90).

138  Imagining Cultural Human Rights Stivens proposes a gendering of the cosmopolitan and a “feminist embrace of the concept.” (90). She conceives of this “embrace” in both theoretical and practical terms. Drawing upon Nava, Stivens argues for re-figuring cosmopolitanism as “a viscerally experienced, domestically located and gendered” concept (Stivens 91). Nava argues that the concept of cosmopolitanism needs to be defined as a “structure of feeling” (Visceral 98). This definition of cosmopolitanism is closer, in principle, to Werbner’s postulation of it as an “ethical horizon” with an emphasis on “empathy, toleration and respect” (2). Nava argues that cosmopolitanism should be understood as being “not only visceral and vernacular but also domestic” (Visceral 12). For her, the “topographical trope of the domestic refers both to the imagination and to the more material aspects of urban geopolitics” (Visceral 12). As such, she pushes towards a recognition of forms of “cosmopolitanism that take place at home, in the family [and] in the neighbourhood” (Visceral 12). In a similar vein, the vernacular cosmopolitanism represented in The Tiger Ladies can be considered an example of a cosmopolitanism that is enacted in the private and domestic spaces of the home, and produced by members of the family, their close friends, and neighbours. Nava and Stivens propose re-positioning the domestic sphere as a viable cosmopolitan space. Stivens suggests that the role of family and filial ties in creating “transnational spaces” needs to be examined (91). Instead of viewing a family as a biological unit in which the narrow codes and norms of one’s culture, ethnicity or nationality are upheld, the family needs to be seen as an active participant in the globalization project for its ability to “construct cosmopolitan spaces” (Stivens 91). Dhanna, a wizened Kashmiri Pandit woman, is presented as the quintessential cosmopolitan in Koul’s memoir. She struggles to negotiate her post-partition identity because for her, cosmopolitan and national identities are at odds with one another: “Now the word “Pakistan” has been initiated into my grandmother’s vocabulary. Even so, the geography and history of our world are too ancient to be changed in our hearts so quickly. It will take decades for us to redo our inner maps” (Koul 28). Kashmiri women in The Tiger Ladies have cosmopolitan “inner maps” that cannot be changed by the demarcations of postcolonial cartography. Although the word ‘Pakistan’ is alien to Dhanna, the city of ‘Lahore’ is well-known to her as she covets the suede shoes her husband buys from Lahore’s Anarkali Bazaar (28). In this part of the chapter, I explore the inner maps of Kashmiri women by mapping the cosmopolitan bonds that they form with one another in the text. One primary space in the memoir where most of the plot unfolds is Koul’s maternal grandmother Dhanna’s “kitchen hall – which is referred to as “her arena” (Koul 49). Her grandfather implicitly understands that this space is Dhanna’s private territory and follows a curious protocol when encroaching upon this space whereby he “comes in slow, deliberate,

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 139 resounding steps so that she may put away what she does not want him to see” (49). Similarly, Dhanna’s guests also treat her as a matriarchal queen and treat her space with respect by removing their shoes before seating themselves on the floor (9). The author uses three different Koshur words namely – waguv, namdeh, and gabbeh – to describe the type of flooring in Dhanna’s kitchen hall. The first two words are extensively glossed in the sentence, albeit without the inclusion of parentheses, with waguv described as “a cushioning reed” and namdeh as “embroidered, pressed-wool” (9). Ashcroft et al. argue that the nature of glossing is such that the gloss is accorded the status of “the real” (Ashcroft et. al 61). In this case, “cushioning reed” is the gloss for waguv and would, by that token, function as “the real.” However, the form of glossing discussed by Ashcroft et al. is one in which parentheses are explicitly used and this is not the case within The Tiger Ladies, where the glossed meaning blends with the italicized Koshur word. In fact, it is the italicized word, which gives a sense of an ‘authentic’ signifier of the object being mentioned and, in this sense, is more real than the translated word “cushioning reed.” However, the word gabbeh is left untranslated in the text: “layered gabbeh are piled for warmth” (Koul 9–10). The inclusion of untranslated words is seen as an overt political gesture because, in glossing, the “receptor culture” is viewed as “real” and accorded superior status (65). Although I agree that the untranslated word impresses the cultural alterity of Kashmir on the reader with more forcefulness and invites a deeper engagement with Kashmiri culture, in my view, both glossing and the inclusion of untranslated words uphold the primacy of the Koshur word as the ‘real’ signifier. The text, as mentioned earlier, is not exclusively interested in writing back to the British Empire although there is an acknowledgement of Kashmir’s, and indeed, the subcontinent’s colonial past. The narrator questions the value of her Western education in which they “wander about in parts of the British empire, read about Australian trees or kookaburras, or Burma or dream of African Safaris” instead of reading about local geography (Koul 83). She considers the curriculum at her Catholic Convent school to be regressive, with the students “reading themselves into obsolescence” and preparing “to work in a British India that no longer exists” (83). However, English is not only the language of the newly dismantled British Empire in the memoir, but also “the language of the ruling classes in a free, Babel-like India” (82). Therefore, we see that the English language continues to be a carrier of institutional authority, only now the authority emanates from the Indian centre. The primary purpose behind the inclusion of glosses and untranslated words in the text is to construct a notion of a cosmopolitan Kashmiri community that is held together by a shared linguistic code, as well as a repertoire of other local languages including Hindi, Urdu, and Persian.

140  Imagining Cultural Human Rights Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, this community is largely a women’s community. In The Tiger Ladies, it can be observed that the cosmopolitanism of the Kashmiri mandala is shown to be enacted in the private spaces of Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim women. The Koshur words waguv, namdeh, and gabbeh evoke women’s spaces as well as traditionally women-centred artisanship. Waguv, a type of reed mat, was typically hand-woven by women using a local “swamp plant” that grew close to Dal Lake, a popular tourist site in Srinagar (Bashir). The art of weaving these mats traces its history back to the 18th century when Kashmir was under the control of the Moghuls(Bashir). Mossman argues that the technique of producing namdeh was probably passed on by central-Asiatic nomads whose techniques and textile motifs also influenced the Chinese and the Persians (Mossman 43). Namdeh usually features flower, animal or bird motifs that are “worked on a naturalcoloured background” (43). Namdeh are “embroidered with chain stitch designs with coloured wool yarns, done with a metal hook known as ara kanj (43). This hook is fitted into “a wooden base,” which is held firmly in the palm of the weaver’s hand and is “forced through the entire felted mass to bring up the yarn” (43). On the other hand, gabbeh is a carpet “utilizing pieces of old discarded woolen fabrics dyed in bright colours” (43). Mossman describes gabbeh as a “utilitarian folk art” because of the fact that it involves re-using and recycling old fabrics (43). The motifs used are much simpler and usually involve “conventionalized floral shapes” (43). Weavers of the waguv are typically women who were taught soft skills by earlier generations of women, namely their mothers and grandmothers, who wove these felt mats for their houses and to generate income for their families (Bashir). The inclusion of the Koshur words for traditional flooring evokes images of women-centred artisanship, material culture, and personal spaces. Dhanna’s kitchen hall is one such space that is private, gendered, and cosmopolitan at the same time. For example, the Kashmiri shawl-dealer, who according to the narrator is Muslim, is welcomed into Dhanna’s kitchen hall as he is “privy to the innermost secrets of the household, because girls, pashmina, gold, silver, shawls, puberty and marriage are all wrapped up in the same tender package, opened up only to the innermost members of the family circle” (Koul 10). Despite being a Muslim male in a Hindu household, the shawl-dealer is well-informed about the trousseau preparations for the bride and the inner workings of the household (10). This does not imply that cultural taboos and prejudices are bypassed: He is served food in special crockery because Hindus of the Valley do not eat food touched by a Muslim. He is content with this arrangement because he believes that Hindu dishes (and cutlery) have been tainted by asafetida, which is believed to be produced using pig’s feet (10). Stivens proposes that Yuval-Davis’ notion of “transversal politics,” which is a “kind of coalition politics” in feminism “in which differences

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 141 among women are recognized and given a voice” can be transplanted into cosmopolitanism (qtd. in Stivens 90, Yuval-Davis 205–6). This, in turn, allows cosmopolitanism to be envisaged as a gendered practice in which women will approach a conflict with a “cosmopolitan openness” to the other’s point of view, while at the same time, not “effacing one’s own positioned identity” (Stivens 90). This example of the interactions between the shawl-man and the women of the Koul household can be considered a type of cosmopolitan “transversal politics” (Yuval-Davis 205–6). Although the shawl dealer, despite being a Muslim male, is welcomed into the private spaces of Kashmiri Pandit women in a gesture of “cosmopolitan openness,” the women remain rooted in their cultural and religious beliefs and speak from a known subject position. At the same time, there is a playful camaraderie between the shawl man and the women as he entertains his customers by reciting nonsense verses for them: “Ten teeth chattering, ten tongues running. Ten tuck tuck tucks” (Koul 13). Along with this, he also code-switches from his native language to English for comic effect in order to divert the women: “Antique piece. Moghul princess. Paisley motif. English rose. Very fine. Uncommon piece. Lovely” (13). These representations of Kashmiriyat function as imaginings of rights-bearing bodies before the 1990s and of the bloodshed and instability that followed in its wake, severing the multitudinous and intricate ties bounding the Kashmiri Pandits and the Kashmiri Muslims. During religious holidays such as Shivratri, non-Hindu family friends are invited into Sudha’s home for meals and her family often visits Muslim homes for the two Eids (76). Of the people who visit, Rice Blind, “a grand old Muslim lady,” is a close friend of Sudha’s grandmother. She converses in “whispers” with the grandmother and helps her in cleaning freshly hulled rice (122). There is a close relationship between Rice Blind and members of the household, with the narrator describing her as a member of the family who has always participated in the domestic rituals of the home alongside them. Sudha’s bond with Rice Blind is described as follows: “We simply love her as she holds out her arms in an embrace, clasps us to her and offers herself to the fates in exchange for any evil that might befall us” (122). Another friend of Dhanna’s is a Kashmiri fish vendor, referred to as “the fishwife” by the family who re-appears again towards the end of the memoir. Lamenting the flight of the Pandits from the Valley, she “beats her haggard breast” and appeals to the Kashmiriyat that still binds the Hindus and Muslims of Kashmir: “The world is upside down but are we not sisters? So, what if you are not here?” (202). The cultural cosmopolitanism in the Valley is aided by the fact that Muslims and Hindus used to traditionally reside in the same mohalla or neighbourhood for several generations (138). In the old part of Srinagar, for instance, houses were built in such close proximity that “owners [could] pass things to each other from the windows” (18). With domestic

142  Imagining Cultural Human Rights spaces joined in this manner, the women of Muslim and Hindu households are shown “shar[ing] domestic woes” and “gossip[ing] loudly across windows” (18). The lines separating private and public life are blurred. A comical domestic scene highlights the encounters that used to take place between Hindu and Muslim women in the old city: Women take a careful look down into the street before throwing out the boiling-hot starch water they have to drain out every day from the cooked rice. If her neighbor is doing the same, it is impossible that the two women will go back to their chores.” (18) Even during times of turmoil, the cosmopolitanism between women of the Valley is shown to still be intact. For instance, when Pakistani tribal “raiders” attack Kashmir, Pandit women are sheltered by their Muslim neighbours: “My family also runs, to a Muslim friend’s house where we are quickly hidden in the women’s quarters” (27). The women’s communities in The Tiger Ladies can be considered cosmopolitan communities in the way that they establish inter-religious ties and relationships with Kashmiris who belong to different religious denominations.

From Visual to Textured Cosmopolitanism The cosmopolitanism in the memoir is not exclusively observable in the formation of inter-ethnic and inter-religious relationships but can also be seen in the cultural and domestic items that women produce, share, and consume. The visual aspect of cosmopolitanism remains an unchartered area that is at the fringe of scholarship on the subject. Scholarly engagements with visual cosmopolitanism focus exclusively on contemporary art and art objects as well as on historical visual culture but there are hardly any discussions of visual cosmopolitanism in literary texts. Necipoglo has examined the way in which the Ottoman King Mehmed II “negotiated the expanding Western and Eastern cultural horizons of his Empire through visual cosmopolitanism and creative translation” (Necipoglo 1). He argues that the Ottoman monarch deployed “heterogenous visual idioms” and artistic practices in order to construct his “public persona and dynastic self-image upon the reconstructed stage of his new capital” (1). Mehmed II encouraged the combination of visual elements drawn from different cultures including the Ottoman, Timurid, Turkmen, Roman-Byzantine and Italian Renaissance (1–2). Maria Fernandez also tackles the concept of “visual cosmopolitanism” in the context of Mexican visual culture. She defines visual cosmopolitanism as involving “juxtapositions, amalgamations and translation of visual materials from various cultural traditions, which have the purpose of

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 143 bringing home aspects of the outside world, and projecting elements of the vernacular outward” (Fernandez 1). While attention has been paid to other cultural forms, especially texts, the role played by art and artistic objects, particularly art objects within literary texts, in making culture mobile has not been explored to any notable extent (7). It is my understanding that Koul’s memoir constructs Kashmiriyat by representing the production, distribution, and consumption of art objects, artifacts, and consumer goods by the women in the household. Earlier, I suggested that there are instances of code-switching between English and Koshur in the work and that the Koshur words deployed in the text often refer to physical objects. In many cases, these physical objects are art objects, cultural artifacts and/or fabric motifs that belong to Kashmir’s rich material culture. In particular, the Koshur, English, and Persian words in the text refer to Kashmiri fabrics, visual motifs, and fabric products such as namdeh, waguv, shawl, silk, paisley, jamawar, and pashmina. It is important to remember that namdeh or numdah, as it sometimes referred to in the Roman alphabet, was not a “felt-making” process which was “indigenous to India” (Mossman 43). Rather, as mentioned earlier, the motifs and design of namdeh is suggestive of its Central Asian and perhaps also, Persian roots (43). The term ‘visual cosmopolitanism’ however only captures the visual aspects of Kashmiri material culture, whereas the process of weaving, stitching, and felt-making is multi-­ sensorial and haptic. As such, I propose the term ‘textured cosmopolitanism’ to be used alongside ‘visual cosmopolitanism’ in order to foreground the tactile and physically collaborative aspects of Kashmiri cosmopolitanism. I define textured cosmopolitanism as the embodied cosmopolitan relationships, visual repertoires, and vocabularies that are created and maintained during the creating, weaving, and crafting of Kashmiri visual and material culture, particularly within communities of women and in spaces controlled, managed, and operated by women. The ‘texturedness’ of cosmopolitanism captures the fact that cosmopolitanism, besides being viewable, is also touchable and palpable. In discussing, designing and creating different ‘textures,’ Kashmiri women are represented as creatively reinforcing the cosmopolitan ties between one another, while also transferring cultural artisanal knowledge from one generation to the other. Textured cosmopolitanism describes the shared vocabulary of textures, visual idioms, artisanal techniques, images, and symbols, which allow Kashmiris to create “bonds of kinship” with one another, across religious, ethnic, caste, and class lines. The textured cosmopolitanism in The Tiger Ladies has three distinctive aspects: it pertains to the cosmopolitan objects, textures, and artifacts that belong to Kashmir’s hybrid visual

144  Imagining Cultural Human Rights culture, the cosmopolitan interactions that brought diverse cultural traditions to Kashmir, and the cosmopolitanism which is in turn engendered by the sharing of these artistic traditions across different religious communities.

The Kashmiri Shawl The glossed and code-switched words in The Tiger Ladies refer to Kashmiri cultural products. These products are themselves examples of textured cosmopolitanism because the techniques of weaving namdeh and gabbeh and the visual motifs utilized in their making have a variety of cultural sources. An easily-recognizable luxury item that is representative of Kashmir’s visual culture is the iconic Kashmiri shawl (or its anglicized incarnation ‘Cashmere shawl’). The Cashmere shawl is perhaps the best known and most ubiquitous symbol of the Valley of Kashmir in the Western imagination (Zutshi, “Designed” 423). The word ‘Cashmere,’ which was used to refer to locally produced luxurious and ‘exotic’ fabrics and shawls in Europe and America, is derived from the 18th century English spelling of the word Kashmir (Maskiell 28). On the other hand, the English word ‘shawl’ is derived from the Persian and Koshur word, shaal, which simultaneously refers to both a ‘shoulder mantle’ as well as a type of woollen fabric (Zutshi, “Designed” 421–22). These shawls are woven from a type of wool called pashmina, which means ‘soft hair’ in Koshur and Persian (422). Pashmina refers to the soft fleece of “the Central Asian mountain goat found in the Himalayan regions of Yarkhand, Khotan, Sinkiang, Lhasa and Ladakh” (422). Kashmiri shawls gained popularity and prominence as coveted luxury goods in the 19th century in Western Europe and later on in North America (423). The words ‘pashmina’ and ‘shawl’ are not italicized in the text: “Usually, though, one cousin comes of age, then another, then another, and pashmina is required for all of them and their spouses, or the master of the house may suddenly feel like [sic] a brand-new pashmina shawlblanket” (Koul 14). This is because these words are not symbolic of cultural difference. By leaving them un-italicized, the text highlights the way in which these two items – pashmina and the shawl – have now been integrated into the English language due to England’s long history of consuming this luxury product. In the late 18th century, Kashmiri shawls primarily made their way into Britain in the form of private gifts or as part of trade between importers and British women travelling back from India (Zutshi, “Designed” 423). Koul’s memoir acknowledges the colonial obsession with Kashmiri shawls. For instance, the shawl man in The Tiger Ladies employs a salespitch in English, which he had used for “British memsahibs” in the past. This indicates that these memsahibs were historically the most avid consumers of the product. However, following the industrial revolution,

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 145 production became mechanized and Kashmiri shawls began to be massproduced for a local as well as international market (424). British imitations of Kashmiri shawls, which appeared as early as 1777, were primarily produced in Edinburgh and soon the British towns of Norwich and Paisley became involved in the shawl trade (424). The town of Paisley was so successfully able to make copies of the Kashmiri shawl that its name – Paisley – “became synonymous with the pinecone pattern,” which was a common motif in Kashmiri shawls (423–24). In The Tiger Ladies, the author describes the paisley motif in the following words: We consider the paisley, dancing among other designs like a selfassured languid beauty; the symbol of timeless perfection. . . . We call it an “almond” because that is what we grow while the people from the hot plains of India call it a “little mango” because that is their fruit. (Koul 14) It is interesting to note that the cone motif is referred to using the term paisley rather than the Persian (buta or buteh) or Koshur (badaam or kalka) terms (Schomer and McLeod 398). This serves to emphasize Zutshi’s point about the success of the town of Paisley, and Britain in general, in copying Asian art for the purposes of commerce and profit. In the author’s imagination, the paisley is the original – a “languid beauty,” which has been adopted into Kashmiri and Indian visual culture (as an almond or mango). By inadvertently positing the paisley as the “original,” the text draws attention to how firmly entrenched this motif and the shawl that it decorates have become within the English language and culture. Koul draws attention to the cultural cosmopolitanism of Kashmiri visual craft that was commercially reproduced by the European market and resulted in the subsequent decimation of the local shawl trade, particularly the jamawar industry, as a result. The word jamawar refers to an “all-over-patterned” Pashmina shawl (Mossman 35, 42). However, in the text, the value of Kashmiri shawls as cosmopolitan items and their participation in the European capitalistic market is not the main focus. Moreover, it was not the colonial “discovery” of Kashmiri shawls that transformed them into commercial products that began to circulate in Western markets (Maskiell 29). As Maskiell reminds us, Kashmiri shawls were cosmopolitan items of trade long before the arrival of the British (30). As early as the 16th century, Kashmiri shawls were already recognized as commercial products that “moved through established trade networks” that stretched across Central Asia, China, Russia as well as parts of the Ottoman Empire (32). The Tiger Ladies is more concerned with showing the textured cosmopolitanism of the Kashmiri shawls themselves; the production of which is shown to be a collaborative and iterative process in which vernacular

146  Imagining Cultural Human Rights taste and cosmopolitan influence are skillfully negotiated. For instance, the “shawl wallah” or shawl man uses his “silk samplers” to take orders from the women of Koul’s household. These samplers consist of visual motifs such as floral patterns that have been painstakingly embroidered onto white silk. This silk is used as a fabric on which sample motifs that will later be rendered on shawls are embroidered. The text reminds the reader that sericulture in Kashmir was learnt from the Chinese: “His village has grown the fat white cocoons of the silkworm . . . since the days of the Chinese traders. No one remembers the silk traders but we continue to grow silk” (Koul 11). According to Mossman, alongside the production of silk, Kashmiris also borrowed “various embroidery techniques” and “essentially Chinese motifs” from the Chinese traders (Mossman 41). The women in the narrator’s household design their shawls by selecting their motifs of choice from a range of “hybrid visual idioms” that represent an “infinite number of possibilities” (11). Along with Persian floral motifs and paisleys, visual symbols drawn from Kashmiri life are also popular among the Pandit ladies. One of these is the leaf of the chinar tree, which was brought from Persia during Moghul rule: “We treat it as if it is a benevolent old lady, we sleep the sweetest sleep in its shade and some women are given its Kashmiri name, which is booyne” (15). Another motif mentioned in the text is that of a “very Englishlooking rose,” which according to the author was probably “requested by a homesick memsahib” (16). Similarly, religious figures and images were also worked into the fabric. For instance, the lotus, which is a sacred flower for Kashmiri Pandits, was frequently embroidered into their shawls (Mossman 33). Along with this, figures from the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana, were also depicted in shawls by Kashmiri Muslim craftsmen (34). The Kashmiri shawl can be considered an example of visual and textured cosmopolitanism because of the way it “juxtaposes, amalgamates and translates visual material from various different cultural traditions” (Fernandez 1). In this regard, Mossman praises the skillfulness of Kashmiri weavers in the way they “borrow motifs and ideas from other cultures” and “blend them with typically Indian motifs in a harmonious manner which eliminates any feeling of inappropriate, foreign additions” (41). The memoir also carefully represents the conversational exchanges between the shawl man and his customers, highlighting the collaborative nature of the design process that precedes the production of a shawl. Although shawl weaving and production are shown to be a typically male-centred activity, the designing of these pashminas is represented as a collaborative, women-inclusive activity. The Pandit women and their Muslim weaver negotiate the cosmopolitan visual typologies of their culture and by doing so, also form long-lasting relationships with one another. Koul writes that the shawl-maker was in possession of all the “symbols of our life firmly catalogued in fine stitches on his cherished

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 147 samplers” (Koul 16). In other words, the motifs on the shawls – the chinar leaf, the buta – are ‘symbols’ of their lives: shared visual idioms and vocabularies that enable individuals of different religions to understand one another and to form relationships with one another.

Construction Site Kashmiri visual and textured cosmopolitanism are themes that have also recently been explored in the artwork of the ‘revered Indian artist,’ Nilima Sheikh (“Nilima”). Sheikh initially became interested in Kashmir after reading Agha Shahid Ali’s poems (“Nilima”). Her works includes stencilled verses from Ali’s work as well as visual representation from a “myriad sources, ranging from medieval poetry to Salman Rushdie’s books, along with equally widespread image references – miniatures, wall paintings, and magical Kashmiri folktales” (“Nilima”). Her painting, Construction Site, for example, is a visual representation of this form of textured cosmopolitanism that is born out of collaborative artisanship. Nilima Sheikh’s exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 2014 has been described as “a tribute to Kashmir in Chicago” (Parikh). The exhibition, which bore the title “Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams,” is based on a line from Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight and featured eight large scrolls that had been painted between 2003 and 2010 with two of them – We Must Bear and Hunarmand – especially created for the Chicago installation (Parikh). Construction Site (Figure 3.1) has been inspired by a 19th century British manuscript, which depicted Kashmiri labourers and artisans working at their particular craft (D’ Mello). The bottom edge of the canvas depicts various tools including a hammer and a hatchet and these utensils frame the painting. In the centre of the work, the Kashmiri bhand, who is described as a “narrator-like figure of satire and buffoonery in Kashmiri folk theatre, is positioned” (McKean). He theatrically gestures at the scenes of collaboration and communal labour behind him. The bhand is the largest figure on the canvas and in this particular work possesses the narrative function of a Greek chorus (McKean). Behind him, figures till the fields, terrace the hills, transfer bulky objects and assist one another in building the city’s infrastructure (McKean). Unlike other works in the series that include references and allusions to Kashmir’s volatile history and troubled politics, this painting depicts a harmonious Valley of Kashmir whose citizens are artisans, builders, and farmers who toil in the village fields or in urbanized spaces. According to McKean, these scenes of collaborative labour and artisanship are a visual representation of the Valley’s cosmopolitan ethos. Nilima Sheikh’s painting and The Tiger Ladies are similar insofar as they both represent the human right to cultural participation as a

148  Imagining Cultural Human Rights

Figure 3.1 Construction Site. Artist: Nilima Sheikh Source: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2009. https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/1880/ nilima-sheikh-each-night-put-kashmir-in-your-dreams

textured cosmopolitanism that is born out of collaborative material artisanship and creative dialogue. Instead of being framed inside a canvas and displayed against the wall, Nilima Sheikh’s works are suspended from the roof and “inhabit the air,” to borrow a phrase from Sheikh’s

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 149 own description of scroll-based art works (D’ Mello). Due to the scale of the works and the brilliance of the colours used, these scrolls create “an aura” around them, which, according to one critic, can only be experienced in person (McKean). According to Sheikh, the scale of this art series derives its inspiration from mural painting, theatre, and set design and Pichawai paintings of the Nathdwara tradition (D’ Mello). However, to my mind, the works are strongly reminiscent of South Asian textile design, especially Kashmiri and Persian wall tapestries. If a lay-observer, without any prior knowledge of Sheikh’s artistic influences, viewed this art series, they would conclude that this series owes its layout and scale exclusively to South Asian wall tapestries, shawl designs, and traditional Persian rugs. The resemblance of Sheikh’s scroll paintings to Asian textiles has not gone unnoticed by other art critics, although the extent of the resemblance has perhaps not been adequately explored. Parikh, for instance, is of the view that the bottom edges of many of Sheikh’s works in this series have “been intentionally finished like typical Kashmiri shawls” (Parikh). The work Valley is strongly reminiscent of a Kashmiri shawl with its ornately designed borders. Along with this, it is rendered in vibrant colors and features floral motifs, stencilled textile designs and geometrical shapes and for these reasons is strongly evocative of a traditional fabric, especially a Kashmiri pashmina shawl. Valley, which McKean describes as a “lyric portrait of Kashmir,” renders the picturesque mountain peaks and rivers of the Vale of Kashmir in swathes of brilliant green and “lapis blue” (McKean). Nilima Sheikh’s artwork and Koul’s memoir, The Tiger Ladies, both use the Valley of Kashmir as their setting. In Valley, Nilima Sheikh flattens geography into a colourful traditional fabric that captures the contours and the scenic beauty of the Kashmir Valley. As Parikh reminds us, she also depicts the “composite history and culture” through her use of “blocks of colour and a collagelike aesthetic that represents patchwork fabric” (Parikh). Traditional Kashmiri fabric in the form of the shawl or the jamawar tapestry are in essence, Sheikh’s canvas, and on this she maps the topography and cosmopolitan culture of the Kashmir Valley. Where Kashmiri shawls are represented in The Tiger Ladies and in Sheikh’s work, they become a literal canvas onto which Kashmiri visual and political histories are re-assembled and rearranged. Instead of only including textile motifs onto her ‘canvas,’ Nilima Sheikh also paints historical anecdotes, texts, Kashmiri figures, and religious symbols into her work. Parikh describes Sheikh’s artistic and cultural influences as including “Ali’s poignant prose . . . Indian and Persian miniature painting, Central Asian wall painting, Kashmiri folk tales, the artist’s childhood memories, and the works of medieval, pre-modern, and contemporary authors” (Parikh). The historical and visual range of these sources is reflective of the cosmopolitanism of the Valley.

150  Imagining Cultural Human Rights Sheikh’s work Son et Lumière, for example, owes its title to Agha Shahid Ali’s poem that bears the same title as the artwork and is featured in his collection The Country Without a Post Office. Using the same textile-inspired aesthetic that can be observed in Valley, Son et Lumière can be considered a visual representation of the cultural cosmopolitanism of the Vale of Kashmir. Upon a scroll that mimics the appearance and texture of a Kashmiri shawl, Nilima Sheikh excavates and unearths the history of Kashmir. The background of the work consists of a range of undulating Himalayan peaks rendered in shades of blue, earthy brown, and green, which are traversed by figures taken from both historical and religious narratives. One of these appears to be a Moghul prince on horseback whereas another resembles a deity about to destroy a demon who is attacking the Valley (McKean). The paths running through the Himalayan peaks that connect the Vale of Kashmir (represented in the foreground) with other geographical regions can be considered a depiction of the Silk Route that brought diverse religions and historical dynasties, including the Moghuls, to the Valley. The exhibition booklet for this particular art series also emphasizes this aspect of Nilima Sheikh’s work: “the paintings focus on the cosmopolitanism of the ancient Silk Road that linked Kashmir to Central Asia and China” (“Nilima”). Another aspect of Son et Lumière,” not yet discussed by art critics, is its formal and semantic relationship with Agha Shahid Ali’s poem. The title of both works Son et Lumière can be loosely translated to mean “sound-and-light show” and is a type of ‘nighttime entertainment’ that was originally developed in France (“Son”). It consists of “Multicoloured lights of changing intensity [that] are directed against the facade of a historic building or ruin. The changes of light are synchronized with a sound track . . . carrying music and the dramatized story of the site” (“Son”). The Oxford English Dictionary also lists a figurative meaning of a ‘Son et Lumière,’ which it defines as a type of “Writing or behavior resembling a son et lumière presentation, especially in its dramatic qualities” (Son et”). Shahid Ali’s poem takes on both meanings of the work: it presents a dramatized history of the Valley of Kashmir where “a mountain to its west / is pierced with a trident” and the future is “splint[ered]” into “wars of succession” but also, describes a literal son et lumière in which “spotlights lash their backs / as Shalimar blooms” (Ali, The Country 71–72). The references to pierced mountains and “desiccated water” in the poem pertain to the myth of creation of the Kashmir Valley, which according to ancient texts and local myth, used to be a lake (Wangu 10). The Sanskrit text Nilmata Purana, for instance, states that Mother Kashmir was once a deep lake in which the demon Jalobhava resided (10). He was driven away by Vishnu who bore a hole into the mountain, enabling the water in the Valley to be drained away (10). However, according to another text, the goddess Sharika killed Jalobhava by hurling a hill at him and it is probably this mythical story that is depicted in Nilima

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 151 Sheikh’s painting. Selected verses from Shahid Ali’s poem are stenciled onto her work, which can be considered a Son et Lumière of Agha Shahid Ali’s poem. A Moghul emperor appears in the centre of the painting and is rendered in a visual style reminiscent of Moghul miniature. The work also depicts the “dynasty’s bloody arms” – a reference to the wars of succession” that are alluded to in the three severed heads painted above the Moghul Emperor’s head (Ali, The Country 71–72). For this reason, McKean argues that Shahid Ali’s works have, to a certain extent, enabled her to “develop a visual language for Kashmir” (McKean). D’Mello, in concordance with this view, states that Sheikh’s works can be considered a visual rendition of “the accumulated pathos of Ali’s collected works” (D’Mello). The themes of Nilima Sheikh’s work – the relationship between language and visuality and the visual and textured cosmopolitanism of the Valley – also inform The Tiger Ladies, as we have already observed. The cover of The Tiger Ladies also visually foregrounds the Kashmiri material and textured cosmopolitanism that are at the heart of the text. The majestic Vale of Kashmir with its snow-covered peaks constitute the background of the cover and these are superimposed with familiar symbols of Kashmir, namely rose petals, water lilies, and Cashmere shawls bearing the archetypal paisley pattern (see Figure 3.2). These images not only evoke the cultural richness of the Vale of Kashmir but also highlight how Kashmir has been historically consumed and appropriated by the global capitalistic market and how images of Kashmir have always had a cultural economy in the Western imagination.

Khir Bhawani The familiarity and exoticism of the cover with its eclectic collection of aesthetic products and scenic landscape is nevertheless undercut by an image of a tiger’s face with narrowed eyes rendered in yellow. Although native to Kashmir, the tiger is not an image that is commonly associated with the region, especially in the Western imagination. The image of the yellow tiger with its piercing eyes unsettles the reader and impinges upon the otherwise safe exoticism of the cover illustration. The motley of symbolic images of Kashmir – the paisley-patterned shawl, the rose petals, and the picturesque landscape – are also woven into the narrative and depict the cultural richness and plenitude of the Valley. The title of the memoir – The Tiger Ladies – is a reference to the Mother Goddess Bhawani, who is also known by the name of Durga, Ragnya, and Sharika (Koul 19). The picture of the Mother Goddess is strategically placed above everyone’s heads in Dhanna’s kitchen hall, where the weaving and shawl-designing takes place (19). Bhawani, or ‘khir Bhawani’ as she is commonly referred to is a goddess who is indigenous to the Vale of Kashmir (Wangu 12). Her name means “the one born from milk and rice

Figure 3.2 Book cover of The Tiger Ladies,” Penguin. Source: The Tiger Ladies by Sudha Koul, Copyright © 2002 by Sudha Koul, Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press, Boston Massachusetts

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 153 dessert” and is probably derived from the rice offerings (kheer or khir) that were made to her at her shrine in the village of Tumul (9). She is the most revered goddess of the Kashmiri Pandits, the Hindu population of the Vale of Kashmir, and her cult is believed to have emerged in the late 19th century (Wangu 7). According to Wangu: her cultic paraphernalia reflects an amalgamation of the folk deities Nagas and Pisachas . . .; the indigenous deities Bhairava and his wife Bhairavi (fearful forms of Shiva and Shakti respectively); and the Vaishnava god Rama, his wife Sita and their devotee Hanuman (Wangu 12) The goddess khir Bhawani can be considered a “syncretic deity in whose cult, myths and symbols from Kashmiri Shaivism, Vaishnavism and local beliefs are appropriated” (247). The representation of khir Bhawani in Dhanna’s kitchen hall depicts her “sit[ting] sidesaddle or astride a demure tiger” (Koul 19). The deployment of a lion or a tiger as a ‘vehicle’ instead of a lotus-shaped ‘ornamental throne’ is indicative of “mobility, might and natural confidence” (Wangu 219). It is presumably for this reason that Koul refers to the goddess Bhawani as “She Who Fears Nothing” (Koul 19). Bhawani is usually invoked in a religious context as the “goddess of the tigers” who resides in her “cave shrine.” (185). The author, alongside her family, “scream out to her” in a display of religious fervor before bathing in the spring water that gushes forth from the mountain (185). Water bodies are considered to be holy by Kashmiri Pandits due to their “religious and economic significance.” Natural springs known as nagas are considered especially sacred since they are often thought to be inhabited by serpent deities (also referred to as nagas) (Wangu 5). However, the myth of khir Bhawani, the tiger lady, does not remain geographically limited to the Vale of Kashmir in Koul’s memoir but migrates to North America with the author. After visiting an exhibition displaying the archaeological findings unearthed in the Indus Valley in Pakistan, Sudha feels that the goddess Bhawani has risen again, but this time on the continent of North America. The goddess is not only a symbol of strength but also of “beginnings” and “continuity” and enables the author to find her bearings in a strange country and to re-discover her sense of belonging (214–15). The goddess, like the author, is not static or limited to a particular locale, but is “alive and well and traveling the world” providing solace and comfort to displaced migrants (215). At times, the tiger lady Bhawani becomes a cosmopolitan symbol of feminine agility and strength, which has its roots in religious mythology and imagery but is not circumscribed by it. The narrator informs the reader that they “have grown up with Tiger Ladies all around us, even our men are in mortal terror of them, and make pilgrimages and pray to them

154  Imagining Cultural Human Rights constantly” (19). Here, the formidable tiger lady is not just a reference to the goddess Bhawani but could also be indicative of the family matriarch, Dhanna, who is respected and feared by members of Sudha’s family. Similarly, when Sudha enrolls into a women’s college which is administered by a “brave Muslim woman,” the first female in her family to pursue a graduate degree, she states that she is “training to ride a different tiger from our mothers” (97). In this instance, “mothers” does not refer only to her biological mother but all her female ancestors. Here, the act of riding a tiger has been detached, to a certain extent, from its religious context and signifies the social and economic mobility that is acquired through a sound education. The sense of power and mobility that accompanied the image of khir Bhawani, the tiger lady, is transplanted into the human realm of female didacticism and education. Similarly, one does not need to follow a particular faith to have the characteristics or the appearance of a tiger lady which, in certain cases in the memoir, functions more as an expression of feminine strength and fortitude rather than an image of the divine. This is further illustrated by an instance in the memoir where the narrator, while perusing a newspaper, discovers the photograph of a veiled Kashmiri woman who is a local leader and “swears to the reporter that the status of women in Islam is equal to that of men” (218). When asked by the reporter the kind of future she foresaw for her daughter, she replied that she would like her to grow up to be the Prime Minister of the country. Upon reading these words in the newspaper, the narrator states that “I smell a tiger and rose petals” (Koul 218). Although the Kashmiri local leader is a follower of the Islamic faith, she is nevertheless compared to a tiger lady due to her sense of determination and ambition. The image of the tiger lady is an example of visual cosmopolitanism insofar as it is a mobile metaphor that transverses the world of mythology, religion, and politics, altering its meaning and even its appearance accordingly. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that these are the concluding lines of the memoir, which leaves the reader with a lasting image of a Kashmiri Muslim tiger lady, who although not garlanded by roses, emanates the strength and the determination of khir Bhavani. The image of a tiger lady is a visual rendering of a rights-bearing subject. The Tiger Ladies provides us with an imagining of the “human,” of “human rights discourse” as a cosmopolitan and yet rooted female subject. The tiger lady is a visual symbol of Kashmiri cosmopolitanism: she is a vernacular expression of the sacred, having emerged in the Vale of Kashmir with a tangible visual manifestation. She is an articulation of Kashmiri cosmopolitanism which, although rooted in religious belief and practices, is not circumscribed by it. In other words, the tiger lady herself can be considered a manifestation of the gendered, vernacular, and material cosmopolitanism present in the Valley, which is created by and accessible to subjects who have their human rights intact.

Imagining Cultural Human Rights 155

Conclusion The Tiger Ladies attempts to re-imagine the relationship between “culture and human rights” by highlighting how linguistic, visual, and material culture can in fact carry forth the work of international human rights. I have argued that the UDHR carries within it a vision of a positivelyenfranchised human being, and a dignified – and pleasurable – existence, and that ‘culture’ itself can become a means of making the lives of human beings happier, meaningful, and enjoyable. In this sense, ‘culture’ advances the work of human rights and ‘cultural participation’ is imperative to the accomplishment of its fundamental vision. The memoir illustrates how material culture, in particular, can be the means of creating a type of visual and textured cosmopolitanism between subjects, which enables them to negotiate and potentially overcome class, ethnic, gender, and religious divisions and differences. As in the previous chapters, an immersion and engagement with local cosmopolitanism, particularly its visual and material aspects, is seen as the marker of a rights-bearing and rights-enjoying body. In short, to have and to enjoy human rights is to have the freedom to make and create textual and material culture and artifacts and to build long-lasting relationships with members of disparate ethnic and religious communities in the process. Code-switching and metonymy are used within the work in order to engage with and draw upon Kashmir’s rich visual and material culture, particularly the Kashmiri shawl, which features prominently within The Tiger Ladies. Through this, Koul’s memoir charts the murky territory of “cultural human rights,” which as I have illustrated, remain an underdeveloped and vague legal terrain, and the memoir pushes us to visualize what it means to have and to enjoy human rights, particularly cultural human rights, while simultaneously cementing the centrality and importance of these rights alongside other social, economic, and political human rights enshrined within the UDHR.

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Imagining Cultural Human Rights 157 Nafziger, James A. R., et al. Cultural Law: International, Comparative, and Indigenous. Cambridge UP, 2014. Nava, Mica. Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference. Berg, 2007. Necipoğlu, Gülru. “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Translation: Artistic Conversations with Renaissance Italy In Mehmed II’s Constantinople.” Muqarnas Online, vol. 29, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1–81. “Nilima Sheikh: Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams.” The Art Institute of Chicago, 8 Mar. 2014. www.artic.edu/exhibition/nilima-sheikh-each-nightputkashmir-your-dreams. O’Keefe, Roger. “The Right to Take Part in Cultural Life Under Article 15 of the ICESCR.” International and Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 4, 1998, pp. 904–23., doi:10.1017/S002058930006259X. Parikh, Rachel. “Trouble in Paradise: A Tribute to Kashmir in Chicago.” Apollo, 20 Mar. 2014. www.apollomagazine.com/trouble-paradise-tribute-kashmirart-institutechicago/. Prasad, G. J. V. “Writing Translation: The Strange Case of the Indian English Novel.” Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, edited by Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi. Routledge, 1999, pp. 41–57. “Protection of Minority Languages Is a Human Rights Obligation, UN Expert Says.” United Nations, 12 Mar. 2013. www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?News ID=44352#.WjANcEqWbIU. Rofel, Lisa. “Between Tianxia and Postsocialism: Contemporary Chinese Cosmopolitanism.” Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, edited by Gerard Delanty. Routledge, 2012, pp. 443–51. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. Knopf, 1981. Schomer, Karine, and William Hewat McLeod. The Saints: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India. Motilal Banarsidass, 1987. Sheikh, Nilima. “Son Et Lumière.” Guftugu, 2009. www.guftugu.in/2016/02/ nilima-sheikh/. “Son Et Lumière.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2015. www.britannica.com/art/ son-et-lumiere. Stivens, Maila. “Gender, Rights and Cosmopolitanisms.” Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, edited by Pnina Werbner., Berg, 2008. pp. 87–109. Vrdoljak, Ana Filipa. “Self-Determination and Cultural Rights.” Cultural Human Rights, edited by Francesco Francioni and Martin Scheinin. Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008, pp. 41–78. Wangu, Madhu Bazaz. A Goddess Is Born: The Emergence of Khir Bhavani in Kashmir. Spark, 2002. www.artic.edu/exhibition/nilima-sheikh-each-nightputkashmir-your-dreams. Yuval-Davis, Nira. “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2006, pp. 193–209. Zutshi, Chitralekha. “Designed for Eternity: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain.” The Journal of British Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 2009, pp. 420–40.

4 Palatable Fictions Negotiating Narratives of Consumption and Subalternity in Jaspreet Singh’s Chef

The Tiger Ladies deploys textual representations of Kashmiri visual and material culture as a means of fleshing out cultural human rights. In contrast, Jaspreet Singh’s Chef uses literary depictions of Kashmiri cuisine and regional culinary customs in order to expose the gap in the human rights that are available to citizens and “subaltern citizens” (Pandey, “The Subaltern” 4735). I posit that Kashmiri cuisine and its representations should not only be exclusively viewed as a type of regional foodway but also as a discursive entity. Representations of Kashmiri food on national tourism portals, in local and regional cook books, in paintings and on films are undergirded by narratives of desire and privilege. By using Kashmiri food customs as its central subject matter, Chef engages with and re-works these vexed narratives. Kashmiri cuisine is different from other forms of Indian cuisine on account of the fact that it does not make use of ingredients that are considered a staple in mainstream South Asian cuisine, such as onions and garlic (Ganju xix). There are subtle differences between Kashmiri Pandit and Kashmiri Muslim preparation methods and techniques, but both forms of Kashmiri food make use of certain basic spices and ingredients in their dishes including “red chilis, fennel powder, asafetida, ginger powder, cumin seeds, curd or yoghurt” (Ganju xix). These dishes, once prepared, are eaten with plain white rice, instead of Indian flat bread or roti, in order to balance the spiciness of the gravy (Ganju xix). Kashmiri cuisine is reflective of the cultural hybridity of the Valley insofar as it has been influenced by the cuisine of “Central Asia, Persia, Middle East and Afghanistan” and borrows preparatory techniques and spices from the cuisine of these different geographical regions (Chak 31). Chef can be classified alongside other South Asian culinary-themed novels such as Mistress of Spices (1997) by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Pastries: A Novel of Desserts and Discoveries (2003) by Bharti Kirchner. These literary works commodify cultural difference as a culinary practice and are immensely popular among the American reading public for the selfsame reason (Mannur 86). Chef, Jaspreet Singh’s debut novel is a Bildungsroman and features a young Sikh army officer, Kirpal

Palatable Fictions 159 Singh, who serves as a cook in the kitchen of the Indian army barracks in the Valley of Kashmir. On account of the protagonist’s profession and his posting to the army mess, descriptions of food and culinary preparation constitute the narrative focus of Chef and as such, I argue that it falls under the rubric of South Asian ‘food writing.’ Food writing is a genre of literary writing in which food “emerges as a vital textual modality, one that becomes a means of articulating one’s sense of ethnic or national identity” (Mannur 14). The ‘culinary-themed’ novel is considered a popular genre of writing within contemporary literature, particularly literature that is composed by minority or postcolonial subjects, who are typically positioned at the margins of the nation-state (84). In culinary-themed novels, racial, cultural or ethnic difference is articulated through the mode of the appetizing and the consumable, and as such, the literary text becomes a palatable, pleasing, and in a certain sense, politically benign narrativization of otherwise vexed and loaded issues of alterity, identity, and cultural difference (84). These forms of food writing enable an Anglo-American readership to consume narratives of otherness with minimum discomfort and guilt (83). For this reason, the genre of food writing has also disparagingly been referred to as “food pornography” by literary scholars (82). ‘Food pornography’ is defined as the commodification and exoticization of culinary dishes for “mainstream readers using an Orientalist understanding of food as a signifier of difference” (82). On the face of it, food pornography appears to protect and popularize the cultural practices of a minority subject, but according to Sau-Ling Wong, in reality this literary practice involves the removal of cultural and culinary practices from their appropriate social context, and their transformation into strange, exotic edibles whose only purpose is to feed the appetites and tastes of the metropolitan Western reader (5556). However, Chef is a culinary-themed novel that is highly subversive and significantly different from other examples of South Asian food writing, or food pornography. Representations of food in Jaspreet Singh’s novel do not fulfill merely a voyeuristic purpose; on the contrary, his text uses food to broach the subject of rights. In this sense, Chef is a distinctive example of a culinarythemed novel in which representations of culinary consumption function as a larger critique of class stratification and of the difference in human rights that are available to different citizens within a national polity. It is however not the only example of subversive or transgressive food writing, particularly within South Asian literary fiction. Salman Rushdie, for example, makes use of gastronomic metaphors in his magnum opus Midnight’s Children (1981) as a way of parodying the consumer appetites of the metropolitan reader (Huggan, “The Postcolonial” 28). In Midnight’s Children, India and its history transforms into edible chutney and through this transmogrification, the novel appeals to the tastes and particular appetites of its Anglo-American reading public, while also

160  Palatable Fictions being critical of their heightened desire to consume non-Western, particularly South Asian literature, and their “complicitous enjoyment” of these texts (Huggan, “The Postcolonial” 28). In The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which can be considered the tale of an extended meal, Mohsin Hamid turns the city of Lahore into an edible entity: “I enjoy the tea in this, the city of my birth, steeped long enough to acquire a rich, dark color and made creamy with fresh, full-fat milk. . . . Allow me to pour you another cup” (Hamid 15). In this instance, it is unclear whether Changez, the protagonist of Hamid’s work, refers to the city or the tea and the novel plays with this sense of ambiguity, transforming the tale that he is narrating into a steaming cup of tea. As he pours the fictional tea, he also pours his story into an attractive vessel for the American Tourist and invariably, for the Anglophone metropolitan reader. Similarly, when Hamid’s narrator depicts his home country for his American girlfriend Erica, we hear that she “sip[s] at [his] descriptions and find[s] them to her taste” (Hamid 27). In both instances the literary narrative is cleverly turned into delectable beverage. In this way, Hamid’s novel acknowledges the Western reader’s desire to consume postcolonial literature while simultaneously mocking and satisfying the appetites of its readership. The process of feeding the American Tourist in Hamid’s novel is also a deeply political act because in certain instances it is used, quite literally, as a device to silence him and to invert the power relations between them: “[T]he time has come to employ your tongue – for taste, if nothing more, although I hope you can be persuaded to speak” (Hamid 76). The shared meal becomes a way of exercising control over the American Tourist’s ability and desire to speak and also serves as a means of lulling him into a false sense of security. In this chapter, I argue that Jaspreet Singh continues this tradition of subversive South Asian food writing that uses its own consumability to advance a critical agenda. Chef deploys visually striking and exoticized depictions of food as a way of exemplifying the relationship between human rights, consumption, and pleasure and as a means of exposing the disparity in the rights available to “citizens” and “subaltern citizens” (Pandey, “The Subaltern” 4735). I argue that Chef uses regional food customs primarily to highlight the differences between the access to pleasure and enjoyment that is on offer to Kashmiris as opposed to non-Kashmiris. The culinary aesthetic of Singh’s novel may be considered ‘pornographic’ in some respects. Chef certainly uses delectable representations of Kashmiri food and invites the reader to consume them. However, it simultaneously exposes their complicity in the consumption of Kashmir as a scenic territory, as a source of beautiful art objects and artifacts, and as a delight for the palate. In other words, Chef uses local culinary registers to offer a critical commentary from a diachronic perspective on

Palatable Fictions 161 the touristic ‘consumption’ of Kashmir. In the first part of this chapter, I analyze different representations of Kashmiri food as a discursive object in selected cookbooks, national tourism portals, blogs and on film in order to explore the culinary space within which Jaspreet Singh plots his literary work Chef. I explore the relationship between human rights and pleasure in the novel in order to highlight how certain ‘humans,’ in the novel, are shown as having a greater entitlement to seek and consume pleasure as compared to others. Finally, in the last part I show how this difference in culinary pleasure and consumption functions as a rhetorical means of highlighting the disparity in the human rights that are accessible to citizens and subaltern citizens.

Filiation and Affiliation Jaspreet Singh, although not an ethnically Kashmiri author, unlike the other Anglophone authors in this book, spent part of his childhood in the Valley of Kashmir and also affiliates himself with other Kashmiri cultural practitioners. Said has famously defined filiation as a relationship that is “held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority – involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict,” whereas affiliation involves alliances that take “transpersonal forms – such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class and the hegemony of the dominant culture” (The World 20). Apart from the fact that Chef focuses on the contested territory of Kashmir, Singh also uses affiliative gestures in his text as a means of placing himself alongside contemporary literary voices emanating from the Valley and from the Kashmiri diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States. He acknowledges his personal debt to Agha Shahid Ali, the pioneer of contemporary Anglophone Kashmiri writing, in the “Acknowledgement” section in his novel. Along with this, Singh acknowledges Basharat Peer for his “bold reporting on Kashmir that brought attention to ‘interrogation camps’ like Papa-1 and Papa-2” (248). Basharat Peer, we have seen, is responsible for popularizing the Kashmir issue amongst metropolitan Anglophone readers, and to an extent, for re-inserting it into the journalistic public sphere with Curfewed Night. The reportage Singh alludes to was largely brought to the attention of the local and international press by Peer’s memoir. By mentioning this work in his own novel, Singh adds his literary text alongside the contemporary strain of English language narratives emanating from the Valley and from Kashmiri diasporas in the West that are starting to proliferate in Anglo-American reading markets. By virtue of this, we should consider Jaspreet Singh a “Kashmircentric” voice (Kabir, “Postpastoral”). Although Jaspreet Singh is not a Kashmiri subject in the strictest sense, he affiliates himself with Kashmiri public intellectuals, standing in solidarity with other voices from the Valley and from the Kashmiri diaspora abroad, in parts of North America and

162  Palatable Fictions Europe. Hence, I would argue, his Bildungsroman should be included in the corpus of Anglophone writing in and about Kashmir published in recent times. Apart from being Kashmircentric and having spent a sizeable portion of his childhood in Kashmir, Singh is also rooted in other national geographies and transnational literary terrains. For example, although he was born in India, he moved to Canada in the 1990s and acquired a doctorate in 1998 from McGill University (“Jaspreet”). He currently resides in and operates from the Canadian Rockies, and in fact, Chef, which was his first novel, won a local Canadian literary award, namely the Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction (2009) (“Jaspreet”). According to the website of the Writers Guild of Alberta, this particular prize is only awarded to an author who is a resident of the province of Alberta, which highlights that Singh should be considered a Canadian author, in addition to being categorized as an Indian, Indian-Canadian and a Kashmircentric author (“Awards”). Jaspreet Singh’s novel Chef, published in 2010, revolves around the life and coming of age of the young Sikh chef, Kirpal Singh, who enlists in the army following the demise of his father, Iqbal Singh. Whereas The Tiger Ladies depicts the kitchen hall and its adjoining areas as a cosmopolitan, female-dominated space, in Chef the gendered, domestic space of a kitchen is no longer the exclusive domain of the female members of the household, but is, on the contrary, occupied by serving members of the Indian army. Singh’s novel begins with an aging Kirpal on a train bound for Kashmir, where he has been invited to serve as the head chef for the wedding of General Kumar’s daughter Rubiya to a Kashmiri Muslim, Shahid Lone. At this point in the plot, Kirpal, the protagonist, is suffering from terminal cancer and a recent CT scan has shown that a malignant tumour is present in his brain. The train journey is punctuated by frequent flashbacks as the protagonist recalls his first trip to Kashmir as a newly inducted officer. The novel alternates between Kirpal’s past, as a young army office, and his present, as a dying man travelling back to Kashmir, a place which has continued to haunt him ever since his premature leave-taking from the armed forces and his flight from the Valley. Despite the vehement protestations of his mother who imagines Kashmir to be a “foreign” place “filled with turmoil,” the young Kirpal nevertheless decides to travel to the Vale as a newly-inducted military officer (Singh 23). Here he is apprenticed to Kishen, a senior chef in the Indian army who functions as an alternative father-figure and mentor following the death of his biological father while in active duty in the army. In the initial stages of his apprenticeship, Kirpal is more occupied with his exploits in the kitchen and with women than with the troubled politics of the Valley and the focal point of his everyday existence is the preparation and arrangement of seamlessly served delectable meals for General Kumar, his only daughter Rubiya, and the motley of guests who visit his residence on a regular basis. However, the apparent monotony and trite

Palatable Fictions 163 domesticity of Kirpal’s situation is interrupted when his mentor Kishen is demoted to the dreary icefields of the Siachen glacier following an illfated episode involving a botched banquet. This marks the end of Kirpal Singh’s brief culinary apprenticeship and, with Kishen’s position as head chef vacant, he reluctantly takes the place of his former mentor. This episode is the first of a series of tumultuous events including Kishen’s eventual suicide in the icefields and the appearance of Irem, the Kashmiri “enemy woman,” which compels Kirpal to confront his own religious and ethnic biases. In a traditional Bildungsroman, marriage along with a successful apprenticeship mark the successful socialization of the formerly reckless youth into bourgeois society. However, in Chef, Kirpal Singh develops romantic feelings towards Irem, a Kashmiri Muslim woman from the other side of the LOC (Line of Control). His love remains unrequited and instead of marriage, their relationship results in his departure from the Valley of Kashmir. Apprenticeship and matrimony, both of which are typically instrumental in the Bildung of the protagonist and his linear socialization into mainstream middle-class society, are instead represented as sources of discord and trauma in Chef. One particularly traumatic episode is the rape and resulting pregnancy of Irem at the hands of an Indian army officer. Bereft of hope and unable to alleviate Irem’s situation, Kirpal requests an early retirement from the army and returns to the quietude of his mother’s house. Subsequently, after a lapse of many years, Kirpal returns to Kashmir following General Kumar’s request, and during this time Kirpal learns about Irem’s fate through Rubiya. Meanwhile, General Kumar, unable to accept the fact that his daughter is entering into matrimony with an enemy, a Kashmiri Muslim man from Azad Kashmir, commits suicide just prior to her impending nuptials and in these apocalyptic circumstances, Rubiya postpones the wedding and leaves Kashmir to join her fiancé Shahid across the border, leaving Kirpal fixated on the horizon as her bus becomes a “little black dot” disappearing into the distance (Singh 246).

Kashmiri Food in the National Imagination Jaspreet Singh’s choice of the innocuous and seemingly trivial subject of local culinary customs to deconstruct fraught issues relating to Kashmiri politics and identity is not an anomalous one because Kashmiri cuisine has a special place in the Indian palate and the national imagination. For example, on the Incredible India website, Kashmir is represented as a destination on the culinary map of India. “Incredible India,” which has become an enormously popular tagline for India globally, is the title of the official website of India’s Ministry of Tourism and was coined as part of a hugely successful marketing campaign launched in 2002 by the Indian government (Kerrigan et al. 319). The campaign was aimed at attracting international and local tourists as well as lucrative business

164  Palatable Fictions investments and deals to the region (319). This international tourist campaign has been labelled as an exercise in “nation branding,” which involves the deployment of highly idealized and aesthetic images of India in order to create and project a particular perception of the nation and its national community (319). The main landing page of the Incredible India website consists of several high-definition, flashing images of India that prominently feature the Himalayan peaks and the scenic Valley of Kashmir, both of which lie in Jammu and Kashmir. On the top of the page are a series of key links, including “Festivals and Cuisine.” The latter is listed in the top right corner of the home page. The section on cuisine invites the viewer to “pamper” their “palate” with “exotic, diverse Indian cuisine” (“Incredible India”). The icon titled “Recipes of India,” once clicked, presents a visual representation of the culinary regions of India accompanied by a score of classical sitar music. Here, the letter ‘I’ of the ‘India’ in Incredible India, which is simultaneously also an exclamation point, is juxtaposed by a single red chili and black peppercorns (see Figure 4.1). Ultimately, the dot of the exclamation mark expands and transforms into a large thaal, or a plate, on which a

Figure 4.1 “Incredible India”. Source: Incredible India. Ministry of Tourism Government of India, 05 Aug. 2015, www. incredibleindia.org/food&cuisine/

Palatable Fictions 165 description of the culinary delicacies of the Indian subcontinent appears in text (Figure 4.2). To the left of the thaal, images of red chilis as well as meat-covered skewers serve as hyperlinks to sections titled “culinary regions” and a “glossary of recipes.” The blurb which appears in the middle of the plate reads as follows: It comes as a surprise to most people that India does not have a single national cuisine but many cuisines. Indian food reflects in all its glory the unity in diversity [of] the subcontinent. The major culinary regions which boast of a distinct cooking style are Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Avadh, Bengal, the coastal region, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Hyderabad and the Imperial cities of Agra and Delhi. It is not as if these gastronomic regions have remained in watertight isolation. There has always been a lively interaction between them and the fusion of flavors and blending of cooking techniques has been the norm and not the exception [. . .] Most of the Indian states today have been defined using the linguistic principle. While this has served political convenience and followed democratic aspirations of the people, for the gourmet the political map can only be confusing. The culinary regions do not always recognize man-made borders. (“Incredible India”)

Figure 4.2 Description of Indian food ways as an expression of unity-in-diversity Source: Incredible India. Ministry of Tourism Government of India, 05 Aug. 2015, www. incredibleindia.org/food&cuisine/

166  Palatable Fictions On the Incredible India portal, ‘India’ is transformed into an enormous thaal bordered by subcontinental herbs and spices that can be readily consumed by both local and international tourists (Figure 4.2). The image of India as a delicious platter upon which different culinary regions co-exist and co-operate with one another functions as a vivid metaphor for the nationalistic principle of “unity in diversity.” According to the principle of unity-in-diversity, different religious communities are assumed to be “equal and complementary partners” in the national community (Uberoi 201). Unity-in-Diversity is a shorthand or euphemism for the idea of India as an avowedly secular and heterogeneous nation-space where many different castes, ethnicities, and religious communities are allowed to flourish and prosper, and where multiple religious traditions are acknowledged as “equivalent sources of truth” (Uberoi 191). The representation of India as a thaal also foregrounds the idea of consumption and invites the viewer to ‘eat’ India with all its scintillating flavours and delectable curries. Descriptions of Indian cuisine include the phrases “exotic” and “diverse,” which pander to the expectations of Western tourists and emphasize both the alterity and racial, ethnic, and religious heterogeneity of India as a national space, and as a community (“Incredible India”). Within this context, the Vale of Kashmir, images of which flash on the main page of the website, with its long history of touristic consumption, becomes an important culinary destination. Kashmir, with its mountainous peaks and expansive lakes is presented as a culinary region on the thaal, a delectable dish on the menu of India. By representing the different cultures and ethnicities residing within India as edible items, the Incredible India website commodifies cultural, racial and religious otherness. Rather than being foreign or threatening, cultural difference is streamlined into a more palatable and acceptable form and each region of the national territory is transformed into a delicious culinary destination. Through this transformation, the viewer is invited to interact with these diverse regions as a pleasure-seeking consumer above all else, and to negotiate cultural difference by way of the palate. Historically, the valley has not been viewed as a locus of culinary pleasure. Within the Victorian imagination, hand-woven pashmina shawls functioned as popular signifiers of Kashmir (Zutshi, “Designed for” 420). Narratives on Kashmiri shawls were helpful in bringing “the empire home attempting to place that remotest of regions – Kashmir – within the geography of the British empire” (Zutshi, “Designed for” 420). Local handicrafts, particularly Kashmiri shawls, were historically consumed by upper-class British memsahibs in the mid-19th century, as shown in The Tiger Ladies, as well as by international tourists to the Valley (Zutshi, “Designed for” 432). The mountainous peaks of the Valley and its hand-woven pashmina shawls, which were symbols of Kashmir in the 19th century European imagination, continue to be synonymous

Palatable Fictions 167 with the region even in postcolonial India. On the other hand, Kashmiri cuisine was not the most ubiquitous or familiar symbol of the Valley of Kashmir in the colonial imaginary. However, on the Incredible India website, Kashmiri culinary customs mark the presence of Kashmir on the postcolonial p(a)late of India and both local and foreign tourists are invited to partake of the spices and flavours of Kashmir in order to assuage their appetites. In the representation of the Indian national space we encounter on the Incredible India portal, Kashmir is co-opted as a distinctive mouthwatering dish on the Indian national menu, which along with the other culinary regions commingle to produce the flavourful cuisine of democratic India. Kashmir, in particular, as a Muslim-majority province, is a valuable addition to the thaal and geo-body of the Indian-nation because it is instrumental in terms of bolstering the secular credentials of the nation, while, at the same time, contributing to its religious diversity. On the Incredible India website, depictions of regional food customs become a means of cementing India’s self-image as a tolerant and vibrant democracy that is home to a multitude of ethnicities, religions, sects, castes, creeds, and curries. In the words of Nehru, the first prime minister of post-colonial India who was himself a Kashmiri Pandit, “We have always regarded the Kashmir problem as symbolic for us . . . as it illustrates that we are a secular state” (qtd. in Commuri 108). Not only does the presence of India on the map of Kashmir bolster India’s secular credentials but it also, to an extent, debunks the two-nation theory that justified the partition of the subcontinent on the religious principle (Commuri 108). In Territory of Desire, Kabir implicates Bollywood in the project of creating, sustaining, and projecting the collective national desire for possessing Kashmir. She dedicates a significant part of the book to examining the way in which “the cinematic apparatus of Bollywood [functions] . . . as the nation’s mechanism for mobilizing desire for Kashmir” (23). She also analyzes the functions of the Kashmiri handicraft as a “fetish object” and a marker of desire on a national and individual scale, which perpetuates the “pastoral fantasy” of the Valley of Kashmir as a paradisiacal space (24). In this chapter, I make a critical addition to Ananya Kabir’s articulation of Kashmir as a “territory of desire” by demonstrating how, in addition to films, Kashmiri food and food narratives have also played a significant and unacknowledged role in expressing India’s desire for Kashmir. Kashmiri food and its representations on tourism websites, recipe books, food festival pamphlets, and literary narratives also betray signs of this desire and enable the framing of Kashmir as a consumable and desirable entity. The representation of Kashmir as a significant culinary destination on the Indian geo-body contributing “flavour” and “variety” to the Indian thaal, without any mention of the unappetizing politics of the region, is symptomatic of India’s desire for Kashmir.

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Consumable Kashmir Annapurna Chak’s Kashmiri recipe book titled Multiple Flavours of Kashmiri Pandit Cuisine also begins with familiar images of Kashmir before moving onto a discussion of Kashmiri culinary customs. Chak is ethnically a Kashmiri Pandit but grew up in a zamindar (landowning) family in Orissa. Her mother regularly prepared Kashmiri feasts for visiting Indian dignitaries with Kashmiri culinary treats in their ancestral home. She writes: Kashmir! The very name evokes pictorial images of snow-covered Himalayan ranges surrounding the valley, rivers gushing down the foothills and plains, villages surrounded by greenery, terraced rice plantations, orchards and meadows, houseboats and shikaras floating on lakes and fields of lotus . . . truly a Paradise nestling in the folds of the Himalayas. This land of fruits and nuts with its natural beauty reflects not only through its exquisite crafts but also its flavoursome cuisines. (Chak 14) In this description, Chak begins with the most consumable aspects of Kashmir – its scenic landscape and its handicrafts, before mentioning Kashmiri cuisine. She moves from the realm of the visually appealing but essentially inedible Kashmiri landscape to its more palatable parts, its fruits, nuts, and cuisines. Through this movement from the inedible to the edible, she transforms Kashmir, turning its mountain peaks, its lakes, shikaras, and shawls into food and her cookbook invites the reader to consume the sights and crafts of Kashmir alongside its cuisines. In a section titled “Recipes of India” on the Incredible India website, a short video explaining the distinctive aspects of Kashmiri cuisine also draws a comparison between the artisanship of the region and its rich culinary tradition. “The intricate beauty of the carpets of Kashmir,” the narrator reads, “is also encountered in the richness of its culinary culture” (“Recipes”). Meanwhile, the screen flashes an image of a Kashmiri carpet weaver, followed by images of a traditional Kashmiri kitchen where food preparers pound and marinate copious quantities of raw meat. Here too, Kashmiri material culture is rendered consumable by being compared to the culinary culture of the region, both of which are represented as being part of the aggregate pleasures and mystical lure of Kashmir. Chak includes two monochromatic family photographs in her cookbook, which appear after the “Acknowledgements.” The first image featured a grand, three-storied haveli and bears the title “Our Ancestral Home in Cuttack.” The second image, captioned “My mother next to Pt. Nehru and Dr. K.N Katju in our Cuttack House,” is focused on three

Palatable Fictions 169 figures, purportedly the personalities mentioned in the caption, who are seated in close proximity, on the floor. Chak begins the “Author’s note” with a list of important dignitaries, including Pandit Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, who were frequent guests at her haveli in Cuttack and were served “the choicest Kashmiri dishes,” which were painstakingly arranged by the lady of the house (Chak 12). Chak names some notable Kashmiri dishes that were typically served to the eminent political personalities: “A host of mouthwatering dishes like the meat khubani, zafrani phirni, pulao, kabargah, dum aloo, rogan josh, koftas, methi chaman, khoye ka shufta, ‘interspiced’ with chutneys, raitas and pickles would be laid out at the table with great care” (Chak 12). Chak’s inclusions of images of Nehru and other notables in the beginning of her book, along with descriptions of the preparation and arrangement of Kashmiri cuisine for their titillation, bestows a certain stature on Kashmiri food. In Chak’s culinary guide to Kashmiri Pandit cuisine, Kashmiri food, in all its vibrant flavours and variety, is shown to be worth preparing and exploring because of its ability to nourish and appease Indian heads of states and politicians. In the way that Kashmiri cuisine nourishes India’s image as a progressive, secular democracy, Kashmiri foodways, in Annapurna Chak’s book, provide enjoyment to the heads of state of postcolonial India. Kashmiri food, and Kashmir by extension, is made visible and rendered real, only visà-vis its ability to provide enjoyment and diversion to Indian members of the government.

The Food-Laden Shikara On both sides of the border, Kashmiri food festivals serve as events through which Pakistani and Indian citizens can partake of Kashmir as a territory and space of boundless pleasure. In March 2016 a Kashmiri food festival was held in a posh uptown hotel, The Pearl Continental, on the historical Mall Road, in Punjab’s capital city of Lahore (“Kashmiri food”). One food-festival attendee commented on how “Kashmir has been an integral and beautiful part of Pakistan [and] he was happy to see number of Kashmiri dishes here at the food festival” (“Kashmiri food”). For him the lure of Kashmiri food, as a cuisine, was connected to the desire for Kashmir, as a contested space. Consuming Kashmir food is linked to the cartographic reclamation of the disputed territory of Kashmir, Pakistan’s lost but not forgotten paradise on earth. In mentioning Kashmir’s status as an unbreakable part of the Pakistani nation-state, the festival attendee uses nationalistic discourse to discuss the subject of local Kashmiri culinary customs. “Kashmir” becomes the shah rag (jugular) of the Pakistani’s geo-body; a counterpoint to the Indian claim that Kashmir is atoot ang (an unassailable part) of the Indian nation. It becomes clear that in consuming well-known Kashmiri dishes such as “hareesa, chicken

170  Palatable Fictions yakhani, tabk maaz, chicken boti, tawa qeema,” the festival attendees are also indulging and fulfilling their appetite for the disputed territory of Kashmir as a cartographic polity (“Kashmiri food”). Almost a year later, in February 2017, tourism officials from the Jammu and Kashmir Tourism Development Corporation (JKTDC), who were expected to host and organize a food festival in Lahore, were denied visas to the country, against a disappointingly familiar “backdrop of rising tensions and cross-border skirmishes in Kashmir” (“Kashmir Food Fest”). The event was advertised as a “big confidence building measure between the people of the two countries” with the gustatory faculty functioning as a means to enable Indians, to momentarily, “share” Kashmir, in the form of its palatable and mouth-watering treats with fellow Pakistanis across the border (“Kashmir Food Fest”). The Lahore Food Festival, which at first instance appears to be a culinary event fundamentally disconnected from high politics and international visa policies, in fact emerges as a defining symptom and marker of the two. Organized and then subsequently cancelled in the same month that Pakistanis typically celebrate “Kashmir Day,” the Lahore Food Festival was a casualty of fraying crossborder ties. This fact is symptomatic, if only slightly and marginally, of the gradual recession of Kashmir, its culinary pleasures and its politics, from the mind and national palate of Pakistani subjects. During the same month that the Lahore Food Festival was cancelled, Wazwan, a Kashmiri Food Festival, was held across the border, in the city of Bangalore. The flier (see Figure 4.3) for the food festival invites Indian citizens to: embark on a flavourful journey into the exotic land of Shikaaras, as you experience the culinary wonders of Kashmir with a myriad of delectable preparations brought to life by Kashmiri Chefs using organic ingredients from the valley. (Vidyalakshmi) The culinary idiom becomes the primary means of consuming the “exotic land” of Kashmir. On the festival poster, Kashmiri dishes appear to be floating on what is quite possibly the scenic and iconic Dal Lake, while the traditional Kashmiri houseboat – the shikara – depicted from above, appears as yet another thaal brimming with delectable delights. The inconsequential and diminutive bodies of the occupants of the shikara, a male rower and his female passenger, represented in the same scale as the rice pudding and the meat across it, are benignly offered alongside for consumption. A display at the Kashmiri food festival in Bangalore also featured a food-laden shikara, which is a reference to the commonplace function of shikaras in Kashmir as vehicles transporting groceries and food supplies to the occupants of Kashmiri boat houses. The name of the food festival – Wazwan – is also suggestive of exotic excess and boundless pleasure. The Wazwan is a traditional Kashmiri

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Figure 4.3 The Poster for Wazwan Food Festival by Vidyalakshmi Source: Vidyascooking, Blogspot, 24 Feb. 2017, https://vidyascooking.blogspot.com/2017/ 02/kashmiri-food-festival-nook-aloft.html

banquet in which thirty-six dishes are prepared and served (see Figure 4.4). On a symbolic level, Kashmir as a well-stacked houseboat of culinary diversions and delights, presents and perpetuates a familiar image of Kashmir as a cornucopia of pleasures.

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Figure 4.4 A Food-laden Shikara at the Wazwan Food Festival. Vidyalakshmi Source: Vidyascooking, 24 Feb. 2017, www.vidyascooking.blogspot.my/2017/02/kashmirifood-festival-nook-aloft.html.

In popular Bollywood films from the 1960s such as Junglee (1961), Kashmiri ki Kali (1964), Jab Jab Phool Khile (1964) and Janwar (1965), city-dwellers from the Indian plains travel to Kashmir usually for pleasurable pursuits and inevitably end up falling in love, oftentimes with a Kashmiri native (Kabir, “Nipped” 83). This frolicking and falling in love usually takes place atop a shikara. Bollywood films have played an important role in creating and perpetuating images of Kashmir as a site for touristic consumption and inexhaustible pleasure-seeking (89). In the film Janwar (1965), Sundar (Shammi Kapoor) disguises himself as an elderly shikara wallah, Subuktagin, in order to serenade Sapna (Rajshree) and partake of her companionship without her knowledge. As Sapna reclines on scarlet-coloured embroidered cushions, Sundar courts the unsuspecting Sapna with florid ghazals and chaste, idiomatic Urdu, both of which function as markers of his Kashmiri Muslim identity. Similarly, in Kashmir ki Kali (1964), Rajiv (Shammi Kapoor), a wealthy young man from the city, falls for a Kashmiri flower girl, Champa, played by Sharmila Tagore. In a scene from the film, Rajiv parks his boat close to Champa’s flower-filled shikara and sings paeans to her beauty, while rolling and writhing on the embroidered cushion covers of the boat, as Champa simpers and cowers shyly in the foreground. The film Jab Phool Khile, like Kashmir ki Kali and Janwar, contains several scenes that are shot in a shikara owing to the fact that the main

Palatable Fictions 173 character is a simple, semi-literate Kashmiri shikara-owner named Raja (Shashi Kapoor). Raja becomes romantically involved with Rita (Nanda), a ‘modern’ Bombay memsahib who travels to Kashmir for leisurely purposes and to escape her heady life in the Indian metropolis. In a crucial scene, Rita, after hoodwinking her fiancé, asks Raja to row her to Chaar Chinar in his shikara and on the way they race their boat with another shikara. Rita climbs over the seat, comes to Raja’s aid, and helps him row. In Jab Jab Phool Khile, Rita’s navigation of the shikara and the engagement in strenuous activity alongside a Kashmiri Muslim local accomplishes the same symbolic effect. She is shown retiring her uptight self, and with the assistance of Raja, going native. We observe that shikara rides used to be a staple in Kashmir films from the 1960s and they enabled lovers to have a private moment for coquetry and romance, for the recitation of lyrical poetry and for indulgence in melodious song-anddance numbers with each other. In Mirza Waheed’s second novel The Book of Gold Leaves, which I will discuss in the last chapter of this book, the female protagonist Roohi is described as bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to Bollywood’s “dreamgirl” Hema Malini, and for this reason, she goes by the Kashmiri version of the Bollywood star’s name, namely “Heema Mali” (Waheed 115). A local dervish and soothsayer in the novel summons Roohi to listen to his poetic performance in the main city square in the following words: “Oh Heema Mali, how long will you stay in your balcony, my dear. Come down. So, what if the hero is not here today?” (Waheed 115). Both Roohi, and her lover, Faiz, long to indulge in touristic and romantic activities together such as taking a shikara ride to visit Nishat Shalimar, a Moghul garden on the bank of the famed Dal Lake. Faiz’s fantasy of riding shikaras with his ardent lady love and of reclining on embroidered cushions is inspired by and intertextually references certain iconic scenes from popular Bollywood films set in Kashmir, including Jab Jab Phool Khile and Kashmir ki Kali. Roohi associates shikara rides on Dal Lake with: “sparkling honeymooners from India, of aching, sentimental songs enacted on their black-and-white TV by Shammi Kapoor and Dharmendra and Shashi Kapoor and that face of utter magic, Sharmila Tagore” (Waheed 65). In an instance in Waheed’s novel, Roohi expresses her desire to not only ride in a shikara with Faiz but also to wear traditional Kashmiri garb in order to adequately mimic Sharmila Tagore. Tagore plays the character of the shy, coquettish Champa and wears traditional Kashmiri dress throughout the film Kashmir ki Kali, a fact which Roohi identifies in the following words: I’ve always seen these people on shikaras, you know, tourist couples. They wear clothes that we don’t wear anymore, then take photographs in the Nishat Bagh. I like the clothes very much. I’ve seen a lot of it on TV. Remember Shammi Kapoor and Sharmila Tagore? (Waheed 139)

174  Palatable Fictions By re-enacting iconic shikara scenes, which are common, as we have observed, to many of the Indian films from the 1960s, and by miming tourists visiting the Valley, Roohi intertextually references Bollywood films. She casts herself as the rightful subject of romantic Bollywood tales set in Kashmir and attempts to appropriate and lay claim to the different sensual, artisanal, and visual pleasures that are contained within the shikara. The shikara, as represented in Kashmiri literary fiction, Bollywood films, and on food festival advertisements, is a metaphor for Kashmir as a cornucopia of pleasures, including the pleasures of the body and the palate, which the viewer/reader is invited to access and consume. Instead of a vehicular convenience that allows ordinary Kashmiris to navigate the lakes and water-bodies present in the Valley, the shikara emerges as an image symbolizing pleasurable excess and gustatory and sensual fulfilment.

Yeh Jawani Hae Diwani Contemporary Bollywood films have, to a certain extent, departed from the poetics of pleasure-seeking and merry-making, characteristic of their predecessors, in order to negotiate the volatile politics of the region, which have over time become impossible to ignore. However, films such as Yeh Jawani hae Diwani, released in 2013, resuscitate the trope of Kashmir as a land of pleasurable exploits. This film was nominated for nine Filmfare awards that year – the most prestigious national award in the Indian film industry – and is considered one of the highest grossing Bollywood films worldwide (“Yeh Jawani”). Yeh Jawani revolves around the coming of age of its protagonists and star-crossed lovers, Naina (Deepika Padukone) and Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor), both of whom are shown to be polar opposites of each other. Whereas Naina is a restrained, devout and bookish medical student, Bunny is depicted as a hippie photographer, freewheeling across the world, filming and photographing exotic people and places (Mukerji). Upon impulse, Naina decides to join Aditi and her group of friends (which includes Bunny and Avi) on a hiking trip to Manali (Gulmarg, Kashmir) and it is here that she unwinds, falls in love and becomes a more uninhibited person. The transformation that Naina undergoes during her time in Kashmir bears echoes of the transformation of other Bollywood protagonists, who also shed the weight of custom and convention, while involved in pleasure-seeking activities in the Valley. The young people in Yeh Jawani indulge in a range of pleasure-enhancing activities such as skiing, playing holi, camping, picnicking, and dancing. In Yeh Jawani eating Kashmiri street food and picnicking on the mountain slopes also become important modes through which the slick and urbane protagonists of the film interact with the Valley of Kashmir. In a revealing scene in the film, Aditi and Avi purchase street food from a stall while observing a marriage party carrying a coy bride in a palanquin.

Palatable Fictions 175 Bunny captures the scene with his video camera while sharing his views on matrimony with his friend. The conversation which takes place is as follows: ADITI (TO NAINA):  Don’t listen to him, Bunny is allergic BUNNY:  Of course. Naina, if I give you the same food

to marriage. every day – daal

chawal – will you be able to eat it? NAINA: Meaning? BUNNY:  Meaning marriage

is like daal chawal for fifty years till you die. Life should also have qeema pav, tangri kebab, hakka noodles. (Yeh Jawani hae Diwani)

Daal chawal, a dish of boiled lentils served with rice, is considered to be a plain-tasting, poor man’s dish within the region. The expression that one has become reduced to eating daal is often used as an Urdu/ Hindi figure of speech to indicate that one has fallen on difficult times. In the film, the jibe about consuming daal is, in fact, a metaphor symbolizing the sterility, monotony and blandness of matrimonial relationships, whereas “tangri kebab” and “haaka noodles” are signifiers for sexual freedom and experimentation. Daal also becomes a marker for the personal inhibition and reticence that Naina embodies whereas qeema pav, tangri kebab etc, indicate a desire to indulge, to consume and to seek out pleasure. In the context of their hiking trip in Kashmir, this desire to consume and to seek pleasurable, possibly risqué encounters can be considered synonymous with a desire to consume Kashmir.

The General’s Palate Kashmiri food and its representation are usually tied to statist narratives such as the narrative that Kashmir is a rightful part of the Pakistani or alternatively, the Indian nation-state. As such, the consumption of Kashmiri food is indicative, in certain cases, of the desire to consume, claim, and secure Kashmir as a cartographic entity. In the food narratives that we have discussed so far, in selected cookbooks, on national tourism websites and in food festival fliers, Kashmir is often transformed into a dish on the thaal of India or a shikara of pleasures, both of which invite viewers to interact with the territory of Kashmir primarily through the idiom of one-sided consumption. It is within these loaded and fraught mappings of Kashmiri food, as a space of gustatory pleasure and an expression of cartographic desire, that Jaspreet Singh plots his novel, and embarks on the task of negotiating the different associations of class, privilege, and discursive power that are associated with these representations. The upper-class Indians represented in Chef, such as the General and his circle of friends and acquaintances, also appear to be influenced by notions of Kashmir as a pleasurescape; a territory to be consumed and

176  Palatable Fictions ravished in a myriad of ways. Jaspreet Singh’s novel is largely set in the 1960s, the era in which the ‘Kashmir films’ mentioned in this chapter were produced and disseminated. The attitude of the upper-class Indians in Chef towards Kashmir and Kashmiris can be considered a product of the cultural narratives perpetuated through Bollywood, in which Kashmir is represented as a means of enhancing their pleasure. The General Sahab in Chef, for example, pursues his pleasure primarily by consuming the culinary delights that Kashmir has to offer. Narayan argues that the primal and primeval potential of food to bring disparate subjects together in solidarity: “gustatory relish for the food of ‘Others’ may help contribute to an appreciation of their presence in the national community, despite ignorance about the cultural contexts of their foods – these pleasures of the palate providing more powerful bonds than knowledge” (Narayan, “Eating”). The ‘others,’ in the case of Chef, are Kashmiri Muslims. Singh’s novel shows us that the preparation and consumption of the food of others does not always result in, or imply, inter-religious understanding, affiliation or empathy. Instead, the ability to consume the food of others is shown as being symptomatic of the existence of unequal power relations and access to human rights which exist between different subjects. This inequality is, in turn, only reinforced and consolidated by the act of consumption. For instance, General Kumar is particularly inclined towards Kashmiri Muslim cuisine: Dinner was the main meal of the day. Sahib had good taste and appetite and a weakness for Kashmiri dishes. Mughlai mutton with turnips, rogan josh, kebab nargisi, lotus roots-n-rhizomes, gongloo, karam saag, the infinitely slow-cooked nahari, and the curd-flavored meatballs of gushtaba. He ate these dishes licking his fingers and used knife and fork for foreign preparation only. (Singh 26) General Kumar consumes these delicacies with his hands, which betrays a certain intimacy and familiarity with Kashmiri food items. Here, eating and consuming Kashmiri food is a marker of power and privilege. On the other hand, food preparation, the slicing of ingredients, the preparation and the arrangement of dishes on the table are a marker of subservience and class difference. The socially, religiously, and economically privileged characters in Chef consume, while marginalized groups, religious minorities, women and lower-castes prepare what is to be consumed. The colonel’s wife, for example, has all her culinary preferences diligently attended to by chef Kishen: “Memsahib is vegetarian, Chef tells me. Navrattan paneer and dal makhani have been prepared especially for her. Lady fingers are also for her” (Singh 48). On the other hand, the kitchen staff, which includes the chef Kishen, his young apprentice Kirpal, the “assistant” and the server, prepare and

Palatable Fictions 177 serve the food. The “server” is “shoved” into the room “bearing finger bowls,” the “assistant” places “naans in the tandoor and phulkas on the griddle” (Singh 52–53). Similarly, chef Kishen and Kirpal only enter the main space of the residence and make their presence felt when it is time for them to take orders for the meal: “It is time to come to existence, Chef tells me. We come to existence only to carry out orders. He parts the curtains briefly and enters the drawing room” (Singh 51). Kishen’s statement highlights the fact that the preparers of food and their labour are meant to be invisible. They come “into existence” for a short period of time and encroach upon the main house only to take orders from the General and his upperclass army guests. The ability to either prepare or consume the food of the other is also not sufficient to develop “fellow-feeling” for this disavowed, Kashmiri Muslim ‘other’ (Slaughter 42). Chef Kishen, as we have observed, is skilled in preparing an elaborate buffet of Kashmiri cuisine, namely the wazwan with all its thirty-six dishes. Despite this, Kishen finds Kashmiris and Muslims foul-smelling and considers it an affront to his sensibilities to serve or wait on them. Similarly, General Kumar, despite consuming Kashmiri food with relish, is an influential member of the Indian armed forces stationed in Kashmir, and in the novel is shown to play a significant role in anaesthetizing peaceful street protest and quelling rebellion in the Valley. Consumption or preparation of Kashmiri food in the novel is not, in and of itself, an expression of solidarity with a marginalized community, nor does it function as a means of establishing dialogue with such a community. In fact, the consumption of Kashmiri delicacies becomes a powerful metaphor for other macro acts of consumption: the touristic consumption of Kashmir as a picturesque space, and the exploitation of Kashmiri bodies by members of the army and the upper-elite political class. For example, when the colonel, his wife and the general are invited to dinner, they engage in lively discussion and consume Kashmiri trout: They talk about classical music, beekeeping, carpets, silkworms, diameter of the most ancient plane trees, absence of railways in Kashmir, loathsome Kashmiris, and picnics in the Mughal gardens. Also, about Nehru when he was PM: an army helicopter would fly to his residence in Delhi with Kashmiri spring water. (Singh 52) The conversation revolves around pleasure-centred activities (picnicking, listening to music), the consumption of Kashmiri handicrafts and fabrics (carpets, silk) and natural phenomena associated with Kashmiri landscape (spring water, gardens). The absence of railways in Kashmir, for example, could be viewed as a hindrance to the mobility of tourists desiring to travel through the Valley of Kashmir while on holiday. The General and his dinner companions betray a touristic impulse to consume the

178  Palatable Fictions Valley, its landscape and its exquisite art objects. They not only consume the Kashmiri trout at the table but simultaneously also ‘eat,’ if only by way of reference, the delectable landscape and handicrafts of Kashmir. The image of Nehru’s helicopter bringing purified spring water from the “peripheries” to the prime minister in the ‘centre’ (Delhi) has problematic colonial undertones and in a sense, is emblematic of India’s relationship with Kashmir. References to the consumption of Kashmir in the form of its cuisine, landscape, territory, and art objects are juxtaposed to a discussion of “loathsome Kashmiris.” The colonel summarizes, and in the process, oversimplifies the political aspirations of the Kashmiri people in the following words: “they bring along bloody men from bloody Islam, who are in touch with militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and they have occupied the bloody mosques, sir. They want bloody azadi, sir” (Singh 56). While the Kashmiri landscape becomes a delectable site of endless consumption, Kashmiri bodies, especially, azadi-seeking, rebellious ones with political demands are seen to be “loathsome” intruders despoiling the perfection and plenitude of the land in Chef.

Subaltern Citizens The ability to eat varied food items is indicative not of culinary openmindedness but of unequal power relations that exist between citizens and subaltern citizens. The term “subaltern” traces its origins to Antonio Gramsci’s article on “Notes on Italian History,” which was later republished in the form of his Prison Notebooks (Louai 5). Gramsci uses the term classi subalterne (“the subaltern class” interchangeably with the term classi subordinate (“the subordinate class”) (Gramsci 166). Louai states that, in Gramsci’s usage, classi subalterne denoted any “low rank person or group of people in a particular society suffering under hegemonic domination of a ruling elite class” (5). In the 1970s, the concept of the subaltern was taken up by the Subaltern Studies Group, founded by Ranajit Guha and five other historians, who desired to transform the way in which the Indian freedom movement had been historically narrated and theorized (Chaturvedi vii). They aimed to recover subaltern agency and voice by narrating and recovering fragmented “histories from below” (Chaturvedi ix). In the preface to the collection of essays published as part of the Subaltern Studies series, Guha summarized the purpose of the historiographical intervention staged by the Subaltern Studies Group: The aim of the first collection of essays . . . is to promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies, and thus help to rectify the elitist bias characteristic on much research and academic work in this particular area. (Guha 35)

Palatable Fictions 179 Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay, which begs the titular question – Can the Subaltern Speak? – probed the limits of historical inquiry into the figure of the subaltern and the degree to which it is ever possible to recover their voice, since the latter is itself constituted and represented by way of different, competing discourses. Using the example of the figure of the sati, the widow self-immolating herself on her husband’s funeral pyre, Spivak writes: Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and objectformation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling, which is a displaced figuration of the “third-world woman” caught between tradition and modernization. (306) The sati is a cypher who either willfully participates in her own death and honours tradition, a position Spivak refers to as “The women wanted to die,” or she is a victim in need of the legislative gifts of Western imperialism, a situation of “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (296). There is a “manipulation of female agency” in the way that competing discourses of sati represent the subaltern woman, and as such, the possibility of recovering the subaltern’s voice, on an individual level, or as a collective, is no longer available (Spivak 283). In such a context, at first glance, the term “subaltern citizen,” coined by Gyanendra Pandey, one of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies Group, sounds like an oxymoron. Subalternity, after all, has been theorized as a space of silence, an epistemic vacuum within historical and cultural narrative, whereas the idea of citizenship implies access to civic, social, and human rights, and entails a degree of enfranchisement and social mobility (Pandey, “The Subaltern” 4735). Recognizing this paradox, Pandey states that “subaltern citizen” requires the juxtaposition of two very different discourses: “subaltern, a relational position in a conceptualization of power . . . as Gayatri Spivak has recently described it and “citizen”, a juridical figure in the pronouncement of autonomy and rights” (4735). He defines subalterns as including the underprivileged and disenfranchised: religious, ethnic and sexual minorities; marginal nationalities; dispossessed indigenous communities; immigrant labourers, the rural poor, urban squatters and working people of numerous other descriptions; African American and dalit women in the US and India. (4738) On the other hand, he uses the term “citizen” to mean “the bearer of the legal right to residence, political participation, state support, and

180  Palatable Fictions protection in a given territory [and] . . . a more diffuse sense of acceptance in, and acceptance of, an existing order and existing social arrangements” (4735). Spivak proposes closely policing who qualifies as a subaltern subject, and critiques broad, non-specific applications of the term to groups and subject positions that are, to varying degrees, able to represent and speak for themselves and to negotiate a position within the “hegemonic discourse” (qtd. in Olson 164). Highlighting this view in an interview, Spivak cautions against inappropriate and ill-defined usages of the political denomination of the subaltern: subaltern is not just a classy word for “oppressed”, for [the] Other, for somebody who’s not getting a piece of the pie . . . In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern – a space of difference. Now, who would say that’s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It’s not subaltern . . . Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. (qtd. in Olson 164) In sharp contrast to this, Pandey argues for radically expanding subaltern as a political category beyond the “archetypal figure of the . . . Third World peasant,” who has consistently been a figure of interest and contestation within the Subaltern Studies Group, towards other categories and conceptions of subalternity (Subaltern Citizens 273). Despite the tension and contradiction that is apparent in the term, Pandey proposes the term “subaltern citizen,” which he believes, enables us to describe the “subordinate status of certain citizens” and the “potential that the subaltern poses . . . of becoming a full member of the community, the village, the neighbourhood and the polis” (“The Subaltern” 4735). According to him, the notion of subaltern citizenship: accurately describes what is a fairly common contemporary condition, the situation of lower-class, lower-caste, immigrant and other minority communities, – women, gays, lesbians and other sexual minorities, to take one kind of example – who have been granted the status of citizens (rights-holders, inhabitants, subjects of the state) without becoming quite ‘mainstream. (Subaltern Citizens 276) He writes that the idea of a subaltern citizen allows us to “reinforce the point that not all citizens (or human beings) are born equal, that many remain ‘second-class’ even when granted the formal status of citizens” (4736). According to Pramod Nayar, a subaltern citizen is one who “might technically be a citizen but has never been a part of the civil society” (18). In Chef, Agha, the General’s Kashmiri Muslim gardener, is an

Palatable Fictions 181 Indian citizen but he does not have the same rights as the General Sahab, in whose house he serves. On account of a spurious suspicion that he is surreptitiously planning the General’s death, and in an atmosphere of distrust and religious tension in the Valley, he is unceremoniously removed from his employment. Kishen, the General’s chosen chef and Kirpal’s mentor, despite being a Hindu member of the army, and being marginally more privileged than Agha, is banished to the icefields of Siachen on the basis of a faux pas committed while on duty. Kishen accidentally mentions his prowess with preparing pork, and the excellence of pork meat, in the presence of Kashmiri Muslim imams who have come to dine at the General’s residence and to settle a delicate, political matter. The imams become suspicious of the food that has been prepared for them and remain uncomfortable and uneasy throughout the course of the visit. As a punishment, the General instantly signs an order for the chef’s transfer to Siachen, a punitive measure that Kishen laments in the following words: And yet in the end” said Chef, “no matter how hard we try – we are low-caste peoples and we do not matter. Army belongs to officers, Kirpal. I am worthless. I feed them, serve them, take ardors. I endure the heat of the tandoor, and then I am let go, or I leave on my own. My life has come to nothing. My work has come to nothing. (75) The Siachen Glacier is the ‘world’s highest battleground’ and is part of the LOC, which is the de facto border between Indian and Pakistanoccupied Kashmir (Parvaiz). Bose verifies the precise location of Siachen: “At its northern end, the LOC terminates at a point called NJ 9842 in the High Himalayas, beyond which lies a glacial region, Siachen, contested between Indian and Pakistani forces” (295). During exile in the icefields of Siachen, Kishen, who is in severe physical pain and is highly delusional, records his meandering and fragmented observations in a journal. At one point during his long punishment, he meticulously records the difference between a soldier’s ration, an officer’s ration and the general’s ration, and contemplates these differences, while struggling to maintain his sanity: The General’s Ration No questions asked. An Officer’s Ration Wheat flour/rice/bread 450g, sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/ coffee 9g, salt 20g, porridge 20g, custard powder 7g, cornflour 7g,

182  Palatable Fictions ice cream/jelly 7g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, non-citric fruits 230g, citric fruits 110g, eggs 2, chicken 175g, meat dressed 26 A Soldier’s Ration Wheat flour/rice/bread 620g; sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/coffee 9g, salt 20g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, fruits 230g, meat dressed 110g, milk (veg) 750g, milk (non-veg) 250. (Singh 121–22) General Kumar’s “ration,” which is seemingly limitless, unlike the more restricted menus of lower-class officers and ordinary foot-soldiers, is a metaphor symbolizing his power and privilege. Tabulating the discrepancies in the ration of edibles is a means of charting the difference in the entitlement and rights that are available to different members of the army. Rather than casting the Indian armed forces as a powerful and largely monolithic institution, Chef reveals the complex intersections of caste, class, and religious identity which dictates and determines the positioning of the different subjects within the army, and which results in degrees of discrimination and privilege. Kishen’s written record of the differences in rations is mentioned alongside accusations involving the General engaging, in his absence, in sexual relations with and impregnating his long-time partner. Female characters in Chef are compared to different types of edibles, particularly varieties of fruit. Kishen, for example, describes the “smell of a woman” as being superior to that of “the most sumptuous dinner,” while Kirpal, on the other hand, compares a woman’s face to “a plate of samosas left overnight in the rain” and mentions beautiful girls whose skins possess “the shine of ripe fruit” or have “cinnamon skin” (Singh 10, 12, 21, 43). He also draws parallels between the Goan Ayah’s eyes and “pods of tamarind” (Singh 38). Descriptions of women as different types of edibles, varieties of fruit and spices, or even a whole banquet, evoke notions of enjoyment and consumption. The female characters function as cyphers: they are sexual objects who are meant to be ravished and their bodies consumed. Chef uses culinary metaphors and analogies to describe female subjectivities and, through this, foregrounds the General’s privilege. He consumes what and whom he likes, including the bodies of women he desires, with impunity and without fear of retributive action. Depictions of feasting in Chef are often depicted alongside vivid scenes of sexualized violence; the eating of Kashmiri food becomes a vivid parallel to the exploitation of Kashmiri Muslim bodies at the hands of Indian army officers. The General, and his powerful peers, are protected under

Palatable Fictions 183 national legislation, in particular, the AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act), which makes it nearly impossible to launch an investigation into the excesses of the army and, in the case of Chef, the sexual improprieties of the serving officers (Chakravarty). The AFSPA gives armed officers wide-ranging powers to police and inflict violence on Kashmiri bodies, without the possibility of being tried in a civil court of law (Chakravarty). Singh’s novel establishes a direct and unequivocal relationship between culinary consumption and legal entitlement. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act was enacted in 1958 to bring ‘disturbed areas’ under control (Ramakrishnan). The AFSPA has colonial roots and is used as a means of granting members of the Indian army immunity from prosecution (Morton 24). This Act, which is also mentioned in both Curfewed Night and The Collaborator, allows military officers to shoot civilians in geographical regions of India classified as ‘disturbed areas’ (Morton 24). Kashmir is classified as a ‘disturbed area’ and by framing Kashmir as “a space of exception,” the Kashmiri population is “raped, tortured, kidnapped and murdered in custody with impunity” (24). Nimmi Kurian, writing in openDemocracy, adds the modifier “border” to Pandey’s term, and fleshes out the figure of the “subaltern border citizen,” who is formally a citizen of the Indian nation-state and can, in principle, claim the civil, social, and political rights promised by the state, but due to local legislative acts such as the AFSPA, has these rights routinely violated and infringed. Kurian refers to Indian citizens who live in the “disturbed” border regions, as border subaltern citizens (Kurian). Border citizens, Kurian argues, are positioned at the precarious and volatile borders of the nation. I argue that as such they exist at the extremities and fringes of the rights regime and from here, they negotiate their access to civic and human rights. Chef draws attention to the way in which legislation such as the AFSPA reinforces the subalternity of subaltern citizens, particularly Kashmiri Muslims, and complicates their enfranchisement as full citizens within the nation-state. The AFSPA ensures that the entitlements of the General sahab and his fellow officers far exceed those promised by the UDHR insofar as they actively violate or infringe other peoples’ right to “life, liberty and security” as well as protection from “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” (UN General Assembly). When Bina, the daughter of the former Governor of Kashmir, is to be married, the menu of the wedding feast prominently features Kashmiri dishes including “golf-ball-sized goshtaba. Tails of sheep. Paisley-shaped naans. Moorish eggplant. Murgh Wagah [and] Rogan Josh” (Singh 187). The event is attended by an upper-elite Hindu intelligentsia class from the cities and the invited guests include Bollywood stars, military and political elites as well as the Prime Minister himself. Here, the act of consuming non-vegetarian Kashmiri food is not an act of solidarity and

184  Palatable Fictions affiliation with ordinary Kashmiris but is symbolic of the upper -elites’ exploitation of the Valley and its subjects for their own pleasure-seeking. As the Governor and his important guests indulge in feasting and merry-making, the Governor’s son coerces a Kashmiri woman to perform sex acts on him, in return for securing the release of her brother who is being held in unlawful custody. While the guests consume quintessentially Kashmiri dishes such as goshtaba and roghan josh, the Governor’s influential son consumes the body of a Kashmiri Muslim woman under duress in a room in the house. The servers at the lavish wedding are economically disadvantaged Kashmiris, whereas the wedding attendees consuming and enjoying the food are mostly, upper-class non-Kashmiris. Here, consumption in itself may not result in inter-religious affiliation and understanding but, on the contrary, may be symptomatic of privilege, power, and social inequality. In Chef, the character who consumes the most and has the most Catholic palate is Rubiya’s father, General Kumar. He not only consumes Kashmiri cuisine, as I have emphasized, but also Hyderabadi, and North Indian cuisine and exotic “dishes from Italy, France, Spain, Greece and Russia.” (Singh 26). Along with this, he eats both vegetarian and nonvegetarian dishes and is drawn to an array of different varieties of meat, including fish, lamb, mutton and chicken. For dessert, he is served subcontinental sweets and sweetmeats such as “Halva. Ashrafi. Jalaybee” and fruits from Kashmir and other parts of India (53). In this case, the cosmopolitanism of his palate does not translate into a cosmopolitanism of the mind. In fact, General Kumar is depicted as a character in stasis: he chooses to end his life rather than relinquish, or even probe, his religious biases, as Kishen and Kirpal had done at crucial junctures in their selfdevelopment. He aggressively resists change and transformation and, in a certain sense, his death can be considered a willful resistance to undergoing Bildung. When his only daughter, Rubiya, decides to marry a Kashmiri Muslim from across the border, General Kumar prefers to take his own life rather than to go through with her wedding. Despite consuming the food and enjoying the invisible labour and devoted service of religious minorities and lower-caste subjectivities, he is morally repelled by the idea of entering into familial bonds with a subaltern citizen. The novel Chef deploys images of Kumar’s eclectic consumption of subcontinental cuisine as a symbolic critique of class and of India’s exploitation of Kashmir and Kashmiri bodies. It also foregrounds the difference in the human rights that are on offer to citizens and subaltern citizens. Prakash Upadhyaya argues that the Indian political system is a type of “majoritarianism” which “protects the interests of the tiny minority who constitute its dominant caste and classes” (815–16). He defines this majoritarianism as “a political idiom in which secularism is subordinated to the nationalism of the Indian majority” and argues that India’s nationalist movement overwhelmingly consisted of members from

Palatable Fictions 185 its Hindu elite classes (817). Subaltern communities, he states, especially lower castes, have “challenged the validity of a system which despite its claims to consensual democracy, has bestowed power and privilege on a handful of wealthy and well-connected members of the higher Hindu castes” (819). The image of General sahab’s cosmopolitan palate, where all cuisines are supposedly welcome, only creates a false sense of equality between disparate communities and their culinary customs. In effect it foregrounds the dominance of an upper-elite Hindu intelligentsia class over the majority, including the Hindu majority, as well as other minority religious groups. Kumar eats the food of whichever marginalized community he chooses. In fact, General sahab’s consumption of ‘Incredible India’ through its culinary delights is merely a visual affirmation of the self-interested consumption and exploitation of India by upper-Hindu elites who are well-represented in Jaspreet Singh’s work. In contrast to the Kashmir Valley, which is represented as a space that offers opportunities for pleasure and indulgence to the Indian upper-elite, the frozen borderland of Siachen is represented as the ground zero for pleasure and human rights, as a barren wasteland where mostly lowranking, economically disadvantaged and low-caste officers of the Pakistani and Indian armed forces are stationed. The novel highlights the enormous physical and emotional challenges that these soldiers have to tackle on an everyday basis. Kishen recalls the difficulties experienced by both the Indian and Pakistani soldiers posted at the Siachen Glacier. Contrary to the sumptuous meals that he prepared for the General, Kishen subsists largely on bland, low-quality canned food, which is rationed to him and the rest of the soldiers. Their loss of basic human rights is mirrored in their lack of access to culinary pleasure. Jaspreet Singh highlights the corporeal pain experienced by Sikhs whose hair become frozen at Siachen in order to symbolically parallel their heightened suffering as subaltern Sikh subjects within the armed forces. Kishen plans a protest at Siachen, which he hopes will be covered extensively by the Indian press. His purpose is to foreground the futility of the presence of Indian and Pakistani troops in Siachen, and in Kashmir, by voicing the suffering of the soldiers. During the course of the visit by the General and the Indian Defense Minister to Siachen, Kishen ties them up in their tent with the help of two other soldiers and then compels them to assemble their troops and to summon the media to extensively cover Kishen’s preprepared speech. He addresses the assembled soldiers in the following words: Ask what are we doing on this glacier, on these Icefields? Ask why do we want to melt away this glacier? The kerosene and other poisons we discard on the glacier end up in our holy rivers. For a long time, we Indians have believed that the gods live up in the mountains.

186  Palatable Fictions Why are we wrecking the home of our gods? Why do we need Kashmir? Ask Does Kashmir need us? We shit on the glacier, and the shit freezes and we have to break it with the rifles. And I say the same thing to the bastards on the other side. What are they dying for, the Pakistanis? This ice is no place for human beings. (Singh 167) Besides critiquing the militarization of Siachen and Kashmir by the armed forces of both countries, Kishen’s speech is also an evocative appeal on behalf of the “human beings,” many of them subaltern citizens, who are forced to survive in subhuman circumstances, and are deprived of the basic dignities – and the fundamental pleasures – of life. As a man who enjoyed classical German music, preparing delightful dishes, and sleeping with beautiful women, Kishen is shown to be an indefatigable sensualist, an artist, and a hedonistic pleasure-seeker. Siachen robs him of his virility, of the possibility of preparing beautiful meals or hearing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which frequently accompanied his culinary experimentations in the kitchen. Realizing the depth of misery and loss of pleasure he and his compatriots have to suffer through, he decides to protest against the ill-treatment of low-ranking and lower-caste soldiers in the army, the rampant corruption within the armed forces as well as India and Pakistan’s ill-conceived desire to annex and control Kashmir.

The Democratization of Pleasure In Chef, we encounter a powerful critique of caste and class differences and of the differences in rights that are available to citizens and subaltern citizens. Singh’s novel enables us to observe the discrepancies between international human rights norms and national legislation, such as the AFSPA, which ensure that high-ranking members of the armed forces enjoy privileges and pleasures at the expense of other marginalized bodies. Chef is not merely complicit in the commodification of Kashmir and the transmutation of its political issues into delicious curries and meats for the diversion of its readers. On the contrary, the novel stages a critical intervention as far as the consumption of Kashmir by upper and uppermiddle class Indians is concerned. It goes as far as to attempt to bridge the gap between citizens and subaltern citizens, with the latter category extending to Kashmiri Muslims, to lower-castes (Kishen) and other religious minorities (Kirpal), by subverting the power relationship between the consumers and right-bearers such as the General, his upper-class friends, and the food preparers, including Kishen and Kirpal. Reversing the role from subaltern citizen to pleasure-seeker and lover, Chef explores the fraught romantic entanglement between Kirpal Singh, a low-ranking Sikh subject and Irem, the Kashmiri Muslim “enemy woman.” The story of Irem is a literary reconstruction and re-telling

Palatable Fictions 187 of the story of the detention of Shahnaz Parveen Kausar by the Indian armed forces (“India relents”). In 1995, Shahnaz Parveen Kausar, a Pakistan woman and a resident of Azad Kashmir, tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Jhelum River to escape the taunts of her in-laws for being unable to bear a child (“India relents”). Surviving the journey, she accidentally ended up in Indian-controlled Kashmir and was captured by Indian armed forces (“India relents”). Because she did not carry valid travel documents, she was charged with illegally crossing the border and was thrown into jail, where she was subjected to sexual violence (“India relents”). She became pregnant as a result of this sexual assault and gave birth to a daughter, Mobin, while still in prison (“India relents”). In Jaspreet Singh’s narration of this story, Kirpal Singh, the General’s cook, who is fluent in Koshur and is a master chef, is sent in to interrogate Irem, and to gather information as to her purpose in illegally crossing the border. In the process of conversing with, and cooking for her, Kirpal begins to develop romantic feelings for the imprisoned Kashmiri Muslim woman in his care. When they initially meet, Kirpal who perceives Irem as the Pakistani Muslim “other,” emphasizes the alterity of her cuisine which, in his view, consisted of “chicken feet,” “snakes,” “lizards,” and a “young bull’s testicles” (Singh 133). The otherness of Pakistani cuisine with its inclusion of meat parts considered repulsive (feet, testicles) as well as creatures believed to be inedible (reptiles, snakes, lizards) is meant to highlight the otherness of the enemy woman. According to Mannur, particular ethnic and racial communities may be “demonized” through “visually marked culinary idiom[s]” where the “other” is shown to consume wildly unpalatable and inedible dishes whereas, the “self” is positioned as the normative consumer of food (149). Chef Kishen’s religious stereotyping was articulated in terms of offensive smells which marked the Muslim body out as a malodorous ‘other’: I was repelled by the smell of fenugreek and bitter gourd. Now I have overcome that repulsion, in fact I have come to love the very same smells I hated as a boy. But certain smells continue to be repulsive.’ ‘Like what sir?’ ‘Kashmiris,’ he said. ‘Badboo –’. (42) Conversely, Kirpal’s religious prejudices are expressed in terms of the alterity and uncivilized nature of Pakistani Muslim culinary customs. However, subsequent interactions allow him to soften his stance towards Irem, to the point where he wishes to make her experience “real Indian hospitality” through food (Singh 134). Kirpal offers her a familiar Kashmiri dish that meets the appropriate religious requirements, halal rogan josh, as a way of securing her trust. He begins to discuss his recipe of

188  Palatable Fictions roghan josh with her, and this act of culinary affiliation, creates a degree of affinity and warmth between them. Whereas previously she had ignored his presence in her room, in this instance she interjects, and corrects his recipe by telling him that tomatoes are typically not added to the roghan josh and the intense red hue of roghan josh is derived from Kashmiri chilis and mawal flowers. Kirpal patently fails to prepare rogan josh according to the Kashmiri Muslim methods; however, his act of feeding her and attempting to understand Irem’s ‘authentic’ recipe for rogan josh becomes the means of securing her trust and eventually her affection. After eating Kirpal’s carefully prepared rogan josh, Irem confides in him, explaining the motivation for jumping into the Jhelum river, which carried her to the Indian side of the border (138). Hearing about her personal struggles and narrow prospects as an illiterate woman living in Azad Kashmir with difficult in-laws enables Kirpal to empathize with her. He begins to overcome his own pre-conceived notions about the alterity of her culinary customs, and the otherness of her religious identity, and is instead moved by the precarity and vulnerability of her situation. Kirpal retains her stained pheran, which needed to be dropped at the washerman’s hut, as a keepsake and this article of clothing becomes a precious memento of their meeting and the conversation that ensued between them. The pheran which had “clung to her” when she had plunged into the river carried her scent, or in the words of Kirpal, “the sweat of a beautiful woman” (138). On account of its clinging to her body, and smelling like her skin, it is almost a corporeal part of her. The act of smelling her pheran is an intimate act that cements a closeness between them that had been fomented during the course of their conversation. While lying in bed, he no longer perceives Kashmir to be a space of difference characterized by rebellious natives, but instead, for the first time, feels himself to be quite ‘at home’ in Kashmir. Despite the fundamental dichotomy of their relationship, in which he is the interrogator and she, the vulnerable subject, he is moved by the beauty and plight of the Kashmiri woman from Azad Kashmir whose experiences exhibited various shades of oppression and subalternity in her life in Pakistan, the supposedly ‘free’ and liberated side of the border. This also serves as a subtle yet powerful indictment of the state of human rights and political freedom in Pakistani-administered Azad Kashmir. While the government of Pakistan pays lip service to the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination and touts the importance of the restoration of international human rights in Indian-administered Kashmir, novels such as Chef use fiction to expose the factitiousness of these concerns, by foregrounding the state of subaltern subjects such as Irem. Her bid to end her life is an act of desperation, but also of agency. It is an emancipatory attempt at gaining control over her pitiful circumstances that ultimately propels her headlong into the middle of a complex political predicament.

Palatable Fictions 189 Relinquishing his earlier suspicious, and diffidence towards her, Kirpal begins to fall deeply in love with the beautiful, long-haired ‘enemy’ from Kashmir. Irem is more disadvantaged than Kirpal because of her gender identity, her illiteracy, and her political plight, but both Kirpal and Irem are positioned as subaltern citizens. And while Kirpal and Irem are never shown as fully able to overcome their subalternity in the novel, they are able to experience a sense of closeness, intimacy, and agency which was previously not available to them. During the course of her interminable imprisonment, Irem’s scarf is forcefully removed and her long hair shaved off. This makes Kirpal deeply aggrieved and compels him to remove his turban and reveal his own coiled locks of hair to Irem, as a way of making himself emotionally vulnerable before her. Their religious headwear – her scarf, and his turban – are similar, visual markers of their religious identity. In a dramatized and emotionally charged sequence in the novel, Kirpal places his Sikh turban in front of Irem’s unraveled headscarf. This act of unclothing, in the form of the removal of a religious garment, draws them close to one another and becomes the basis for the growing trust between them. Kirpal’s ability to empathize and affiliate himself with the ‘enemy’ woman is also reflected in the modification of his culinary methods. Before meeting Irem, he used to prepare rogan josh in accordance with the rules of north Indian cuisine by using tomatoes to induce the red shade of the curry and the tangy aftertaste. However, after becoming familiar with Irem and her ‘Kashmiri Muslim’ way of preparing the dish, he alters his recipe accordingly, replacing tomatoes with Kashmiri chili and yoghurt. He becomes acquainted with the Kashmiri Pandit method of preparing this dish, in which asafetida, fennel seeds, and ginger are used, and at Rubiya’s wedding, he tries to incorporate all these culinary styles in order to create a cosmopolitan rogan josh, which is a metaphor for Kashmiriyat in the novel. After meeting Irem and learning her recipe, Kirpal prepares rogan josh, which can be consumed and relished by all Kashmiris – Kashmiri Pandits who fled the Valley and Kashmiris Muslims from both Pakistan and Indian-occupied Kashmir. This cosmopolitan rogan josh is a means of healing the scission and bitterness between these different Kashmiris, and of restoring Kashmiriyat, but it also turns subaltern Kashmiris from marginalized food-preparers into consumers. The cosmopolitan rogan josh is meant to satiate and cater to all Kashmiris irrespective of the dietary, historical, and religious differences between them. It functions as a means of overcoming the rift between the Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit communities and of suturing the historical wound of the Pandit exodus that took place in the 1990s. The blending of the two unique culinary traditions leads to the creation of a dish that satiates the taste buds of the different ethnic communities living in the Valley of Kashmir, reminding

190  Palatable Fictions them of the gustatory bonds that tie them together, and acting as a palliative to the mutual suspicion and distrust that exists between them. The image of the rogan josh functions on different levels. The selection of Rubiya’s wedding as the venue to debut this new dish is appropriate because Rubiya, an upper-caste Indian Hindu, is marrying a Kashmiri Muslim, and in that sense, the dish mirrors their inter-religious marriage. It is also a labour of love, a tender creation developed by Kirpal, as a token of the unrequited love between him and Irem. As Irem licks her fingers while consuming Kirpal’s rogan josh, as we have seen, she is no longer represented solely as a victim, of domestic abuse in Pakistan and of forceful detention in India, but as the recipient of pleasure (Singh 137). In Sanjay Kak’s documentary, Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom), Shakeel Bakshi, a political activist states that, “Kashmiris are a unique people who even after a prolonged struggle, and five hundred years of being colonized, didn’t give up on the smallest of their traditions – the wazwan – Nor could anyone make them do it either” (“Jashn”). Food, particularly the Kashmiri wazwan, is here turned into a site of political protest, and the reclamation and preservation of local culinary customs and its pleasures for Kashmiris is seen as a mechanism of resistance. Similarly, in Chef, Irem and Kirpal are cast as pleasure-seekers, and not just marginalized subjects and victims. Jaspreet Singh’s novel pushes both Irem and Kirpal towards full citizenship, and at least momentarily, minimizes their subalternity by giving them access to the full range of pleasures and rights that are available to the most privileged members of society. By propping up the desires of subaltern citizens, Jaspreet Singh’s novel promotes the democratization of desire and pleasure and seeks to make pleasure and enjoyment accessible to all members of the human community in equal measure. Chef uses representations of the inclusive rogan josh to position ‘subaltern citizens’ as deserving of dignified treatment and inalienable rights, and to advocate for their inclusion into the mainstream as equal members of the national community.

Conclusion The image of the thaal, which we encounter initially on the Incredible India website, is similar to the image of the cosmopolitan rogan josh in Chef. Both are visual imaginings of India as a democratic nation-space. The thaal is offered as a delight to largely pamper the palate of the privileged, and to titillate the touristic gaze, whereas Kirpal’s rogan josh is an egalitarian culinary treat meant to be consumed and enjoyed by all Indian subjects equally, including a subaltern underclass that is typically excluded from the spheres of pleasure, political participation and human rights. They, in particular, are invited to ‘eat’ and consume the culinary pleasures as well as the rights offerings of the nation-state. Kishen’s sensitively prepared creation is aimed at making the gustatory pleasures and rights of

Palatable Fictions 191 democratic India indiscriminately available and ‘edible’ for all its citizens, such that the gaps in rights between citizens and subaltern citizens can be negotiated and overcome. Representations of regional culinary customs on national portals, cookbooks, and in literary texts often reveal class, caste and religious inequalities and differences, as I have shown throughout this chapter. But in Singh’s novel, culinary images are deployed to incisively critique, and ultimately, to attempt to iron out these differences and to advocate for a true democratization of pleasure and rights.

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Palatable Fictions 193 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 271–313. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, and Ranajit Guha, editors. Selected Subaltern Studies Subaltern Studies. Oxford UP, 1988. Uberoi, Patricia. “Unity in Diversity?’ Dilemmas of Nationhood in Indian Calendar Art.” Contributions to Indian Sociology, vol. 36, no. 1–2, 2002, pp. 191– 232. Google Scholar, doi:10.1177/006996670203600107. Upadhyaya, Prakash Chandra. “The Politics of Indian Secularism.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 4, Oct. 1992, pp. 815–53. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/312941. UN General Assembly. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” United Nations, 1948, www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/. Vidyalakshmi. “Kashmiri Food Festival @Nook-Aloft, Cessna Business Park, Bengaluru.” Vidyascooking, Blogspot, 24 Feb. 2017. www.vidyascooking. blogspot.my/2017/02/kashmirifood-festival-nook-aloft.html. Waheed, Mirza. The Book of Gold Leaves. Penguin, 2014. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton UP, 1993. “Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani Leads Filmfare with 9 Nominations.” India Today, 16 Jan. 2014. www.indiatoday.intoday.in/story/yeh-jawaani-hai-deewanifilm fare-ram-leela-chennai-express/1/336554.html. Zutshi, Chitralekha. “Designed for Eternity: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain.” The Journal of British Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 2009, pp. 420–40.

5 Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché Strategic Exoticism in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves

The salience of the pleasures of culinary, literary, and material culture in the Kashmiri narratives considered in this book is notable, especially since many of the works in question narrativize the phenomenon of pain, and experiences of loss and dehumanization. They narrativize human rights infringements but do so through representations of everyday pleasures and the pursuit of happiness, the thoughts of which are never too distant, even – and especially – in the minds of a marginalized people. The exploration of narratives of local pleasure – which I have argued most of the texts analyzed in this book are focused on – is connected with the quest for and the desire to reclaim and secure, one’s human rights. Access to the pleasures of the mind, the body, and the palate functions as a sign of a right-bearing body in these selected Kashmiri life narratives. A human subject who is truly ‘free’ and ‘equal,’ as envisioned and promised in the clauses of the UDHR, is not only someone who enjoys the human right to safety, shelter, and freedom from oppression, but is also one who has the right to pursue pleasure. I have drawn tangible connections, wherever possible, between the articulation of local pleasures in these literary narratives and the discourse of human rights, in order to identify the impulse to seek justice and engage in human rights advocacy and activism. Kashmiri authors use somewhat unconventional narrative plots, which prominently feature representations of food, poetry, geographical beauty, and material culture, to talk about the desire for and the absence of human rights. Considering the ethical aspirations of these works, it is also equally necessary to view them for what they are: literary commodities that exist in a highly complex and transnational web of authors, publishers, editors, publicists, distributers, and booksellers. The Kashmiri life narratives considered in this book are marketed, and one could perhaps assume even composed, with certain publics and consumers in mind. The novel in the service of human rights is not just a fictional alternative and/or counterpart to a human rights report, an online petition, or a testimony delivered within the context of a truth and reconciliation committee. Unlike these textual and verbal forms, it is also a commercial literary

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 195 product that aims ultimately to be profitable, to generate publicity, to receive critical and commercial acclaim and to secure a loyal readership, both in India and abroad. “But don’t these novels piggy-back off the fame of South Asian Literature?” was a remark I received while presenting my research at a colloquium in the Spring of 2017. This is certainly true. The Kashmiri life narratives under consideration in this book must be acknowledged as commercial products that aim to carve out a share for themselves within South Asian postcolonial fiction in English, which has remained a particularly lucrative market for the last two decades (Huggan, Marketing 59). How do selected examples of Kashmiri life narrative protest against political injustices and human rights infringements, while also attempting to be commercially successful? In this chapter I explore the way in which selected Kashmiri texts negotiate their position as commercially viable products, while also attempting to be agents of human rights activism and social justice. Taking Mirza Waheed’s novel The Book of Gold Leaves as a case study, I try to uncover the assumed audience of this literary work, the way in which this audience is subtly catered to and acknowledged within the work, and what role, if any, this readership is invited to play in the complicated matrix of pleasures and pain that characterizes Waheed’s novel and Kashmir as a region.

Strategic Exoticism Following the global international success of Mirza Waheed’s debut novel The Collaborator (2011), his second work The Book of Gold Leaves (2014) was published by Penguin Random House to critical acclaim. The work received favourable reviews from Indian as well as Pakistani newspapers and literary magazines. It was also heralded for its evocative themes and florid prose by the international press. DAWN newspaper, Pakistan’s most widely read English newspaper, argued that The Book of Gold Leaves was even more “beautiful, emotional and lyrical” than The Collaborator, “almost to the point of being indulgent” (Murad). The Economic Times, a widely circulated Indian newspaper, praised the novel for the way in which it traced “the arabesque lines of multiple lives, from Faiz being ensconced in the smell of the glue he uses to the matrix of violence that enmeshes all these lives” (Mubaraki). The Financial Times drew attention to the book’s “warm gold cover, with its flowers and leaves . . . [which] proclaim[ed] the beauty of the past; as big a subject here as the travesty of the present” (Albinia). The Guardian compared the protagonist’s unfinished work of art to the unfinished war in Kashmir: “Faiz is the proverbial dreamer, a frustrated artist trained in naqashi (the ancient art of papier- mâché) who secretly toils away at a vast canvas that, like the war, will remain unfinished” (Ramaswamy).

196  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché These reviews draw attention to the commodification of Kashmir and Kashmiris in the novel. Interestingly enough, these literary reviews themselves further enable the commodification of Kashmir by aestheticizing the violence and oppression that is described in the novel in vivid and highly lucid prose. The Economic Times review, for example, compares the interlocking lives and realities of the different characters in The Book of Gold Leaves to elements from Kashmiri visual and material culture, such as filigree and arabesque, which are characteristic of regional Kashmiri artisanship. Here, the main protagonist Faiz and his brushes with loss and violence are commodified and marketed to an Indian readership. In a similar vein, The Guardian review compares the representation of an unfinished papier- mâché artwork in the novel to the interminable war and volatility in Kashmir. Through this, Kashmiri material culture as well as pain is packaged and rendered consumable for Kashmiri, Indian, and transnational audiences. Moreover, as The Financial Times highlights, Waheed’s novel has a visually appealing and stylized cover and to an extent, enables its own commodification. Waheed’s work, after all, panders to the tastes and consumer tendencies of its local and international readership by virtue of the fact that it comes “wrapped in the exotic aura of the cultural commodity fetish” (Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic 27). In The Book of Gold Leaves, Waheed painstakingly attends to the exotic predilections and tastes of his regional and global readers, giving them easy, unbridled access to the intricate and mysterious world of Kashmiri craft. Critics of Waheed’s work have accused him of profiteering from Kashmiri narratives of pain by marketing them to a readership eager to consume not only exotic art, but also macabre plots and gory descriptions. They have claimed that Waheed is a literary careerist who merely cannibalizes the suffering of ordinary Kashmiris and uses it as a means of advancing his career as a Kashmiri author and cultural practitioner. In an article published in the literary journal Guernica, Waheed recounts how an Indian official at the High Commission satirically asked him how long his literary writing and reportage on Kashmiri mass graves was going to sustain his career and livelihood as an author (The Torturable). He responded to this “unambiguously humiliating” charge by insisting that he wrote about Kashmir because he felt ethically compelled to do so as a Kashmiri writer, and not because Kashmir was “in season” and a popular subject with the international press at the time of his novel’s publication (Waheed, The Torturable). Instead of debating the commercial aspirations of Mirza Waheed, as a diasporic Kashmiri author living in the United Kingdom, or the moral issues at stake in attending to and satiating the appetites of the novel’s readers, this chapter analyzes how The Book of Gold Leaves functions as a literary commodity and makes use of exoticist discourses and Orientalist imagery in order to be critically and commercially viable.

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 197 I argue that Waheed’s work uses strategic exoticism in a truly novel way; it deploys this particular literary technique as a rhetorical mechanism for conducting human rights advocacy. The Book of Gold Leaves is strategically exotic insofar as it plays into the expectations and imaginative demands of his implied readership, while also parodying and critiquing these demands for critical and ethical purposes. Throughout the chapter, I investigate the use of strategic exoticism by analyzing representations of the local papier-mâché tradition in Waheed’s novel and try to dissect the balancing of the text’s critical and commercial aspirations. I want to uncover the extent to which The Book of Gold Leaves is merely complicit in the historical commodification and consumption of Kashmir and Kashmiris, and the extent to which the novel re-deploys exoticist discourses for the purpose of protesting this commodification and exoticization and advancing its human rights objectives.

Double-Consciousness Graham Huggan provides a good working definition of strategic exoticism in his book The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, defining it as “the means by which postcolonial writers/thinkers, working from within exoticist codes of representation, either manage to subvert those codes, or succeed in redeploying them for the purpose of uncovering differential power relations” (33). Waheed’s novel was commercially successful in the South Asian region and abroad, which is a testament to Waheed’s expertise in navigating and negotiating the desires of his readers. Receiving favourable reviews in international newspapers such as The Guardian and The Telegraph, The Book of Gold Leaves went on to be shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2016. It was also positively reviewed by Indian news publications such as The Economic Times, Livemint, DNA India and by Dawn in Pakistan. Waheed’s second novel caters to and deflates the expectations and appetites of both his national and transnational readers. Postcolonial authors are one “agent of legitimation” in the Englishlanguage book market besides other agents such as publishers, reviewers, booksellers, and reading publics (Bourdieu 13). Alongside members of the international writing community, postcolonial authors also compete for global recognition, prestige, and commercial success (Huggan, Marketing 212). Postcolonial literature in English is particularly popular with Western metropolitan audiences because it gives privileged readers from the Anglo-American world unfettered access to different cultures and distant geographies (Huggan, The Postcolonial 26). Anglophone authors belonging to developing countries are often accused of using “exoticist manoeuvres” in their works in order to render them more appealing and palatable for their English-speaking, primarily Western, readers (Huggan, The Postcolonial 26). Authors who deploy exoticist representations

198  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché and discourses in their work are seen as complicit in the commodification and marketing of cultural difference for the purpose of profitable gain (Huggan, Marketing 33). They are seen as willing participants in the perpetuation of exoticist clichés and stereotypes and are viewed as being part of the problem, rather than the solution (Huggan, Marketing 33). However, according to Graham Huggan, there is a group of postcolonial cultural practitioners who recognize their own problematic and often dubious position within the international book market (Marketing 77). Such authors use exotic modes of representations in order to critique them and/or take them apart at the seams (Huggan, Marketing 32). They understand their own compromised role within the commercial market and are aware of being complicit in the marketing of cultural difference to a fundamentally Western readership (77). As such, postcolonial authors satirize their own complicity in determining and driving market forces within the literary book market, while appropriating exotic representations within their works in order to undo the discursive dominance and cultural hegemony of these representations (32). But the recycling of exotic discourses and imagery within postcolonial literature is as much about commercial viability as it is about critique (77). Postcolonial authors desire to break the stronghold of exotic representations, while also keeping themselves commercially relevant and afloat in an increasingly competitive and cutthroat publishing market (77). Strategic exoticism, as defined by Graham Huggan, is the use of exoticist imagery by postcolonial authors in order to critique historical legacies of power and subjugation (Marketing 32). Authors from postcolonial backgrounds use strategic exoticism to foreground their own precarious position within the world of international publishing as well as to critique the touristic impulse of Western metropolitan readers who are often all too eager to consume literary works composed by authors from ‘Third-World countries’ (Huggan, Marketing 77). Huggan cites the example of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), which “reveals to its Western readers their hunger to consume . . . feeds their desire for entertainment; satiates their keen exoticist appetites; but . . . never fails to mock them for their complicitous enjoyment” (The Postcolonial 28). Sarah Brouillette has criticized Huggan’s theorization of strategic exoticism, particularly the way in which his theory averts criticism from the figure of the privileged postcolonial author and focuses it on an “unspecified global reader in pursuit of exotic excess” (Postcolonial Writers 5). She refers to this as a “negative interpellation” of the Western metropolitan reader who is represented as a voyeur involved exclusively in the pursuit of their own “easy pleasure” (Postcolonial Writers 21). She believes that Huggan’s “global reader” is merely a trope that allows him to create and subsequently identify with an ethically responsible and aesthetically refined consumer of postcolonial cultural products (Postcolonial Writers 5). According to Brouillette, strategic exoticism should

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 199 instead be viewed as a “set of textual strategies that communicates at all because the author and the actual reader likely share assumptions about the way culture operates and concur in their desire to exempt themselves from certain undesirable practices” (Postcolonial Writers 43). Instead of a lopsided negotiation between an ever-skilled postcolonial author and an unrefined, self-interested reader, Brouillette represents the consumption of postcolonial products as an exchange between two equally canny and culpable parties, both of whom are self-conscious of their own complicity with exoticist discourses and their willing participation within the capitalistic international book market (Postcolonial Writers 43). However, both Huggan’s and Brouillette’s conceptualization of ‘strategic exoticism’ largely interpellates a Western reader. In Huggan’s case, this reader is eager to be titillated by and to consume exotic pieces of literature composed by non-Western authors. For Sarah Brouillette, the reader is a participant in the international book market who is just as aware of his complicity and collusion in the perpetuation and consumption of exoticist discourses as the postcolonial author. Brouillette also interpellates a Western readership, albeit one which is more cognizant of its role in the postcolonial book market and consequently consumes with greater responsibility and social awareness, as the actual addressee of postcolonial literary texts. Neither she nor Huggan account for literary texts that assume a more varied and diverse group of readers, and which cater to the demand of this readership accordingly, as is the case with the Kashmiri life narratives in this book. According to Huggan, readers of postcolonial fiction are “individual buyers who pick up the latest ethnic autobiography to expand their horizons” (Marketing 12). In his schema, the metropolitan/global reader is ultimately a privileged, Western reader who sees the Third World as a source of entertainment and spectacle and consumes postcolonial fiction to partake of its different exotic and stimulating pleasures (Marketing 23). He writes that Third World texts have a “(mostly) First World audience” and here, the inclusion of the word “mostly” in parenthesis is indicative of his own anxiety in suggesting that postcolonial works have limited economy within local and/or national contexts and are composed and marketed primarily with international tastes in mind. It registers his own ambivalence and uncertainty regarding the issue of Anglophone postcolonial fiction and its implied audience and readership. I contest Huggan’s position and argue that the Kashmiri life narratives analyzed in this book attempt to cater to local as well as international readers, while critiquing their touristic and consumptive tendencies. Reviewers of postcolonial novels often “express clear suspicion that achieving success as an English-language writer requires some willingness to indulge a specifically Western readership’s misconceptions and fantasies about India” (Brouillette, Literature 98). According to Brouillette postcolonial writers are accused of “applying a cultural calculus to

200  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché determine what will sell in Europe and North America” (Literature 98). The works considered in this book, on the other hand, assume a diverse and varied readership and are addressed and marketed to regional, IndoPakistani and Kashmiri publics, as well as international publics. They have a “double” or even a triple consciousness insofar as they are aware of and attentive to the needs of their regional and global readers and strive to satiate and satisfy their multifarious demands (Huggan, Marketing 41). The Book of Gold Leaves is set in Srinagar and revolves around the coming of age of its protagonist, the artist-turned-militant, Faiz. Named after the famous Pakistani dissident poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the protagonist belongs to an illustrious Shia family, the Mirs, and resides in a stately, traditional house referred to as Mir Manzil, a name bringing to mind the charm and bygone romance of old South Asian town-houses or havelis. He lives there alongside his large family, consisting of three sisters, two brothers, his elder brother Mir Zafar Ali and his family, and his mother who is the matriarch of the household. Faiz, who often visits the neighbourhood Sufi shrine, catches a glimpse of a young woman called Roohi standing in her window and while he ascribes little importance to this amorous exchange of glances, Roohi is instantly besotted with him and sends him a letter through his younger sister and future confidant, Farhat, inviting him to meet her at the shrine. Roohi aspires to greater things – perhaps a PhD – and recoils at the prospect of marriage and domesticity; the secret trysts with Faiz arranged with the collaboration of Farhat, her comrade-in-arms, inject spark and excitement into her otherwise morose and tepid life. However, the city’s landscape begins to transform as violence begins to envelop the city and irreversibly impact the lives of its inhabitants. As local schools are turned into military bunkers, and young men snatched off the streets of Srinagar to be interrogated, questions about romance and the possibility of a future together begin to recede to the background. Mir Zafar Ali’s abduction by the Zaal – a Koshur word for a fictitious, demonic truck which roams the streets of Srinagar literally devouring young men – and the death of Faiz’s godmother at the hands of the paramilitaries prove to be the tipping point for Faiz who decides to abandon his career as a papier-mâché artist and to make his way to the training camps in Pakistan to become a guerrilla fighter. This, in many ways, marks the end of his artistic aspirations, and his former self. He remains haunted by spectres of his unfinished artworks, particularly his magnum opus, a large mural-sized painting he refers to as Falaknuma. While in training, Faiz, who is constantly homesick, writes long, lyrical letters to Roohi with the help of his friend, a man dubbed “Engineer,” who later also proves instrumental in ensuring his safe passage back to Kashmir once his training has been concluded. In these abnormal times, Roohi can no longer harbour lofty academic aspirations and she

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 201 abandons any plans of continuing her education and pursuing another postgraduate degree. The suspension of normal life with the advent of raids and curfews leads to a softening of religious customs, and when Faiz, belonging to an avowedly Shia family brings a proposal of marriage to Roohi’s family, her Sunni parents unwillingly accept and the two are wed in a simple ceremony, one suited to the melancholic atmosphere of Srinagar. Her newlywedded bliss is also prematurely interrupted when her father is brutally murdered by a militant who bears the pseudonym Panther.

The Art of Pen cases or Kar-i-kalamdani On account of his lack of traditional schooling, Faiz had been apprenticed to a renowned papier-mâché artist and poet, Sadat Beigh Shirazi, and he works at Gulfarosh Handicrafts Workshop, an enterprise owned by the artist himself. Papier-mâché products such as the ones Faiz produces in The Book of Gold Leaves are usually made of “light weight material like paper pulp, paper board or wood and further embellished with hand painting of traditional motifs and designs” by painters known as naqash (Mir and Ain 222). In Waheed’s novel, Faiz is also referred to as a naqashi artist. This particular art form, along with other Kashmiri artisanal practices, was brought to Kashmir during the 5th century, in the time of Bud Shah, or Zain-ul-Abidin, the 15th century Kashmiri ruler and renowned patron of the arts in Kashmir (Kabir, Territory of 110). Zain-ul-Abidin personally invited famous artisans and experts in the different craft traditions from Samarqand to Kashmir, so that they could impart their artistic skills to Kashmiri artisans (Rafiabadi 256). The Valley’s Shia Muslims are descendants of these Iranian and Central Asian artisans and many of the traditional artisan families are still privy to the techniques of these craft traditions and pass them on to future generations of papier-mâché artisans (Kabir, Territory 110). Faiz, the main character of The Book of Gold Leaves, belongs to one such formerly illustrious and well-to-do Kashmiri Shia Muslim artisan family. Artisans were not only summoned from Iran and Central Asia to Kashmir but local craftsmen from Kashmir were also sent to these places so they could familiarize themselves and hone their skills in the different arts, including papier-mâché art (Rafiabadi 256). Initially, the papier-mâché objects produced in Kashmir were limited to pen cases or kalamdans, which were decorated with courtly scenes and/or highly ornate and stylized geometric and floral motifs and then covered with a thin coat of varnish or roghan (Bakshi 220). As a result of this, papier-mâché art used to be referred to as kar-i-kalamdani [the art of pen cases] or even kar-i-munqash [the art of decorating] in Kashmir (Bakshi 220). Eventually, in the mid-19th century, the French word – papiermâché – entered the local lexicon and replaced the Persian terminology

202  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché in both Kashmir and India (Bakshi 219–20). During this time, Kashmiri shawls had become enormously popular in Victorian England as well as Napoleonic France and these shawls were often enclosed in delicately designed papier-mâché boxes before being shipped off to Europe (Kabir, Territory 119). In light of the new commercial purposes, which kar-i-­ kalamdani was made to serve during this time, the French term became the more familiar, oft-used one; a fact that remains true to this date (Kabir, Territory 119). At present, Kashmiri handicrafts and garments such as Pashmina and kani shawls, carpets, walnut woodware, papier-mâché objects, Sozni embroidered crafts, khatamband and crewel embroidery, most of which we have already encountered in The Tiger Ladies, generate about two hundred million Indian rupees worth of revenue per annum and employ around three hundred thousand Kashmiris, as per modest estimates (Sheikh and Tiwari 143, 149). Although papier-mâché items continue to be exported to North America and Europe, especially to France and West Germany, they are no longer as popular as they used to be during the early 19th century (Crossette). As we have seen, during colonial times Kashmir was historically important as a source of beautiful, handcrafted products such as shawls and papier-mâché objects, which were then exported to Europe where they functioned as highly coveted, upperclass luxury items (Zutshi 423). Nowadays, Indian buyers represent the primary consumer market for these items (Ahamad and Yasmin 78). Papier-mâché craft objects are not relevant solely from an economic and labour perspective, but Kashmiri handicrafts and garments, like Kashmiri cuisine, are also discursive objects that function as metonymic representatives of the Valley of Kashmir in the Indian imagination (Kabir, Territory 24).

Representations of Papier-Mâché in The Book of Gold Leaves Waheed’s character, Faiz is shown to be particularly adept at painting portable papier-mâché art objects, which are exported to India, and to parts of Europe and North America. His employers often commission him to produce hundreds of seemingly identical, papier-mâché objects such as Easter eggs, pencil boxes and/or Christmas balls, which he finishes under a strict time regimen. His sparse, cramped bedroom located in the upper storey of his grand but neglected family home functions as a makeshift atelier where he renders motifs emblematic of Oriental Islamic visual culture onto different art objects. The fact that Faiz is inspired by overtly Orientalized and Persianate imagery is made instantly clear by his fascination with a large painting that he borrows from his art patron. This work, from which he borrows imagery and motifs to daub onto papier-mâché objects, contains several Orientalized images:

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 203 In the centre of the screen, the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, leaning against ornate cushions on a narrow boat, is holding a papier mache cup into which a woman with the most beautiful hair Faiz has ever seen is pouring wine from a long, curved flask. The flow of the wine, by design, it seems reflects the woman’s tresses. (Waheed, The Book 7) Waheed’s invocation of the much-mythologized figure of Omar Khayyam, the 9th century Persian poet is a compelling and provocative choice. Khayyam’s verses, which were translated into English in 1878 by the poet Edward Fitzgerald, have historically been instrumental in the perpetuation of Orientalist discourses in the West (Said, Orientalism 54). In fact, Said lists Fitzgerald alongside other European cultural practitioners whose literary work, according to him, really defined and represented the genre of Oriental literature (Orientalism 54). He considers Fitzgerald’s work, especially The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, responsible for the perpetuation of a “free-floating mythology about the Orient” (53). Published in the last quarter of the 19th century alongside other official and nonofficial narratives such as travel narratives, missionary testimonies, and scholarly work, the popularity of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam testifies to a heightened interest in the Orient as both “subject matter and territory” in Europe at the time (192). It is my understanding that Waheed uses this iconic figure of European Orientalism precisely for the purpose of tapping into a cache of images and associations that Western readers may subliminally associate with this historical personage. Omar Khayyam has been popular in the West since the publication of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and several books and articles have been written on him (Jermyn 242). He continues to be viewed as a “bon vivant” and a “symbol of revelry and pleasure seeking” amongst his Western reading publics (Jaberizadeh 696). The representation of Khayyam in The Book of Gold Leaves perpetuates constructions of the ‘East’ as a space of hedonism, Epicurean excess and pleasure-seeking. Waheed represents Khayyam as reclining against cushions while being entertained by a bewitching, long-haired exotic beauty. He does not deflate or question these Orientalist motifs but merely offers them for consumption to his transnational readers. Waheed’s novel shows an interest in exploring the workings of exoticism within contemporary postcolonial fiction and his sly insertion of the Orientalist figure of Khayyam into a novel about modern-day Kashmir is irrefutable proof of this. It shows his interest in pandering to the tastes of his diverse reading publics, while also being conscious of his role in perpetuating Orientalist discourses in the postcolonial book market. Waheed’s regional readers are also catered to and addressed in the novel. The Book of Gold Leaves opens with an image of Faiz busily adorning a series of portable pencil boxes, instead of largescale canvases.

204  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché He draws “deers, lions, cypresses, tall rose bushes, chinar leaves. . . . And Mughal princes on hunting trips” on small portable boxes (Waheed 3). The image of these papier-mâché pencil boxes with their familiar imagery rendered in bright, almost garish colours would most likely be familiar to regional readers. The Book of Gold Leaves deploys ekphrasis as a means of drawing the book’s Indian readership into the highly visual and evocative world of portable papier-mâché art. Ekphrasis, which is the “verbal representation of visual phenomenon” as articulated in a prominent definition by James Heffernan, is consistently used within Waheed’s novel (3). An example is as follows: Faiz scratches the paint from his nails, not all of it, though, as he sometimes feels different, less himself, if he does not see his hands flecked with the colours he has worked with during the day. . . . He turns to his creations, the floor full of them, finished, semi-finished and just-begun pieces spread all around him. The half-done pencil boxes present hills and jungles in formation, and animals in chase with no quarry in sight. A tiger sparkles golden here, and a deer cranes its neck against the blue sky. A lion reclines, its eyes red with passion, and the end of its tail, a fine blond goblet . . . he can never quite bring himself to produce exact replicas, even though he is capable of it. He will always add a little something to the piece, a tiny nightingale that peeks out of a corner bush, a gazelle darting across a border, a kingfisher’s reflection in a turquoise pool, a Persian couplet intertwined with a forest vine. (Waheed 6) Although the pencil box is a diminutive object that does not allow sufficient space for creative expression and artistic experimentation, in this case Faiz is able to utilize its limited space to draw fantastical animals in visually overpowering shades and tonalities. Kashmir, with its cosmopolitan Central Asian and Persian cultural heritage, is commodified for the consumption of the reader, and literally turned into a box painted with sparkling tigers, rhyming couplets, exotic birds, and vibrant water bodies. While the portable papier-mâché objects might not be as visually familiar to the Western reader, owing to the dwindling Anglo-European interest in these papier-mâché pieces, as well as the imagery inscribing its surface, they would be highly recognizable to an Indian reader for whom these portable crafts items are symbolic representations of the territory of Kashmir. Such evocative visual representations would certainly appeal to both international and local readers, but they would most likely be more familiar to and would have a deeper cultural significance for their regional Indian publics. This is a fact that Mirza Waheed, as a canny cultural practitioner, anticipates and exploits. It is my contention that international

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 205 Anglophone readers are not the primary addressee of his literary text, or of his strategic exoticism, but that they are, in certain cases, peripheral to the novel and its critical agenda. It is also his regional readers, particularly his Anglophone Indian readers, that Mirza Waheed hopes to engage and involve in the pleasures of Kashmir.

The Mobilization of Shame While indulging its readership, the novel simultaneously acknowledges and criticizes the consumer preferences of the regional market that often determines which type of objects and artwork go into production, and which types are discarded and replaced by other objects. Within the Indian market, for example, there is an enormous demand for small, portable, hand-painted papier-mâché objects that are easy to ship and carry, as opposed to larger, more unwieldy papier-mâché paintings and objects that are harder to transport or to gift and are much too grandiose to function as decorative items within domestic spaces (Kabir, Territory 111). Papier-mâché objects, usually coveted by local consumers and tourists in the Valley, are all characterized by unoriginal, nearly identical motifs, and bear “the same scenes, the same spears, lions and fat princes, even the same six colours” (Waheed, The Book 14). This repetitive quality of commercial objects is critiqued by Faiz, who longs to work on larger canvases and to paint in the style of his Persian and Central Asian ancestors. Instead of exclusively pandering to the tastes of regional consumers and offering lofty descriptions of portable art objects and jewellery boxes, the novel also criticizes the popular preference for portable objects. The readers are offered beautiful identical pencil boxes and Easter eggs to linger upon and consume, but at the same time, they are also made uncomfortable about coveting such prosaic and unimaginative papier-mâché art objects, all of which are inscribed with the same “blades of grass” and motifs and deploy the same colour palette (14). As expected, these objects are not merely held up for the regional readers so that they may devour them; rather, Waheed’s text also compels them to re-think the choices they make as consumers. Embedded within this critique is a deeper concern about the commodification of Kashmir, and its transmutation into fetish art objects that can be traded and owned. The passage previously mentioned viscerally foregrounds the effort that it takes for Faiz to paint motifs on papier-mâché items such as jewellery boxes and Easter eggs in the narrow, confined space of his room. The job of painting hundreds of identical objects within a month is described, quite literally, as back-breaking. In fact, the physically demanding, dull and repetitive nature of the work causes the motifs on the papier-mâché objects to become botched and to appear “slightly deformed, hurried and skeletal, not fleshed out enough” (14). Besides deploying ekphrasis to show the products of Faiz’s craft, the novel also uses it to bring to

206  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché light the process by which these objects are manufactured, painted, and lacquered. Through this, the Kashmiri art object, instead of being a convenient stand-in and/or a replacement for its Kashmiri creator, becomes connected to him. Faiz is represented as an artist instead of as an “automaton,” whose only task is to blindly manufacture endless copies of an original work, which are then marketed to consumers nationally and transnationally (14). A proof of this can be found in the ekphrasis mentioned earlier, which focused on Faiz’s painting process. In certain cases, his motifs deteriorate in quality, but in other scenarios, his art objects appear to be more embellished than others. Although commissioned art objects are required to be identical replicas of one another, Faiz tries to give each object a unique appearance by adding small visual details to them, such as “a tiny nightingale that peeks out of a corner bush, a gazelle darting across a border, a kingfisher’s reflection in a turquoise pool, a Persian couplet intertwined with a forest vine” (6). According to Marx, commodities are tradeable and exchangeable goods and their “use-value” is dependent, among other factors, on the “contained useful labor” that has been spent in the production of the object (7). However, he acknowledges that a category of commodities “cannot be reproduced by labour, such as antiques and works of art” in which case, their price “may be determined by many fortuitous combinations” (473). McKeown states that within “Marxian political economy,” objects are assumed to be reproducible commodities, but at the same time, there is a recognition of the existence of “non-reproducible commodities” that include oil paintings, art work, as well as rare wines (67). For this reason, he makes a distinction between the two types of commodities that exist within Marxist philosophy: reproducible commodities and non-reproducible commodities (67). He argues that in the contemporary context, the market price of non-reproducible products “exceed[s] their price of production” (67). The papier-mâché objects that Faiz produces in The Book of Gold Leaves fall in the liminal spaces between these two categories insofar as they are reproducible and exchangeable to an extent, and yet each one of them is visually unique and therefore not entirely reproducible. Because of their visual distinctiveness, The Book of Gold Leaves attempts to foreground their perceived value while acknowledging their apparent exchangeability. The novel subverts the artist/commissioned artisan binary by highlighting the fact that despite their cheapness, portability, and near-identical visual appearance, the art objects produced by Faiz are still the non-reproducible work of an artist and worthy of having their value being ascertained accordingly. The lush Orientalized images on the art objects Faiz produces tantalize readers and pander to their tastes, but along with that they also foreground the artistic skill, and more importantly, the humanness of the subject who is responsible for producing these coveted papier-mâché

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 207 objects. Pieces of Kashmiri craft are not represented as being identical despite the demand from Faiz’s patron that they resemble one another. The extra embellishment as well as the botched motifs function as Faiz’s visual signature. They remind the reader that these objects are produced by a human being and as such, each one of them is visually distinctive and individually valuable. The Book of Gold Leaves uses vivid visual description as a means of inviting the Indian reader to consume beautiful papier-mâché objects, while at the same time subtly shaming them for their appetite for Kashmir and all things Kashmiri. Thomas Keenan writes that “[m]obilizing shame is the predominant practice of human rights organizations, and the dominant metaphor through which human rights NGOs understand their work” (438). He defines shame as: A primordial force that articulates or links knowledge with action, a feeling or a sensation brought on not by physical contact but by knowledge or consciousness alone. And it signifies involvement in a social network, exposure to others and susceptibility to their gaze. (436) According to Franklin, “with the growing support for human rights standards, the growing reach of international human rights organizations, and the new resources available to domestic oppositions, naming and shaming is becoming a powerful tool for human rights” (60). Louis Henkin draws connections between human rights activism and the mobilization of shame and argues the following: the various influences that induce compliance with human rights norms are cumulative, and some of them add up to an underappreciated means of enforcing human rights, which has been characterized as ‘‘mobilizing shame.’’ Intergovernmental as well as governmental policies and actions combine with those of NGOs and the public media, and in many countries also public opinion, to mobilize and maximize public shame. The effectiveness of such inducements to comply is subtle but demonstrable. (24) Strategic exoticism in The Book of Gold Leaves functions as a kind of strategic shaming aimed at exposing the presence of human rights violations in Kashmir, but also to show the everyday complicity of ordinary citizens who desire and consume ‘Kashmir’ but remain aloof to the plight of its people. This twofold strategic shaming is aimed at turning readers from passive consumers of the text to fellow activists and human rights allies. As The Book of Gold Leaves progresses, making papier-mâché art becomes less about satisfying the consumer and more about satisfying its creator, the inheritor of Persian artisanship, the protagonist Faiz. The Book of Gold Leaves begins by describing the more popular forms of papier-mâché art objects, but eventually moves onto the more imaginative, individualistic, and ‘authentic’ pursuits of papier-mâché craft. Faiz

208  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché wishes to work on large murals and paintings instead of small, portable papier-mâché objects because painting expansive canvases brings him greater happiness and satisfaction. His search for meaning and ‘grandeur’ in the objects he makes is not connected to considerations of commerce and market forces but is instead connected to his own artistic sensibilities and to the pursuit of pleasure and fulfilment through traditional Kashmiri arts. He derives enormous contentment from dreaming of and painting his own large papier-mâché artwork Falaknuma. Faiz’s masterpiece is meant to include “[t]he earth and the world contained in it, in all its detail and glory, in all its life and light, reflected in a saucer-shaped sky” (Waheed 14). Ekphrasis in Waheed’s novel takes the form of flamboyant, almost overstated visual descriptions of Falaknuma, which endows Faiz’s paintings with quasi-magical and almost hallucinatory properties. The art work being described in the literary text becomes even more striking and visually appealing on account of its disembodiment and invisibility to the naked eye. Through ekphrasis, Waheed makes the art object more desirable to the observer than perhaps even the ‘actual’ physical rendition of Falaknuma would have been. While allowing the reader to act as a voyeur and to feast their eyes on Faiz’s painting, the novel also shifts the conversation on papier-mâché art, from being a commercedriven craft tradition, to an art form about Kashmiri artistic pleasures and spirituality. The Book of Gold Leaves meticulously outlines the rendering of Falaknuma on Faiz’s canvas: Faiz picks a matchstick, dips it in red paining and starts making the expanse of his city. Soon clusters of red paint begin to assume a pattern. It starts narrow, then expands and finally dissipates as it touches the river at the rim. He now draws two moons, more or less of the same size. This, he knows, is the tricky part, especially since he does not want to conjure a hall-of-mirrors effect. As he finishes a few more touches – a settlement of animals on the fringes of the city, with two roads linking it to where the people live; an indefinitely long line of sparrows flying away from the oval lake; and finally, many lights, each constellation signaled by a drop of different colour – Faiz is determined to finish the piece by the end of the year. (16) In this way, Mirza Waheed makes the formerly concealed and mystical process of the creation of large-scale papier-mâché art, as well as miniature papier-mâché handicrafts, accessible to the reader. He does not divorce the creation from the process that led to its creation. He is also careful to underscore the gratification that Faiz derives from the process of painting Falaknuma, and the eagerness with which he awaits its completion. The novel re-locates Kashmiri papier-mâché art to the privacy of the artist’s home and to the intimacy of the local shrine, away from the

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 209 more accessible and visible world of the handicraft shop, the craft exhibition, or the handicraft bazaar. Representations of local papier-mâché art are reconnected to the lives of ordinary Kashmiris and their brushes with both pain and pleasure. The use of strategic exotic representations is meant to enable the reader to view papier-mâché as an extension of the personal and creative life of the Kashmiri artisan and not just as an object for touristic consumption. Papier-mâché becomes part of the everyday lived experiences of the papier-mâché artist and is re-signified as a means of seeking aesthetic and spiritual gratification through local craft traditions.

Papier-Mâché Art in Sacred Spaces As depicted in the novel, the purpose of the papier-mâché artisan or naqash is not related to his ability or willingness to provide commercial and consumable products to the nation-state, but instead, to the fulfilment of his desires and artistic aspirations. In addition to this, rather than being synonymous with portable commercial objects, papier mache art is represented as an indispensable part of the sacred architectural topography of local Sufi shrines. The Sufi shrine, which is an essential part of the spiritual and political landscape of Kashmir, is frequently deployed as a setting within contemporary works of Anglophone Kashmiri life writing. In Curfewed Night, for example, crowds of protesting Kashmiris assemble at the local shrine before pouring into the city streets. In Chef, the disappearance of a sacred vial of hair from the Hazratbal shrine is shown to result in violent rioting. In The Collaborator, tying votive threads at the shrine is shown to be common practice among the Gujjars of Nowgam, whereas in Our Moon has Bloodclots, Kashmiri Pandits are represented as visiting the Vaishno Devi shrine prior to their departure from the Valley, and this shrine functions as a place of worship as well as a community hall for solemnizing marriages. In the Kashmiri life narratives considered in this book, shrines emerge as spaces of resistance, as places of assembly and reprieve for protestors and as a refuge for seekers of spiritual solace and calm amidst the violent political chaos. Generally, a Sufi shrine or dargah is the tomb of a revered saint whose spiritual gifts and blessings – kamalaat in Urdu – permeate the physical space of the shrine, the area around the saint’s mausoleum, the basement, and the adjoining courtyard. The pir or Sufi saint is believed to be a “mediator between the devotee and the divine” (Hussain). In fact, the word dargah, which means “threshold” in Persian, is tied to the idea of intercession and communication between the physical world of the worshipper, and the invisible, spiritual realm of the Sufi saint and of God (Jafa). A dargah is also alternatively referred to as a mazaar or a khanqah (Boivin 3). Typically, a dargah is a cosmopolitan space that attracts diverse

210  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché swathes of the population across class, gender, sect, caste, ethnicity, and religious lines (3). Dargahs are usually scattered across South Asia and members of different faith communities including Hindus, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians visit the dargah, a fact which testifies to the “conviviality of people of different religions, despite the ruptures between them in recent decades” (Hussain). Shrines have been labelled as “binding social institution[s]” because of the unique opportunity they offer local citizens to pray, worship, and meditate alongside members of other faith communities (A. Khan). Usually, sacred functions associated with the dargah, such as the annual urs festivities, attract a highly diverse and differentiated demographic (Hussain). The word urs literally means “wedding” and marks the death anniversary as well as the re-birth of the deceased saint (Harder). It is the “ritual commemoration of the death” as well as the birth of the saint because death in the Sufi tradition is “coterminous with awaking and finding oneself in complete union” with the Divine (Harder). Urs ceremonies are a characteristic feature of vernacular, lived religion in South Asia and typically attract devotees belonging to different religious denominations as well as different nation-states in the region. The annual urs of a saint usually has hundreds of participants who indulge in chanting, “ecstatic dancing and singing” (Hussain). Devotees of shrines typically also tie a votive thread at the shrine and undo the thread once their wish (in Urdu “mannat”) has been fulfilled (Vinayak). Separate prayer halls for men and women may also be located close to the shrine to enable devotees to also offer their daily salah. Present-day followers of Sufi Shaykhs belonging to a specific Sufi tariqah [lineage] recite their wazaif [religious recitation] and adkar [supplications] on the premises of the Sufi shrine (Geelani). In Kashmir, the shrine space is also utilized by local theatre troupes to enact their performances (Menon 154). Travelling local folk performers – or Bhand Pather – often perform their plays in shrine courtyards (154). Dargahs and the activities associated with them are a pan-South-Asian phenomenon instead of being an exclusively Kashmiri or Indian one and consequently, these spaces and the pieties associated with them have a resonance with Kashmiri, Indian, and Pakistani subjectivities. Assuming the fact that the regional readership of Waheed’s novels will be highly familiar and well-acquainted with shrine spaces, The Book of Gold Leaves unfolds either inside the shrine or in its immediate precincts to draw in and appeal to its regional readers. The distinctive visual topography of Kashmiri shrines, in particular their usually out-of-bounds basement, is consistently deployed and marketed to the novel’s regional reading publics and made available for their consumption. Most traditional shrines and mosques in the Valley are built in Buddhist pagoda style, a fact that is reflective of the religious syncreticism of the region (Jameel). Specific shrines in Kashmir, particularly the 15th century

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 211 mausoleum of Nooruddin Rishi in Charar-e-Sharif, are among the most sacred sites in the Valley, revered by both Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims (Geelani). The Vale of Kashmir goes by the name of “Pir Waer” meaning the “Alcove of Sufis and Saints” (Geelani). In particular, Srinagar, the city in which The Book of Gold Leaves is set, is home to several important shrines including shrines of Mir Syed Ali Hamadani, Makhdoom Sheikh Hamzah, Khuwaja Naqshband, Mirza Kamal, Habibullah Nowshehri and the Hazratbal dargah (Geelani). Of these, the Hazratbal dargah and the shrines of Syed Ali Hamadani are particularly venerated by the local populace (Geelani). The shrine in The Book of Gold Leaves is referred to as “khanqah” (Urdu: seminary) and is said to belong to “the great saint.” It is located in the heart of Srinagar city on the banks of the river Jhelum and, gauging from these descriptions, it is highly likely that the shrine mentioned in Mirza Waheed’s novel is the khanqah of Shah Hamdan, also referred to as “Khanqah-e-Moula” by the locals (“Khanqah Mosque”). Built in the late 14th century by a Shahmiri king, Sultan Sikander, in honour of the Sufi saint, Syed Ali Hamadani, this shrine has a layered pagoda-style structure and its walls and ceiling are inlaid with delicate woodwork and “fine papier mache workmanship” (“Khanqah Mosque”). The Shahmiris are “the most notable dynasty that ruled Kashmir for almost hundred years” from a period ranging from “the middle of the fourteenth century to the mid-sixteenth century” (Bhat 100). The structure of the Khanqah shrine is an embodiment of the “medieval wooden style of Kashmir Muslim architecture” with its “beautifully carved eaves,” antique chandeliers, and a pyramidal roof” (“Khanqah Mosque”). The highly embellished ceilings and walls of this shrine and its distinctive architectural design endow it with a unique, visual appeal that is conveyed to the reader through the medium of the text: Old men rest their backs against the wood paneling inside the main hall and wipe off half-dry tears. The panels are painted so intricately in that high genre of zaiwyul naqashi, that even the oldest masters find it daunting to reproduce them. Persian miniatures sit amid royal vistas. Verses of the Qur’an enclose moments of beauty as though to prevent violation. And then there is that colour of magic, Seher, a sharp fusion of crimson and orange, whose delicate chemistry was known to Mir Mohammed Ali but, alas, he didn’t have the time to whisper it to his youngest, or perhaps, the son was too young to understand the language of colour. . . . At this hour, when the people of the city and the long-travelling devotees from the country sit in the warm, perspiration-filled air inside the shrine, the colour actually begins to glow, almost with a pulse. (Waheed 62)

212  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché The intense pictorial description of the shrine emphasizes the fact that praying within the shrine is not an exclusively inward spiritual experience but has a strong outward and visual dimension. The pleasures of spirituality are increased by the pleasures of artisanship, the vibrant colour and intricate motifs that characterize the walls and ceiling of this place of worship. Ekphrasis describing sacred spaces, such as the one in the passage above, impresses the physicality and the disarming visual beauty of the Sufi shrine upon the reader. Through the written text, the novel provides the reader with an immersive experience of praying and meditating within the shrine’s private spaces. Ancient renditions of papier-mâché painting or zaiwyul naqashi enable Shia devotees such as Faiz to feel connected to their spiritual ancestors. The Book of Gold Leaves restores papier-mâché art to the private and sheltered world of Sufi shrines and to the realm of worship, spirituality, and community. Papier-mâché art becomes a means of connecting Shia devotees to their distant ancestors and cosmopolitan histories, reminding them of a time when Kashmir was more closely connected with the cultural and artistic practices of Iran and Central Asia: Roohi and Faiz’s shrine was last painted with the colour at the turn of the twentieth century, when sheepskin pouches carrying pigments were still travelling from Tajikistan to artists’ workshops in this part of the world. When Kashmir, Kashgar, Samarkand, Tashkent, Bukhara, Baghdad, Khorasan and Shiraz were tied by both verse and colour. When schools of artists from the central mountains created workshops in the heart of Srinagar and made its shrines sing. (63) Sheepskin pouches of colour pigments being transported from Central Asia to Kashmir through the Silk Road function as a metonymic representation of local cosmopolitanism or Kashmiriyat. Papier-mâché art is re-positioned as a craft form connected to traditional Kashmiri architecture, Sufi spirituality, and local cosmopolitan histories. In the novel, papier-mâché also comes to symbolize the resistance and resilience of the local Kashmiri population. When Roohi’s father, Kabir Khan, is slain by Panther, a man belonging to a rogue Kashmiri insurgent group, New Salvation Front (NSF), mourners and protestors assemble at the shrine to pay their last respects. The gold and bronze tonalities of the shrine are shown to be “aglow in the soft silver light” of the moon (Waheed, The Book of 324). The sheen of the papiermâché work inside the shrine and in its porch is heightened by the lights and illumination that are switched on: “Someone turns on all the lights, so that it resembles the festive zool of Urs days when every room, every balcony, every window burnt brightly. A memorial mood pervades” (321).

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 213 Here, the beauty and characteristic glow of papier-mâché, which is central to its appeal as a portable art object, is connected to local, Kashmiri, Sufi practices and to the sacred festival of Zool. The Zool festival in Kashmir marks the Urs of the Sufi Saint, Zain-ud-din Wali. Participants hold lit-up torches – leshi – that are believed to function as a means of seeking the spiritual blessings of the deceased (but also re-born) saint (“Tourism”). The festival culminates in participants marching through the streets in a large procession while holding individual torchlights in their hands (“Tourism”). The shining appearance of the papier-mâché at night reminds the narrator of the luminosity and brightness of the torchlight processions, which take place during the Zool festival. Far-removed from the world of commodity exchange, papier-mâché paintings become linked to the rituals of Zool and Urs and to the process of seeking blessings and salvation from revered Kashmiri saints. Mir Zafar Ali, Faiz’s elder brother, leads Kabir Khan’s funeral while holding the alam – or the flag – that Shias typically carry as part of the Moharram mourning processions marking the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad, in the 7th century ad (Pinault ix). Each year, Shia Muslims across the Muslim world flagellate themselves, or beat their chests, to commemorate and mourn the death of Hussain. The 10th day of Moharram culminates in a procession in the streets, led by a devotee on horseback holding the Shia flag. In The Book of Gold Leaves, Mir Ali hoists the Shia flag high above the stone steps of the shrine in “solidarity with his younger brother’s wife in her moment of loss” but also “as defiance that Muharram will go on no matter what” (Waheed 325). At the time of Khan’s murder, Srinagar is under curfew and public assembly as well as movement are strictly banned by Captain Sumit Kumar, a member of the Indian army stationed in the region. The amassed mourners provide cathartic outlet to their personal and collective losses, to their anger against local militants, while also defying the curfew and the explicit orders of Kumar’s lieutenant, Rathi, who had been commanded to make the protestors vacate the shrine and peacefully return to their homes. The rituals of urs, Zool and Moharram combine to create a wholly new, hybrid religious event that cuts across religious, cultural, and sectarian lines. A different notion of Kashmiriyat emerges here, one which bears shades of different religious practices and is born as a consequence of the fraught and confusing political situation prevailing in the Valley. Zool, which is essentially a joyous celebration of the Sufi saint, becomes combined with Moharram, which primarily involves grief and atonement. The lambent glow of papier-mâché inside the shrine is a sign of ritual “festivity” but simultaneously, a sad “memorial mood” pervades the building. Mourning and celebratory rituals intersect and the soft luminous glow of papier-mâché symbolizes both the life-giving, enriching festivities of Zool and the atonement and mourning rituals of Moharram. Najeeb Mubaraki, in his review of Waheed’s novel, remarks

214  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché that “Huzun, which [is a] soft, sad light suffuses the characters of the book, the book itself, and a people and land one loves deeply” (Mubaraki). Huzun is the Turkish word for “melancholy.” It is my contention that the sense of melancholic radiance or huzun that this reviewer observes in The Book of Gold Leaves derives from the image of papiermâché glowing at night. As the papier-mâché in Shah Hamdan’s shrine shines and sparkles, Kashmiris recall the pleasures of Zool and the huzun of Moharram. The translucent light shining off papier-mâché art becomes a reflection of beauty and melancholia but also, I would argue – of the resilience of ordinary Kashmiris. Despite the political turmoil and the restrictions on assembly and movement, the locals arrive in multitudes and flood the space of the shrine. By consuming these mediated representations of Sufi shrine art, it becomes impossible for the reader to separate the beauty of Kashmiri visual culture from the deep sorrow of the circumstances within which it is located, marketed, and produced, as well as from the courage of ordinary Kashmiris who continue to celebrate, wed, and mourn despite the violence and instability enveloping their lives. Representations of papier-mâché, and the fragile lives of its makers, function as a means of mobilizing public opinion and of creating publicity for the human rights issues in Kashmir, in the hope that acts of violence, which endanger the lives of these artists and their artistic works, will be highlighted and curtailed. William Schulz, for example, articulates the purpose of organizations such as Amnesty International in the following words: Our power is primarily the power of mobilizing grass-roots people to speak out. “The mobilization of shame” is one way to put it. The eyes of the world shining on the prisons and into the dark corners of police stations and military barracks all over the world to try to bring international pressure to bear upon governments. (qtd. in Keenan 438) Kashmiri narratives such as The Book of Gold Leaves do not only draw attention to the “dark corners” but also to the pleasurable ones. “The eyes of the [nation],” to re-quote Schulz, shine on the prisons, as well as on the sacred Sufi shrines inlaid with shining papier-mâché – spaces that have been robbed of their joy, spirituality, and vivacity.

Commodification and Re-Contextualization The vivid descriptions of papier-mâché craft tradition within The Book of Gold Leaves enable immovable and non-commercial forms of papiermâché art, found exclusively within the private and sacred world of the Kashmiri Sufi shrine, to become mobile and accessible to its readers.

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 215 The novel dwells on the aesthetic beauty of the shrine and through its ekphrastic representations of papier-mâché, allows the fixed and immutable renditions of naqashi and stained-glass painting to become movable. The latticework mentioned in the novel belongs to the “back zone” of tourism because it is not easily available or accessible for touristic consumption (Kabir, Territory 112). Commercialized papier-mâché handicrafts travel easily in national spaces, but latticework, which is a part of traditional Kashmiri houses, buildings, and Sufi shrines, does not (Kabir, Territory 112). Through the medium of the text, Mirza Waheed transports the latticework, stained glass windows, and ornate naqashi, which characterize Sufi shrines, into the literary text and enables them to become mobile in national and transnational public spheres. Ostensibly, The Book of Gold Leaves allows for the further commodification and exoticization of Kashmiri visual culture by offering previously unavailable artefacts and architectural elements for mass consumption. However, as Appadurai argues, exoticization also involves the “aesthetics of decontextualization” whereby, in the words of Huggan, culturally othered products are removed from their “original cultural/historical context” and rendered strange and mystical (Appadurai 16; Huggan 16). Huggan believes that the decontextualization and dislocation of cultural products makes it difficult to gain cultural knowledge about these products and may even contribute to cultural ignorance (Marketing 16). He includes “Third World Literature in English” alongside a series of exotic items such as native art and craft objects, all of which, according to him, are decontextualized in the process of being bought, displayed, and consumed in Western households (17). Waheed, on the contrary, does not remove papier-mâché art from its socio-historical and physical context, but in fact, restores it to its appropriate place within the local Kashmiri cultural and spiritual milieu. Papier-mâché art objects are re-contextualized into their Kashmiri cultural contexts and the reader is given access to the cosmopolitan histories as well as the social rituals that are closely connected with these craft forms. Cultural representation, instead of being at odds with cultural knowledge, goes hand in hand with it. Put another way, representations of cultural products and local craft traditions within postcolonial literature often present these as objects of curiosity and touristic navel-gazing, rather than as objects of knowledge that are located within a cultural and social milieu within and serve a practical as well as aesthetic purpose. Local histories associated with the shrine as an architectural and spiritual space, instead of being “levelled out,” are delved into, recovered and reclaimed by The Book of Gold Leaves (Huggan, Marketing 19). The brand of exoticism in The Book of Gold Leaves is markedly distinct from the one described by Huggan in his work because the intended audience is different. Western reading publics are not the sole addressee of Waheed’s work and for this reason, he does not compose and market

216  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché his literary texts with only their assumed tastes and appetites in mind. Rather than flattening out local histories and diminishing the sociohistorical context of the artistic traditions being described to render his novel more consumable for metropolitan Western readers, Waheed furnishes his novel with finely observed physical and historical details pertaining to the practice of papier-mâché in Kashmir. He selectively panders to his regional publics by appealing to their cultural affiliation with Sufi dargahs and markets the sacred space of the Kashmiri shrine to them, while also desiring to critique the commodification and consumption of Kashmir. Papier-mâché art is returned to its appropriate place within the artisan’s home and the Sufi shrine and is viewed in relation to the cosmopolitan historical movements and cultural exchanges that brought this craft tradition to Kashmir in the first place. As such, the portable lacquered papier-mâché object is represented as being part of the realm of Sufi spirituality, local artisanship and everyday acts of resilience, such that papier-mâché art becomes almost indistinguishable from the volatile personal, spiritual, and creative life of its creator, Faiz. In fact, I posit that the portable papier-mâché object is re-articulated as a tiny, portable carrier of Kashmiri pain and longing.

Narratives of Suffering The Book of Gold Leaves constructs a subversive counternarrative for the commercial papier-mâché art object. Waheed’s novel contains letters that Faiz and Roohi write to each other from different sides of the border. These letters are enclosed inside papier-mâché objects and re-routed to Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, from where they are dispatched to their respective locations. The novel invents a fictitious Kashmiri writer, named Ibteda Andrabi, who works for Din Shah’s papier-mâché workshop in Kathmandu and surreptitiously encloses letters sent from Kashmir and Pakistan inside commercial papier-mâché items. Many of these letters are sent by families of Kashmiris in the Valley and constitute the only tenuous link between Kashmiris in Pakistan and their loved ones in the Valley of Kashmir. They are written mostly by women – wives, girlfriends and fiancés – and contain “love, tears, waiting” (Waheed 178). Ibteda receives these letters from a designated post office in Kathmandu and then carefully hides them inside papier-mâché objects: Every week he packs a carton, writes the address of a handicrafts manufacturer in the back alleys of the lakeside locality of Rainawari in Kashmir. . . . The cartons contain samples of papier mache articles wrapped in triple layers of thin brown paper and bubble-wrap. A jewellery box, a vase, a card-holder, a cutlery box, a cigarette case, a pencil box. . . . The samples go back to Kashmir via the Nepal Parcel Service, arrive at Peer Handicrafts of Rainawari and are given

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 217 to select artisans, who hand-paint exact replicas by the hundred or thousand, as the orders demand. Carefully concealed under the glued velvet lining of the coaster set and cutlery boxes are tightly pressed envelopes that contain letters from Pakistan. (Waheed 177) Waheed re-fashions the Kashmiri art object from a fetish item used to obfuscate Kashmiri bodies and voices to a literal, physical carrier of the longing and voices of Kashmiris. The portable papier-mâché craft object, instead of diverting attention away from the concerns of its makers, refocuses it onto them. Objects of the “gaze,” which according to Deborah Root, are not designed to “look back” but only to be admired and consumed, are given the ability to not only return this gaze, but also to narrate and write back (45). Exoticism is the “aestheticizing means by which the pain of . . . expansion is converted to spectacle, to culture in the service of empire” (Arac and Ritvo 3). Exotic art objects are used to “mask the inequality of . . . power relations” (Huggan 14). Layers of color, motif, and gold leaf are a veneer which obsolesce the “underlying political motives” of the people who produce these commercial, aesthetic objects (Huggan 14). In The Book of Gold Leaves however, popular papier-mâché objects such as paper-holders, Easter eggs and pen cases do not reinforce and reify the consumption-centred relationship between India and Kashmir. On the contrary, these stylized portable objects become conduits to Kashmiri voices and pain. But pain, in this case, is not exclusively limited to physical suffering, but extends to non-corporeal and non-bodily registers of pain including the pain of losing the traditions of local papier-mâché artisanship, foregoing one’s artistic aspirations and spiritual sanctuary, or even the pain of indefinitely waiting for a romantic relationship to materialize and flourish in an atmosphere of interminable political uncertainty, as is the case with Roohi and Faiz. In this way, the strategically exotic representations in Waheed’s literary work are strategic not only by virtue of their ability to make the consumer dissect their appetite for exoticized Kashmiri art object, but also because these representations are tinged with narrative traces of Kashmiri suffering, which are conveyed and carried across to Indian readers. The shining papier-mâché objects of Kashmir are no longer simple stand-ins for the beauty, mystique, and touristic potential of Kashmir, but also come to symbolize the deep melancholia and sadness of the region. Letters from abandoned lovers and mothers are concealed within glossy and kitschy papier-mâché objects in Ibteda’s workshop and as such, papier-mâché becomes the material through which the miniscule, incalculable, and unspeakable losses of Kashmir are articulated, recorded, and distributed. The re-positioning of papier-mâché objects in new and novel contexts and for radically different purposes in Waheed’s text is an example of bricolage par excellence. Coined by Levi-Strauss, the term “bricolage”

218  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché involves the taking of raw materials to put them to “alternative uses by adapting and combining objects through improvisation to create new meanings” (Procter 91). Hall et. al argue the following: Commodities are, also, cultural signs. They have already been invested, by the dominant culture, with meanings, associations, social connotations. Many of these meanings seem fixed and ‘natural.’ . . . In fact, in cultural systems, there is no ‘natural’ meaning as such. Objects and commodities do not mean any one thing. They ‘mean’ only because they have already been arranged, according to social use, into cultural codes of meaning, which assign meaning to them. (42–43) As we observed earlier, portable papier-mâché objects are symbolic representatives of Kashmir in the Indian national imagination. They are “cultural signs” with pre-assigned uses, social functions, and connotations, to use Hall’s structuralist classificatory scheme. They reinforce and normalize the consumption-focused power relations between Kashmir and mainland India. In The Book of Gold Leaves, papier-mâché objects still function as tradeable commodities, but the meanings assigned to them are scrambled and re-arranged. Bricolage involves the re-signification of cultural signs through “exaggerations, isolation, combination and modification” (Procter 92). By enclosing letters inside portable papier-mâché, the latter become physical repositories of Kashmiri beauty as well as pain. The agent performing bricolage, the bricoleur, is able to use things and objects in a way so as to disarticulate them from their “dominant meanings” and to re-articulate them into new contexts” (92). The designated meaning of an object is subverted in this way (93). The papier-mâché object, for example, continues to function as a lacquered and glossy consumer item, but is also re-fashioned as a symbol of Kashmiri pleasures and suffering in The Book of Gold Leaves.

The Book of Gold: Re-inscribing Affect Like Ibteda Andrabi, the fictitious papier-mâché trader, Waheed is also a bricoleur. He re-positions and re-inserts the portable art object into different contexts through his literary representations of the art form. Along with this, the papier-mâché art represented within his work is further reinscribed onto the physical aspects of the novel, particularly its front and back cover. Through this re-inscription, the portable papier-mâché object is once again reincarnated in a drastically different form and is made available to a much wider market. The book’s cover deploys a startling colour palette of red, gold, and green and contains geometric shapes and highly stylized floral motifs (Figure 5.1). The floral shapes include red and green tulip motifs, tilted blue chinar leaf motifs and green Persian

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 219

Figure 5.1 Cover of The Book of Gold Leaves (Paperback). Penguin, Source: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/253/253366/the-book-of-gold-leaves/97802419 70829.html

rose motifs. The Book of Gold Leaves comes wrapped in the aesthetic beauty of Kashmiri visual culture in order to captivate both regional and international readers. (Huggan, The Postcolonial 27). Brouillette draws attention to the seemingly unimportant “extra-textual” aspects of a book which, as per her argument, are as significant as its actual text. She summarizes the key lessons of the field of book history and writes that the material aspects of a text including its format, cover, packaging, and typography as well as the general field in which it is situated,

220  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché comprised of the institutions of literary production, dissemination, and reception, are more than merely context for the work’s conceptualization and realization. Instead they are textual in their own right. (Postcolonial Writers 2) I propose that the aestheticized book cover of The Book of Gold Leaves is a strategic choice that determines the perception of the text by its reader. Moreover, the visual appeal of the book’s cover is foregrounded by international reviewers and readers of The Book of Gold Leaves, a testament to the role played by the cover in ensuring the novel’s commercial success. The pictorial quality of the contents of the novel, combined with its visually striking cover, led the reviewer of The Newsroom Post, an online Indian newspaper, to compare The Book of Gold Leaves to a painting: “The culture, art, way of life, geography, society, human interactions and beauty of the valley is explained and recreated as beautifully as a painting” (Shubhrastha). The reviewer states that Waheed’s novel has “the makings of a literary artefact.” In referring to the literary text as an “artefact,” he foregrounds the way in which he, as a reader, perceives The Book of Gold Leaves as a physical object. The conscious packaging of Waheed’s novel as a physical commodity is not limited to the inclusion of pictorial motifs rendered in vibrant tones on the jacket design, but also extends to the presence of raised ridges along the outlines of the floral shapes and the title of the work on the book cover. This suggests that the reader’s interaction with the book is not only meant to be visual but also tactile. I would go as far as to argue that Waheed’s postcolonial novel is a contemporary afterlife of the Kashmiri papier-mâché handicraft. Portable and lightweight like its predecessor, The Book of Gold Leaves is a new type of Kashmiri handcrafted object, a contemporary and subversive avatar of Kashmiri papier-mâché. It is inscribed by the markings of Kashmiri visual culture, but contains narratives of both pleasure and interrupted pleasure, romance and longing, within its pages. The Book of Gold Leaves has been re-published in the form of a hardback edition, but this edition also features the same artwork painted by Waheed’s great-grandfather on the cover (Figure 5.2). The only difference is that the cover image is a reproduction of a different portion of the original artwork. As such, the colour palette as well as visual motifs are remarkably similar to the original cover and the “Cover Story” in the first edition is reproduced verbatim in the final chapter of the hardback edition. In addition to this, the raised ridges that demarcate the boundaries of the visual motifs on the paperback version are also present on this edition. This shows how integral the visuality and materiality of papier-mâché is to the novel as a whole, and to the way it is packaged and marketed by the publishers.

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 221

Figure 5.2 Cover of The Book of Gold Leaves (Hardback) Penguin Source: https://penguin.co.in/book/fiction/book-gold-leaves/

Although not crafted by hand per se as a papier-mâché handicraft is expected to be, The Book of Gold Leaves is also made of paper and is as portable and lightweight as the latter. It also carries the same type of traditional motifs and degree of visual brilliance on its surface as an ‘authentic’ papier-mâché art object. The outlines of the title and the visual motifs

222  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché glimmer and shine, and I argue, the Kashmiri novel emerges as the new type of portable Kashmiri artisanal object, one which is as mobile and aesthetically appealing as a lacquered papier-mâché handicraft but which, unlike a commercial art object, also carries with it the traumatized voices and narratives of Kashmir. It is meant to induce admiration, shame, pity, and empathy within the reader, and the mobilization of these emotions within the recipient of these texts constitutes the affective basis of the human rights activism that it performs and purveys. This refurbished and redesigned version of the papier-mâché object is one in which Kashmiri visual aesthetics are inextricably bound up with the longings of Kashmiri subjects. Furthermore, by using these visual motifs on its cover, Waheed enables Kashmiri visual culture to gain wider access, recognizability, and visibility in the transnational Anglophone book market. It appears that the portable Kashmiri papier-mâché object, this time in the form of a postcolonial novel, is once again allowed to travel in the Anglo-American and European markets and to reach new buyers and consumers. The Book of Gold Leaves acknowledges its own status as a cultural artifact and an exotic commodity by being self-reflexive and metafictional. It makes the process of its own creation and marketing visible to its readers. The Book of Gold Leaves is strategically exotic also insofar as it “lay[s] bare the grounds of its own material production” and exposes the process of its own construction before the reader (Huggan, Marketing 77). In the last section of the book titled “A Cover Story,” Mirza Waheed provides a personalized history of the cover design of The Book of Gold Leaves and how it came to be selected, produced, and published. The cover image is a reproduction of an original papier-mâché artwork painted by the author’s great grandfather, Mirza Ali, who was well-trained in the art of naqashi. While the author was visiting Kashmir, his uncle re-discovered this forgotten familial heirloom tucked away in the vestiges of an old trunk in the family home. This papier-mâché artwork is found enclosed in a delicate book binding, which is astonishingly well-preserved despite being nearly a century old. The vibrant colours, which had been used to render the visual motifs and floral patterns on the naqashi painting, had not spoiled in the least, and appeared “fresh” to the observer (Waheed 338). Stunned by the lively play of colours and the intricate brushwork of his great grandfather’s painting, Waheed immediately took a high-resolution photograph of the painting and sent it to his publisher in England. He describes the process of the discovery and the utilization of the cover image in the following passage: I’d been slightly doubtful about the title of my new novel at first. I had liked it but, as so often happens, I still felt slightly uncertain. When I saw my own grandfather’s ‘Book of Gold’, I knew it could not be called anything else. It had created an extraordinary connection

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 223 between past and present, what I had been writing about and my family’s past. I brought the jild to my publisher’s office in London. When she opened it and saw the painting inside, she knew she had found the cover for the book. Over the next few months I would witness family history, art and modern publishing merge together to create the cover for The Book of Gold Leaves, which you now hold in your hands. (Waheed 339) Here, Waheed offers the reader a rare vista into the hidden, and often, enigmatic world of postcolonial Anglo-American book publishing and illustrates the invisible interactions and transactions between the author and the publishing house, which result in the final product, the printed book itself. By using these metafictional references, he exposes the process of packaging his work and the selection of an appropriate title and jacket image. He also informs us that the title of his novel is in fact a direct reference to his great grandfather’s original papier-mâché artwork recovered untouched from the bottom of a trunk. The book cover and – I argue – the novel as a whole is presented as the result of aesthetic negotiations and multi-directional interactions between the author’s personal history, Kashmiri visual culture, and the commercial demands of contemporary publishing houses. The passage above draws attention to the highly individualized investment of the author in the creation of his work. Waheed allows his readers to have access to and consume a family heirloom that is taken and subsequently photographed at his uncle’s ancestral home in Kashmir. By including this artwork and recording the story of its discovery within his novel, Waheed highlights his personal connection with the cosmopolitan world of Kashmiri visual art. He also busts the myth of the literary work as an unmediated communication between a single authorial voice and a global readership by making the significant as well as mundane decisions involved in the final production and printing of a novel visible to the public. The above passage also underscores the way in which Waheed participates in the transformation of immovable, formerly irretrievable, personal works of naqashi languishing in neglected familial archives, into mobile literary products that can be accessed and consumed by different publics across the English-speaking world. The novel enables shrine art which is connected to sacred and inner Kashmiri spiritual spaces, but also personal artworks, to have increased mobility and international visibility in the national and transnational public sphere. At the same time, Mirza Waheed is aware of his own complicity in the commodification and marketing of Kashmir. As such, he leverages critiques of the commercialization of Kashmiri artisanship and craft culture throughout his novel. When, for instance, Principal Madan Koul, the Kashmiri Pandit academic, suggests that Faiz participate in

224  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché a government-organized handicraft exhibition in Delhi to promote his artistic skill and his products, Faiz responds by stating that “people can’t differentiate between fine papier mache naqashi and quick-fix Christmas balls” (Waheed 77). Here, the commercialization of a product is seen to lead to a sharp drop in the quality of the final product. Paint, instead of being carefully applied onto an object, is hastily “daubed on” to meet the quick turnover and hefty demands of the consumer market. These remarks on the commercialization of the papier-mâché art market can also be seen as a commentary and a veiled critique of the workings of the international book market. Within the Indian handicraft market, it does not matter if portable papier-mâché objects are not representative of the intricacy of local papier-mâché practices, what matters is that they are able to sell well and to appeal to their buyers. Similarly, the concern of the publisher and the cultural practitioner is to ensure commercial viability and profitability. The focus may not necessarily be to ascertain whether exoticist discourses connected with Kashmir are being critically re-packaged and dissected in literary works; the purpose ultimately is to attract readers and to create attractive and saleable commodities. Such skilfully included, tongue-incheek remarks in the text establish the fact that Waheed is aware of his complicity in the commodification of Kashmiri material culture and is anxious to negotiate his own position, and possibly assuage his guilt, as a Kashmiri cultural broker within the international book market. The appropriation of his great-grandfather’s painting is also a way for Waheed to feel connected to his cosmopolitan predecessors and to reclaim the skills and pleasures of their craft traditions, much like the Shia Muslim protagonist of his novel, Faiz. Working with a major publishing house, Waheed is able to fashion a literary text with a faux-naqashi cover; one that closely resembles a papier-mâché handicraft by virtue of its portability, sheen, and appearance. Although he does not possess the artistic skills to make these paintings himself, he uses modern publishing to reproduce one of these paintings on the cover of his book. This is a way for him to pay homage to his Shia Muslim ancestors and to forge a connection with the legacies and histories of papier-mâché artisanship within his own family. Through the medium of the written word, Waheed can partake of the pleasures of creating and painting authentic papier-mâché art in the tradition of the old masters. Ekphrasis in the text is more than just a strategy for satiating or critiquing the appetites of the novel’s regional publics, it is also a method for the author himself to lay claim to the aesthetic pleasures connected with the art of creating papier-mâché objects and painting. They enable him to ‘create’ and finish objects and murals through his florid descriptions. Instead of passing on these skills to his next of kin, he passes them onto his readers, who also becomes connected with a lineage of Kashmiri artisans and with the cultural cosmopolitanism/Kashmiriyat that informed their lives and identities.

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 225 There are other self-referential statements in The Book of Gold Leaves as well, which draw attention to the novel’s acknowledgement of itself as an art object. Waheed’s work, for example, mentions the existence of a gold book: “Gold, gold dust, or more specifically, gold foil pasted onto leaves of a book that is called just that – the gold book – which is used to embellish his pieces just before applying the final coats of lacquer” (33). Just as the gold book provides the gold tones that are used to decorate papier-mâché artwork, the outer jacket of The Book of Gold Leaves also adds visual appeal to Waheed’s literary work in much the same way. In a conversation between Roohi and Faiz, the novel’s title is also directly mentioned as highlighted below: “What did you do with my letter? I hope you kept it safe somewhere? It’s locked in my trunk. Inside the book of gold leaves. I have the keys here. Oh no, what if it spoils your gold? It must be expensive. I will buy more from Rangrez.” (39) In this exchange, Roohi, concerned about the possibility of her sentimental love letter being discovered by a member of Faiz’s burgeoning Shia family, inquires after its whereabouts to ensure the secrecy of their romantic relationship. Faiz allays her fears by informing her that her precious letter rested in between the precious pages of “the book of gold leaves,” a ‘book’ that contained unadulterated gold dust that could be utilized in papier-mâché artworks. Waheed seems to suggest that The Book of Gold Leaves that the readers hold in their hands is the same book as discussed by the protagonists in the novel or at least a close counterpart. The fictitious book of gold becomes a metaphor for the novel itself, The Book of Gold Leaves, which is positioned as a poetic love letter in a beautiful and highly ornate gold cover. This is consistent with the self-positioning of the text as one of the papier-mâché objects manufactured in Ibteda Andrabi’s subversive papier-mâché workshop where letters are hidden inside commercial papier-mâché art. Lacquer and shining gold paint on the outside, and muted pain on the inside: a queer concoction of the suffering and pleasures of Kashmir.

Conclusion I have argued throughout this chapter that both regional and international publics are catered to in The Book of Gold Leaves. However, I have tried to show that regional publics, particularly Indian publics, remain its primary addressee. As we have observed, this work deliberately uses the portable papier-mâché object as a means of engaging its Indian readers, for whom the object has a special cultural resonance and

226  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché significance. Waheed’s novel is strategically exotic insofar as it critiques the apathy of Indian subjects towards ordinary Kashmiris and to the consumption driven cultural and economic exchange between India and Kashmir, while at the same aspiring to satisfy and indulge its regional readers as well. Waheed uses the fictional text to mobilize shame by making the readers aware of the social and political implications of their consumer choices, as well as of the conditions within which the art objects they covet and purchase are painted and produced. The beautiful papier-mâché object does not remain merely an aesthetic object but is connected to the spiritual, psychosocial, and creative life of its maker. The novel attempts, in its own distinctive way, to create space for dissent and debate within the Indian public sphere. It invites Indian citizens to engage with Kashmir and Kashmiris through the lens of its cosmopolitan history, legacies of artisanship, and its pain and not necessarily through the myopic lens of high politics, the daily conflagrations at the LOC and the Indo-Pakistani claims and counterclaims that follow in their wake. Through this, the literary text cleaves space for the lyricism as well as the pain of Kashmiri voices within the Indian public sphere, while attempting to turn Indian reading publics into human rights activists and ethical agents who can be mobilized at will. Besides marketing Kashmiri craft to its national and transnational readers, the novel also reclaims the visual beauty, immediacy, and pleasures of Kashmiri papier-mâché art for the protagonist Faiz, and for the author himself. As in Chef, Kashmiri subjects are re-signified not only as victims but as seekers, and in some cases, as recipients of pleasure and happiness. Instead of being rerouted from the periphery to the centre, as Huggan claims that postcolonial cultural products often are, The Book of Gold Leaves exists in both local and global contexts (Marketing viii). In fact, Kashmiri literary works such as The Book of Gold Leaves subvert the centre/periphery binary that is used to delineate, predict, and theorize about the workings of the international book market. Waheed’s novel forces us to re-think our assumptions about the Anglophone book trade, its networks, and its implied addressees. Waheed, instead of acting as a cultural broker mediating cultural difference for a primarily Western readership at the centre, is also concerned with writing and marketing his novel to his regional readers, particularly his Indian readership. The brand of strategic exoticism used by this work is dramatically different from the one described by Huggan and Brouillette, because the primary implied reader is most likely an Indian one. A Western reader is not being interpellated as the default or the only assumed consumer of cultural products produced by Kashmiri authors such as Waheed. Cultural practitioners such as himself are firmly embedded within local and national contexts and wish to be relevant to an Indian readership, while simultaneously residing and working in the Global North and publishing and marketing their works to international English-speaking reading publics.

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 227

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228  Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché Jaberizadeh, Tahereh. “Reflects of Epicurism of Khayyam Quatrains in the West.” Life Science Journal, vol. 9, no. 4, 25 Sept. 2012. Jafa, Navina. Performing Heritage: Art of Exhibit Walks. Sage Publications, 2012. Jameel, Yusuf. “Changes in Traditional Styles of Shrines Transform Kashmir’s Architectural Landscape.” Deccan Chronicle, 5 Oct. 2015. www.deccanchro nicle.com/151005/lifestyletravel/article/changes-traditional-building-styles mosques-shrines-transform. Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS). jkccs.wordpress.com/. Jermyn, Scott. “Loaves of Bread and Jugs of Wine: Three Translation of Omar Khayyam.” Meta: Journal Des Traducteurs, no. 34.2, 1989, pp. 242–52. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. U of Minnesota P, 2009. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “(Post)Pastoral Desire: Recent Trends in Representing Kashmir.” IIAS Lecture Series, 29 Oct. 2015. Leiden U. Keenan, Thomas. “Mobilizing Shame.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, Jan. 2004, pp. 435–49. Google Scholar, doi:10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-435. Khan, Ali. “India’s Sacred Spaces Are Tapestries of Culture.” The Guardian, 9 Feb. 2012. “Khanqah Mosque.” Official Website of Jammu and Kashmir Tourism. Directorate of Tourism Jammu and Kashmir, 15 June 2016. www.jktourism.org/ religious/khanqahmosque.html. Marx, Karl. Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy. Regnery, 2009. McKeown, Kieran. Marxist Political Economy and Marxist Urban Sociology: A Review and Elaboration of Recent Developments. Palgrave Macmillan, 1987. Menon, Jisha. The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition. Cambridge UP, 2013. Mir, Farooq Ahmad, and Farutal Ain. “Legal Protection of Geographical Indications in Jammu and Kashmir – A Case Study of Kashmiri Handicrafts.” Journal of International Property Rights, vol. 15, 2010, pp. 220–27. Mubaraki, Najeeb. “The Book of Gold Leaves’ – and Love and Loss.” The Economic Times, 14 Jan. 2015. www.blogs.economictimes.indiatimes.com/ Ragtime/the-bookof-gold-leaves-and-love-and-loss/. Murad, Mahvesh. “Cover Story: The Book of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed.” Dawn, 16 Nov. 2014. www.dawn.com/news/1144687. Pinault, David. Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Procter, James. Stuart Hall. Routledge, 2004. Rafiabadi, Hamid Naseem. Saints and Saviours of Islam. Sarup & Sons, 2005. Ramaswamy, Chitra. “The Book of Gold Leaves Review – Mirza Waheed Speaks up for Kashmir.” The Guardian, 1 Nov. 2014. www.theguardian.com/books/2014/ nov/01/the-book-of-goldleaves-mirza-waheed-review-novel-kashmir-conflict. Root, Deborah. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, and the Commodification of Difference. Routledge, 1996. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage, 1979. Schomer, Karine, and William Hewat McLeod. The Saints: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India. Motilal Banarsidass, 1987. Sheikh, Showkat Ahmed, and Sharad Tiwari. “Skill Development and Vocational Training in the Handicraft Sector in Jammu and Kashmir: Special Reference to

Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché 229 District Anantanag.” Annual Research Journal of Symbiosis Centre for Management Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2014, pp. 138–55. Shubhrastha. “Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves.” Newsroom Post, Jan. 2015. www.shubhrasthapoliticspostscriptum.blogspot.com/2015/01/. Smith, Sidonie. “Narratives and Rights Zlata’s Diary and the Circulation of Stories of Suffering Ethnicity.” The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time, edited by Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, Columbia UP, 2012, pp. 168–85. “Tourism Dept Organizes Zool Festival at Ashmuqam Shrine.” Greater Kashmir, 22 Apr. 2016. www.greaterkashmir.com/news/kashmir/story/215491.html. Vinayak, Ramesh. “A Sufi Monument to Kashmiriyat.” India Today, 31 May 1995. www.indiatoday.in/magazine/coverstory/story/19950531-a-sufi-monu ment-to-kashmiriyat754121-1995-05-31. Waheed, Mirza. The Book of Gold Leaves. Penguin, 2014. Waheed, Mirza. “The Torturable Class.” Guernica, 3 Feb. 2014. www.guerni camag.com/the-torturable-class/. Zutshi, Chitralekha. “Designed for Eternity: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain.” The Journal of British Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 2009, pp. 420–40.

Conclusion/Postscript

The Kashmiri writers considered in this book use life narratives in the form of memoirs and Bildungsromane to draw attention to human rights issues in Kashmir and make these issues intelligible to both local Indian and Pakistani publics as well as international English-speaking reading publics. I have shown that the Kashmiri life narratives considered in this study are examples of “human rights literature” insofar as they make and publicize human rights claims, and desire to draw sympathy and solidarity from within the ranks of their metropolitan readership. In the process, Kashmiri cultural practitioners re-imagine Kashmiri identity, participate in the process of imagining Kashmir’s political future(s) and re-conceive the formal contours of activism, resistance and protest in Kashmir. The life narratives analyzed in the preceding chapters suggest an alternative to the suffering-centred mode of advocacy that is upheld by scholars as the only way of articulating and claiming human rights. Rather than focusing exclusively on the corporeality, victimization, and physical pain of sufferers of human rights violations, the texts discussed here narrativize their pleasurable lived experiences and “happy memories” prior to the fact of violence (Hamilton 65). This “pleasurecentric model” of human rights advocacy is mirrored in social movements such as the Kashmiri Bicycle Movement, which not only seek to reclaim the right to safety and security, but also the mundane pleasures enacted and enjoyed in the public space. Instead of pushing for their bare minimum human rights, Kashmiri subjects are desirous of the restoration of their everyday pleasures, including the pleasures of creating and consuming material culture, local food, romance, and poetry. The “pleasurecentric model” of advocacy provides human rights workers at an international level with alternative and creative ways of representing human rights victims – as more than depersonalized and dehumanized bodies in pain. The narratives discussed in this books take us beyond the trope of the “body in pain” and can be considered a class of human rights stories that lament the loss of pleasure rather than only protesting against experiences of pain (Scarry, The Body 47). The language of pain has a universal appeal, but this appeal can come at the expense of the paradoxical loss of the

Conclusion/Postscript 231 humanity of the subject whose inalienable rights by virtue of being human are being advocated. At their core, human rights are about the desire to be happy and to reclaim the loss of everyday lived experience and quotidian pleasures. This point is consistently brought out in the Kashmiri life narratives discussed here, which do not just focus on the pain of losing human rights, but also attempt to imagine and articulate the state of having them. In human rights reports, for example, human rights are often discussed only in terms of human rights atrocities, infringements, and violations because these violations are pressing and urgent concerns, but in the process, the full vision of human rights as enshrined in the UDHR is lost. As per this vision, human rights are significant, not only because they protect human beings from unspeakable pain and suffering, but also because as a legal regime they aim to make the lives of human beings dignified, pleasurable, and worthwhile. In many of the life narratives that I have discussed, human rights are broached through the issue of pleasure rather than only through representations of pain and corporeal torment. Instead of only representing the usurpation of negative human rights, as most life narratives in the field of human rights do, the Kashmiri narratives discussed here also elaborate on Kashmiris’ desire for positive human rights such as the right to participate in the cultural life of a community. It must be emphasized that the absence of texts and voices from Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK) from this book does not mean that literary, cultural, and political engagements with human rights do not exist on the other side of the LOC, or that the human rights practices of the Pakistani state are more benevolent and less repressive than their Indian counterpart. The responses within the field of Anglophone fictional and non-fictional life narrative emanating from Azad Kashmir are limited and a body of literary work paralleling the work of Kashmiris from Indianadministered Kashmir is not present within Pakistan-administered Kashmir, or within the Kashmiri-Pakistani diaspora at the present moment. The purpose of this book was to examine the new poetics of resistance that emerged in Kashmir circa 2008, and which begot rich cultural, artistic, political, and literary afterlives, of which the life narratives dealt with in the chapters of this book are a constitutive part. It was my intention to capture the subversive cultural politics that were re-shaping Indianoccupied Kashmir at the time, and the emergence of scholarly texts as well as non-fictional and fictional life narratives in the aftermath of these profound transformations on the street, which lead to an unprecedented centering of Kashmiri voices, bodies, and lived experiences in the discussion on the Kashmir conflict, its fragmented past, fraught present, and hopeful futures. Rather than examine Kashmiri writing from both sides of the border, I was intent on collating literary responses to the crisis in Kashmir that were being impacted by the broader and holistic changes in resistance work in the Valley of Kashmir, while also simultaneously

232  Conclusion/Postscript participating and inflecting these changes, creating new vocabularies and emergent, ardent languages to speak about the pleasures and the pain of being Kashmiri and testifying to the potency of Kashmiri resilience. Pleasure, in the chosen texts, is also signified as a mechanism for resisting and protesting against the apparatuses of the state, which attempt, by force of law (the AFSPA), to stamp out signs of dissent, but also playfulness, pleasure, and happiness from the everyday lives of Kashmiris. In the face of nihilism and the abnegation of the basic human rights of assembly and protest, enactments of pleasure and happiness, particularly those enacted, performed, celebrated, and enjoyed in the public space for all to see, are a sign of resistance. As Gowhar Fazili has highlighted, these enactments of pleasure rejuvenate and revive the protesting body, rather than sapping it of energy and emotional resources in the way that events and protests focusing on public mourning and melancholia tend to do (“Can Happiness”). In terms of the field of ‘human rights and literature,’ this study shows how literary narratives can serve to illuminate obscure points of law, devise new mechanisms of conducting human rights advocacy, improve ubiquitous modes of storytelling in the field of human rights activism, help human rights victims in the process of making and publicizing their human rights claims, and generate sympathy for their political causes. The defining features of the pleasurecentric model of human rights advocacy can be further developed and studied in relation to different, critical and national contexts, and the interactions between human rights as a legal regime and happiness as an affective paradigm, can be fleshed out in greater detail. Kashmiri narratives posit pleasure as a central element of the human experience and as the basis for calls of solidarity that undergird human rights activism. They proclaim the power of experiences and memories of pleasure, as the grounds for creating bonds of solidarity and furthering human rights initiatives as opposed to the ability of a shared sense of “human vulnerability” and the fear of violence (Butler 42). Moments of happiness, and interrupted happiness, are posited as an important component of the common human experience, knowledge of which can potentially compel human beings to respond to human rights activism on a visceral level and demand an end to atrocities. Re-conceptualizing human subjects as constantly desiring pleasure, contentment and happiness, requires a re-articulation of the type of shared “humanism” that drives and dominates human rights work (Butler 42). This new, ­happiness-centred humanism which foregrounds the centrality of happiness, rather than corporeal vulnerability, within the universal human experience and within human rights discourse, needs to be investigated further. The current shifts in Kashmir following the revocation of Article 370 under Modi’s government and the nuanced responses to these changes within the terrain of Kashmiri literary and cultural production should be attended to in future examinations of the region.

Conclusion/Postscript 233

References Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2006. Fazili, Gowhar. “Can Happiness and Resistance Go Together?” Kafila, 6 Aug. 2013. www.kafila.online/2013/08/06/canhappiness-and-resistance-go-togethergowhar-fazili/. Hamilton, Carrie. “Happy Memories.” New Formations, vol. 63, no. 1, 2007, pp. 65–81. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1988.

Index

Page numbers in italic indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Page numbers in bold indicate a table on the corresponding page. “Aakho Shahre-Sheerazo” (song) 2 Abrahams, Jessica 117 activists 14 adkar 210 affiliation: cosmopolitan 33; cultural, with Sufi dargahs 216; Curfewed Night on 77; definition of 161; food consumption and 176, 183 – 4, 188; identity and linguistic 135; Kashmiriyat and political 34; Koshur words as linguistic totems of 133; in The Tiger Ladies 133, 135 Afghanistan 6, 158 African Americans 104, 179 agency: artistic 62; consolation and 104; criminal, in atrocities 96; of female vs. male characters 125; forsaking of pleasures and 81; pleasurecentric model and 116; sati and female 179; of subaltern citizens 178 – 9, 189; suicide and 188 Aggarwal, Neil 33 – 5 Aha ha Kalarki (Mahjur) 41 Ahmad, Wajahat 13, 75 – 6 Ahmed, Sara 14, 19 Aksai Chin 6 alam 213 Albakry, M. 131 – 2 Ali, Mirza 222 Ali, Tariq 25 Al-Jazeera (news channel) 27 all-affected principle 38 Allen, Lori 28 alterity 134, 139, 159, 166, 187 – 8

Amnesty International: human rights reports by 43, 86, 93, 118; Nobel Peace Prize awarded to 11; purpose of 214 Anderson, Benedict 7, 58 – 9 Anil’s Ghost (Ondaatje) 100 An-Naim, Abdullahi A. 8, 10 Anthony, Susan B. 117 Anthropology and The New Cosmopolitanism (Werbner) 31 Appadurai, Arjun 215 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 30 Arabian Nights (stories) 66 ara kanj 140 Argentina 111 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) 183, 186, 232 artist novel 58 – 9, 61 – 5, 195 – 6, 200 – 9 asafetida 140, 158, 189 Ashcroft, Tiffin, and Griffths, The Empire Writes Back 132 – 4, 139 Ashraf Ali, Agha 68 Asia Society 52, 80 atoot ang 169 “Attack on Human Rights, The” (Ignatieff) 130 authoritarianism 130 autobiography: coming-of-age narratives as 56 – 7; Curfewed Night as 51; friendship and storytelling 116; as human rights literature 11 – 12; as life narrative 13 – 14, 56 – 7; vs. memoir 42; readers of 199; Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature

Index  235 on 11 – 12; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as 63 azadi (freedom) 13, 54 – 5, 75, 101, 112 – 13, 178 Azadi (movement) 42, 75, 77, 100 – 1 Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK): Chef on 163, 187 – 8; cultural, ethnic, religious, and social heterogeneity in 5, 211 – 12; human rights in 188; Kausar’s suicide attempt in 187; map of 5, 6; political freedom in 5, 188; population of 4; Punjabi language in 5; texts from 231; The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir on 5; see also Line of Control (LOC) badaam 145 Bagchi, Barnita 89, 91 – 3 Bakerwal Muslims 4 Bakhtin, Michail 17 Bakshi, Shakeel 190, 201 – 2 Bandipora 98 Bangalore 170 Bangladeshi literature 36 – 7 Baramulla 98 Bashir, Shahnaz 22 Baweja, Harinder 24 bereavement 104; see also mourning Bhabha, Homi 31 Bhairava and Bhairavi (deities) 153 Bhakti (devotional) 70 Bhambra, Gurminder 32 Bhand Pather (folk performers) 210 bhands 69, 147 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 26 Bhardwaj, Vishal 52 Bhatia, Ritika 52 Bhawani (goddess) 151 – 4; see also Sharika (goddess) Bildung: definition of 41 Bildung: apprenticeship in 163; completed, finished 60, 64, 81; definition of 41; matrimony in 163; narrativization of notions of 62; political events and 125; as process 62 – 5; resistance to undergoing 184; violence complicating 81 Bildungsroman: aim of 60; American writers of colour use of 11; Buckley on plot structure of 56; Chef as 158 – 9, 162 – 3; Chinar in my Veins

as 57; classification of 62; The Collaborator as 57, 90; Curfewed Night as 43, 53, 56 – 7, 61 – 2, 64 – 5, 81; definition of 14; fiction vs. non-fiction 57; happiness in 63; human rights laws and 74; human rights literature and 11; Kashmiriyat and 68; literary tropes of 57; marginalized subjects in 74; Munnu as 57; negative and positive rights in 60 – 1; Our Moon has Bloodclots as 43, 53 – 4, 56 – 7, 61, 64 – 5, 81; pleasure in 61 – 4, 81; plot structure of 82; postcolonial 59, 60, 74; protagonist of 62 – 4; readers of 59, 63; roots of 41; “social type” of character in 58 – 9; A Tale of Two Cities as 57; themes in 62; The Tiger Ladies as 125 – 6; “transformation principle” in 78; as transnational genre 57 – 8, 60 – 1; tropes of 58; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as 60, 62 – 4; see also artist novel; coming-of-age narratives; life narratives blogs 26, 52, 170, 171, 172 Body in Pain, The (Scarry) 18 – 20, 116, 119, 230 Bollywood 40, 79 – 80, 167, 172 – 6 Bombur Yemberzal (Nadim) 132, 136 – 7 book market, English language: “agents of legitimation” in 197; authors of postcolonial literature in 197 – 9; The Book of Gold Leaves and 203, 222, 224, 226; commercial viability and profitability in 224; discussion on 36 – 9; impact of 23; readers of 36, 39, 197 – 200; reviewers of postcolonial literature for 199; as ‘transnational advocacy network’ 39, 87 Book of Gold Leaves, The (Waheed): as an artisanal object 220 – 2, 225; as an artist novel 195 – 6, 200 – 9; Bollywood films referred to in 173; bricolage in 217 – 18; Chef and 226; as coming-of-age narrative 200; commodification of Kashmir and Kashmiris in 196 – 8, 204 – 5, 215 – 16, 223 – 4; cosmopolitanism in 212; cover art for 195 – 6,

236 Index 218 – 25, 219, 221; curfew imposed in 213; ekphrasis in 204 – 6, 208, 212, 224; Falaknuma in 200, 208; female characters in 125, 200 – 1; human rights objectives of 197, 222; Kashmiriyat in 212 – 13; Kashmir’s representation in 4; Khayyam in painting in 203; Mahraaze’s recording of torture in 1 – 2, 3; melancholia in 214, 217; papier-mâché art in 195 – 6, 200 – 9, 211 – 18, 223 – 6; pleasure in narrative of 220, 226; protagonist of 200; publication of 195; readers of 44, 195, 205, 215 – 16, 225 – 6; reviews of 195 – 7, 220; setting of 1 – 2, 3, 200; shame mobilization in 226; shikara in 173 – 4; shrines in 1 – 3, 200, 208 – 16, 223; strategic exoticism in 44, 196 – 7, 205, 207, 209, 215, 217, 222, 226; time period of 3 booyne 132, 146 border thinking 31 Bose, Sumantra 4 – 6, 23 – 4, 54 – 6, 181 Bowditch, Rachel 17 Breckenridge, Carol 137 bricolage 217 – 18 Brouillette, Sarah 198 – 200, 219 – 20, 226 Brown, Ian 133 Brown, Wendy 95, 123 Buber, Martin 68 Buckley, Jerome 56, 58, 62, 64 – 5 Buddhists 5 Bud Shah 201 Burnt Shadows (Shamsie) 36 burqa 135 “Burried Evidence” (IPTK) 86 – 7, 96 – 9, 98 buta or buteh 145, 147 Butler, Judith 95, 99 – 100, 232 “Can Happiness and Resistance Go Together?” (Fazili) 29 – 30, 112, 232 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak) 179 Carlson, Eric 111 carpets 168, 202 Case of Exploding Mangoes, A (Hanif) 36 Cashmere shawl see shawls, Kashmiri caste: Chef on 181 – 2, 186; cosmopolitanism and 30, 143; food, culinary activities, and 73,

176, 191; Hindus divided by 5; India’s nationalist movement and 184 – 5; majoritarianism and 184; shrine visits and 209 – 10; subaltern citizenship based on 180; UDHR on entitlement and 15; unity-indiversity principle on 167; Why Loiter feminist movement and 113 Cavarero, Adriana 99 – 100, 116 Chak, Annapurna 158, 168 – 9 Chambers, Claire 40, 57, 67, 125 Cheah, Pheng 30 – 1 Chef (Singh): on AFSPA 183; on azadi 178; as Bildungsroman 158 – 9, 162 – 3; The Book of Gold Leaves and 226; on caste 181 – 2, 186; citizens in 44, 158; on class 159, 175, 182 – 6; Curfewed Night and 161; female characters in 182; food and culinary activities in 43 – 4, 158 – 60, 163, 175 – 8, 181 – 91; Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction awarded to 162; human rights in 43, 159, 184, 188, 190 – 1; identity in 163; Kashmiriyat in 189; marginalized subjects in 176 – 7, 186; Muslims in 176 – 8, 180 – 3, 187 – 90; pleasure in narrative of 43 – 4, 226; publication of 162; on religion 182; shrines in 209; on Siachen Glacier 163, 181, 185 – 6; subaltern citizens in 44, 158, 180 – 1, 183 – 91; vs. The Tiger Ladies 158, 162 chilis 158, 164 – 5, 188 – 9 China 6, 132, 140, 146 Chinar in my Veins (Pandita) 57 chinar trees 146 chochevaer 72 chrononormativity 90 citizens 44, 158, 160, 179 – 80, 184; see also subaltern citizens Clapham, Andrew 8, 9 class: affiliation within 161; Chef on 159, 175, 182 – 6; code-switching and 135; cosmopolitanism and 31, 143, 155; in food and culinary activities 191; Hindus divided by 5; India’s nationalist movement and 184 – 5; Kashmiriyat and 72; Lal Ded’s works and 71; majoritarianism and 184; shrine visits and 209 – 10; subaltern citizenship based on 180; Why Loiter feminist movement and 113

Index  237 Clewell, Tammy 103 – 4 code-mixing 132 code-switching 41, 70, 131 – 7, 141, 143 – 4, 155 Collaborator, The (Waheed): on activities in public space 105 – 7, 112; on AFSPA 183; as Bildungsroman 57, 90; corpora delicti in 90, 100 – 3, 107 – 10; cosmopolitanism in 90 – 1; emotional appeal of 91, 118; female characters in 125; hallucinations in 107 – 10; happiness in 106; HRW and 43, 108; human rights in 123; human rights reports and narrative of 43, 89, 100 – 1, 103, 108 – 11, 118; identity in 90 – 1, 102, 111; IPTK and 101 – 2, 108; vs. I Remember Julia 111; Kashmiriyat in 90 – 1, 103; as life narratives 101, 118; melancholia in 103 – 4, 106 – 8; pleasure in narrative of 90 – 1, 101 – 8, 110 – 11, 118 – 19; publication of 87; reviews of 87; setting of 90, 100; shrines in 209; temporality in 90 – 1, 103 – 7, 118 collard greens 72 coming-of-age narratives: The Book of Gold Leaves as 200; categorizing 56 – 7; characteristics of 62; Chef as 162; The Collaborator as 90; Curfewed Night as 54, 61 – 2; definition of 14; enfranchising marginalized subjects in 60; French 78; as human rights literature 59 – 60; literary works discussed in 68; non-fictional 56 – 7; Our Moon has Bloodclots as 54, 61; pleasure in 63, 82; The Tiger Ladies as 126; “transformation principle” in 78; as transnational genre 57 – 8; tropes of 57; Yeh Jawani as 174; see also artist novel; Bildungsroman Communist Party of India 67 Comparative Literature Studies, “Human Rights and Literary Forms” 10 Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, The 66 Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The (Shakespeare) 67 Congress party 54 consciousness 18 – 19 consolation 104 Construction Site (Sheikh) 147 – 8, 148

Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) 12, 128 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 12 Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (ICCPR) 128 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 127 – 8 Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage 127 corpora delicti 90, 95 – 7, 100 – 3, 107 – 10 cosmofeminism 137 cosmopolitanism: Bhawani and 153; binding religiously and ethnically diverse Kashmiris 72; in The Book of Gold Leaves 212; vs. border thinking 31; caste and 30, 143; class and 31, 143, 155; code-switching and 131 – 2; in The Collaborator 90 – 1; colonial origins of 137; in Curfewed Night 61, 73 – 5, 103; definition of 30, 138; entrepreneurial 132; Eurocentrism of 31; feminism and 137 – 8, 140 – 1; food and culinary activities and 73, 184; gender and 137 – 8, 141, 154 – 5; genealogy of 30 – 1; human rights and 74, 82, 123; ideas of cultural syncretism, itinerancy, mobility, and openness in 33; identity and 30, 32, 141; in language and linguistic use 33, 131 – 2, 136 – 7; life narratives and 30, 33, 37, 61, 123, 125; as literary phenomenon 67; new 31; in Nilima Sheikh’s work 147 – 50; Nooruddin Rishi and 75; in Our Moon has Bloodclots 61, 73; papier-mâché art and 212; pleasure, happiness, and 30, 33; pleasurecentric model and 91; postcolonial 31; religion and 30, 143, 155; rooted 31, 32; of shrines 75, 209 – 10; socio-cultural milieu for 32; temporality and 90; textured 33, 143 – 8, 151, 155; in The Tiger Ladies 124 – 5, 131 – 2, 134 – 46, 154 – 5; “transversal politics” and 140 – 1; universal logic of 137; vernacular 31 – 3, 138, 154; visual 33, 142 – 51, 148, 154 – 5; Western, reimagined 137; see also Kashmiriyat “Cosmopolitanisms” (Breckenridge et al.) 137 cosmopolite 30

238 Index Country Without a Post Office, The (Shahid Ali) 67, 150 – 1 Critical Kashmir Studies Collective (CKSC) 42 cultural memories 18, 26, 33 cultural relativism 129 – 30 cultural resistance 24, 26, 36 – 7 cumin seeds 158 curd 158 Curfewed Night (Peer): on affiliation 77; on AFSPA 183; as artist novel 61 – 2, 65; as Bildungsroman 43, 53, 56 – 7, 61 – 2, 64 – 5, 81; Chef and 161; as coming-of-age narratives 54, 61 – 2; cosmopolitanism in 61, 73 – 5, 103; on curfew 78 – 9; on Delhi 55; food and culinary activities in 69 – 73; on guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency in IJK 55; Haider and 52; historical context of 54; human rights advocacy and activism in 77; human rights in 61, 123; on Kashmir as “text and subtext” of life 55; Kashmiriyat in 69, 72 – 82, 103; on library at home 67 – 9, 81; as life narrative 57, 61; on marches and protests 74 – 7, 209; mise en abyme scenes in 57, 64 – 5; narrator of 55, 62; native village as a “Fragile Fairyland” 71 – 3, 78 – 9; pleasurecentric model and 93; pleasure in narrative of 73 – 4, 78 – 9; on poetry on dastarkhuwan 69 – 71; publication of 51 – 2; readers of 74; reading of, at the Asia Society 80; on resistance, resilience, and bearing witness to atrocity 82; review of 51; on school 65; Shalimar the Clown and 51; shrines in 75 – 7, 209; The Tiger Ladies and 51 curfews 78 – 9, 126 Cynics 30 daal chawal 175 Dal Lake 140, 170, 173 dal makhani 176 Dalrymple, William 51 dargah 75, 209 – 11, 216; see also individual shrines dastan goh 69 dastarkhuwan 69 – 70, 71, 78 Dawes, James 11

DAWN newspaper 195 Delhi 55, 56, 126, 165 Delhi Walla, The (blog) 52 Democracy Now! (radio/tv program) 25, 52 dervishes 2, 3, 75 “Designed for Eternity” (Zutshi) 144 – 5, 166 Devarenne, Nicole 132 dhabas 116 Dickens, Charles 57 Diogenes 30 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee 158 D’Mello, Rosalyn 147 – 9, 151 domesticity 137 domestic spaces 137 – 9 Donnelly, Jack 129 – 30 Douglas, Fiona 133 Douzinas, Costas 9 Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora? (collection) 22 Draft Declaration on The Rights of Indigenous People, The 12 Dudai, Ron 88 – 9, 94 Durga see Bhawani (goddess) Dwivedi, Rama 42 “Dying Linguistic Heritage of the Kashmiris, The” (Kachru) 4, 131 Economic Times, The (newspaper) 195 – 6 Eids festivities 72, 141 ekphrasis 204 – 6, 208, 212, 224 Empire Writes Back, The (Ashcroft et al.) 132 – 4, 139 empty signifier 34 Engel, Manfred 61 England 3, 117, 144 – 5 English language 8 – 9, 92, 132 – 3, 135 – 6, 139 English literature 3, 52, 58 – 9, 67 Entwicklungsroman and Erziehungsroman 61 escape plot 11 ethics 15 ethnicity: cosmopolitanism and 30, 138, 143; Hindus divided by 5; of Kashmircentric authors 22; shrine visits and 209 – 10; Stoics on 30 – 1; Why Loiter feminist movement and 113 “Everyone Lives in Fear” (HRW) 43, 93 – 4, 99, 118

Index  239 Faiz, Faiz Ahmad 67, 200 Fazili, Gowhar 29 – 30, 42, 53, 112, 232 felt-making 140, 143 Feminist Collective, The 114 fennel 158, 189 Fernandez, Maria 142 – 3, 146 filiation 161 Financial Times, The 195 – 6 fireen 72 Fitzgerald, Edward 203 flourishing 20 food and culinary activities: affiliation and 176, 183 – 4, 188; alterity in novels of 159; caste and 73, 176, 191; in Chef 43 – 4, 158 – 60, 163, 175 – 8, 181 – 91; class in 191; contexts for 159, 176; cosmopolitanism and 73, 184; in Curfewed Night 69 – 73; “demonization” through 187; and desire to consume, claim, and secure Kashmir 175; as a discursive entity 158; of Hindus 70 – 3, 140 – 1; hoarding during curfews 78; human rights and 43, 160; Incredible India website on 164 – 8; Jashn-e-Azadi on 190; Kashmiri vs. Indian cuisine 158; Kashmiriyat and 69 – 72; marginalized subjects in 159, 176 – 7; as metonymic representatives of Kashmir 202; in Midnight’s Children 159 – 60; in Multiple Flavours of Kashmiri Pandit Cuisine 168 – 9; of Muslims 71 – 3, 140 – 1, 176 – 8, 181 – 4, 187 – 90; Our Moon has Bloodclots on 70 – 3; political protest and resistance in 190; primal and primeval potential of 176; religion and 191; The Reluctant Fundamentalist on 160; Scarry on 110 – 11; The Tiger Ladies on 140 – 2; in Yeh Jawani hae Diwani 174 – 5; see also specific ingredients and spices food pornography 159 – 60 food writing 159 – 60 France 8 – 9, 78, 150 Francioni, Francesco 123, 128 – 9, 131 Fraser, Nancy 38 Freeman, Elizabeth 90 Freud, Sigmund 14, 103 – 4 From House to Home (collection) 22

gabbeh 139 – 40, 144 Gajarawala, Toral 57 Gandhi, Mahatma 66 Gangahar, Manisha 39 Ganguly, Meenakshi 94 Garden of Solitude (Gigoo) 23 Gates-Madsen, Nancy 96, 111 Gaza War 38 Geczy, Adam 3 Geelani, Gowhar 210 – 11 gender: cosmopolitanism and 137 – 8, 141, 154 – 5; happiness and 29; human rights and 8; Kashmiriyat and 137; pleasure and 29, 113 – 14, 116; rights and freedoms in public space and 113 – 14; sexual rights 16; shrine visits and 209 – 10; of subaltern citizens 189; violence based on, HRW on 94 Georges Bugnet Prize for Fiction 162 Ghana, Tahir 23 ghazals 7, 68, 172 Gibbs, Anna 19 Gigoo, Siddhartha 23 Gilgit-Baltistan 6 ginger 158, 189 ‘Girls at Dhabas’ feminist movement 91, 113, 116 – 18 Gitanjali (Tagore) 66 globalization 137 – 8 glossing 132 – 4, 139, 144 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 60, 62 – 4 Gojri language 4 Goldberg, Elizabeth Swanson 10, 95 Goldsmith, Oliver 41 Goldstone Mission and Report 38 goshtaba 183 – 4 Gramsci, Antonio 178 graphic novels 11 – 12, 57 gross domestic product 16 Guardian, The 195 – 6 Guernica (literary journal) 196 Guha, Ranajit 178 Gujjar Muslims 4, 100 – 1 gushtaba 176 Habib, Anjum Zamarud 23 Habibullah Nowshehri’s shrine 211 Haider (film) 52, 76 hakka noodles 175 Half-Mother, The (Bashir) 22 halwa puri 132, 136

240 Index Hamid, Mohsin 36, 160 Hamilton, Carrie 18, 230 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 52 Hanif, Mohammed 36 happiness: in Bildungsroman 63; in The Collaborator 106; as contagious 19; cosmopolitanism and 30, 33; cultural rights and 135; definition of 20; gender and 29; gross domestic product and 16; human rights and 15 – 20, 28 – 30, 44, 231 – 2; International Day of Happiness 16; in literary narratives 28 – 9, 128; loss of, in mourning and melancholia 103; as organizing principle of human rights advocacy and activism 17; Oxford Handbook of Happiness on 20; “On Postcolonial Happiness” 17 – 18; The Promise of Happiness 14; resistance through 30; The Tiger Ladies and 131, 135; UDHR on 127; UN resolutions on 15 – 17; US Declaration of Independence on 14 – 15; in victim narratives 18, 28, 230 Haq, Kaiser 36 hatab 132 havelis 168 – 9, 200 Hazratbal dargah 209, 211 Health, Empowerment, Rights and Accountability (HERA) 16 Heffernan, James 204 Henkin, Louis 207 Hindi language 66, 131, 133, 135 – 6, 139, 175; see also Sanskrit; Urdu language Hindi literature 66, 68 – 9, 71, 136; see also Sanskrit literature; Urdu literature Hinduism: Shaivite 34, 53, 70, 153; Vaishnavism 153; Vedic 33; see also individual deities Hindus: Dogra monarch in princely state of Jammu and Kashmir 5 – 6; food and culinary activities of 70 – 3, 140 – 1; in Jammu 5; in Kashmir 4; Kashmiriyat and 33 – 4, 69 – 73; in The Tiger Ladies 123 – 5, 134 – 5; see also Pandits, Kashmiri Hindustan Times, The 24, 53 Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM) militants 24, 54 – 5

hoarding 78 Hoffmann, Florian 8, 9 hokhea syun 78 – 9 homosexuality 180 Huggan, Graham: on art objects 217; on decontextualization 215; Marketing the Margins 195, 197 – 200, 215, 222, 226; “Postcolonial Exotic, The” (Huggan) 159 – 60, 196 – 8, 219; on strategic exoticism 197 – 8 humanism 31, 95, 99 – 100, 232 “Humanities in Human Rights, The” 10 human rights: academic and scholarly inquiry into 8 – 10; in Chef 43, 159, 184, 188, 190 – 1; citizens vs. ‘subaltern’ citizens access to 160, 184 – 6; in The Collaborator 123; consequentialist justification for 15, 16; cosmopolitanism and 74, 82, 123; culture, cultural participation, and 127, 129 – 31; in Curfewed Night 61, 123; curtailment of 60; as defense against power 95; definition of 8, 12; first vs. second generation 20; food, culinary activities, and 43, 160; genealogy of 74; happiness and 15 – 20, 28 – 30, 44, 231 – 2; Kashmiriyat and 73 – 8, 81, 131; as “lingua franca of global moral thought” 92; negative 20 – 3, 28, 60 – 1, 112, 231; in Our Moon has Bloodclots 54, 57, 61, 123; pleasure and 15 – 20, 28 – 30, 43 – 4, 81, 160, 232; positive 20 – 3, 28, 60 – 1, 112, 127, 231; promise of 28; as protection against pain, deprivation or suffering 95; qualities of 8; sexual 16; top-down model of global diffusion of 92 – 3; universality of 129 – 30; as “vague and unenforceable” 123; victim narrative construction and 12 human rights advocacy and activism: Amnesty International on storytelling and 11; “boomerang effect” of 87; contexts for 92 – 3; in Curfewed Night 77; definition of 14; engagement in 194; in Kashmiri literature 12 – 14, 37; in Kashmir: The Case for Freedom 25; laws, policies, and 12, 14; life narratives

Index  241 in 4, 8, 12 – 13, 18, 28 – 9; literary narratives and 232; organizing principle of 17; for sexuality 16; shame mobilization in 207, 214; strategic exoticism for 44; sufferingcentred approach to 19, 91, 94 – 6, 99 – 100, 111, 118, 230; see also pleasurecentric model Human Rights and Empire (Douzinas) 9 Human Rights and Narrated Lives (Schaffer and Smith) 12 – 14, 17 – 18, 59, 73 Human Rights and the Body (Mooney) 95, 99 Human Rights Committee (HRC) 128 Human Rights Inc (Slaughter) 59 – 61, 74, 177 human rights language: academic and scholarly inquiry into 9; demand for azadi and 75; of physical victimization 111; in rap songs 13; in UDHR and French Declaration 9; vernacularization of 92; in victim narratives 75; vocabularies for 59, 117 human rights laws: Bildungsroman and 74; cultural participation and 123, 127, 129 – 31; ideals of 74; life narratives and 12; literary narratives and 232; physical embodiment of 76; purpose of 95; utopian, ambiguous ideals of 123 human rights literature: academic and scholarly inquiry into 10 – 12, 17; advocacy, activism, and 12 – 14; Bildungsroman and 11; The Book of Gold Leaves as 3; coming-of-age narratives as 59 – 60; Kashmiriyat and 78; life narratives as 12, 21, 40, 59, 61, 230; metaphors of 207; negative and positive rights in 20 – 3, 28; pleasure in 17; plots used in 11, 111; purpose of 39; repertoire of stories in 17 – 19; viewed through frame of the human body 95 – 6, 102 – 3, 111, 118 – 19 human rights norms: adoption of 92; Chef and 186; The Collaborator and 110 – 11; compliance with 207; culture and 129; pleasurecentric model and 118; promotion of 14; a set of discursive 12; translation

of 92, 117; transmission of 92; vernacularization of 92 – 3, 117 human rights organizations 99 human rights reports: atrocities, infringements, and violations in 231; “body-as-witness” trope in 95 – 6, 102, 118 – 19; claims made by 88; The Collaborator’s narrative and 43, 89, 100 – 1, 103, 108 – 11, 118; formal structure of 91; goals of 87; of HRW 93 – 4, 99; of IPTK 96 – 9, 98; quantitative data in 97; rhetorical techniques used in 99; “scientific positivism” of forensic studies in 102; testimonies in 88 – 9, 94, 97, 99 – 100, 109 – 11; topics of 94 Human Rights Watch (HRW) 43, 86, 93 – 4, 99, 108, 118 Hunarmand (Sheikh) 147 Hunt, Lynn 8 – 9 Hussain (Imam), martyrdom of 213 Hussain, Delwar 209 – 10 huzun 214 ‘hyperremembering’ 103 – 5 idealist genre 11 identity: in Chef 163; codeswitching and 132, 135; in The Collaborator 90 – 1, 102, 111; collective, in “unbound seriality” 58; cosmopolitanism and 30, 32, 141; in culinary-themed novels 159; Fazili on independence and 112; in I Remember Julia 111; ‘Kashmiri’ 22, 36, 230; Kashmiri Bicycle Movement and 117; in Kashmiri literature 35, 42; Kashmiriyat as 33 – 5, 68 – 9, 131; language and 131 – 2, 135, 137; literary influences on 66 – 8, 70; loss of group, in testimonies 18; melancholia and construction of 104; militant, on social media 24; narrative vs. nonnarrative literature and 39; religious headwear and 189; social type and historical 59; in The Tiger Ladies 131; in victim narratives 42 Ignatieff, Michael 8, 92, 130 “Imaginarium of Rahul Pandita, The” 53 India: atoot ang of, Kashmir as 169; under British colonial rule

242 Index 5; Constitutional Articles 35 (A) and 370 revoked in 26 – 7, 232; Incredible India website 163 – 8, 164, 165; independence of 5; Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh provincial unit 27; Ladakh provincial unit 27; as majoritarian state 27, 184; map of 6; #MeToo movement in 42; nationalist movement in 184 – 5; princely states on the Indian subcontinent 5 – 6; Simla Agreement between Pakistan and 7; subaltern communities in 185; UN 1949 ceasefire of war with Pakistan 6; unity-in-diversity principle in 166 – 7; visa policies in 37; ‘Why Loiter’ feminist movement in 91, 113 – 18, 115; see also Indianadministered Jammu and Kashmir (IJK); Line of Control (LOC); individual states and cities Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir (IJK): AFSPA in 183; communalism in 126; elections in 54 – 5; “Everyone Lives in Fear” on 43, 93 – 4, 99, 118; “guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency” in 54; intifada-style street movements in 23, 25; IPTK report on 86 – 7, 96 – 9, 98, 101 – 2, 108; Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act and 26 – 7; land reforms in 126; map of 6; mass graves in 87, 96 – 9, 98, 101 – 2, 108; militarization in 86; population of 4; protests and militants in 24 – 5, 54 – 5; railways in 177; SHRC report on 87, 101; see also Jammu; Kashmir; Ladakh; Line of Control (LOC) “India’s Bloodstained Democracy” (Waheed) 101 “India’s Message to Kashmir” (Waheed) 78 Inglis, David 30 – 1 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 127 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 127 International Day of Happiness 16 International Labour Organization Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples 12

International Peoples’ Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian- Administered Kashmir (IPTK) 86 – 7, 96 – 9, 98, 101 – 2, 108 “Introducing Human Rights and Literary Forms” (McClennen and Slaughter) 10 I Protest (Kash) 13 Iqbal, Muhammad 67 Iran 201, 212 I Remember Julia (Carlson) 111 Irina, Dana 127, 128 – 9 isbandh 132, 135 I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight (Shahid Ali) 147 Islam 130, 154; see also Muslims; Sufi Islam Islamabad 5, 6 #IWillGoOut events 114 – 16, 115 Izsák, Rita 131 Jab Jab Phool Khile (film) 172 – 3 Jahangir (emperor) 2 Jalobhava (demon) 150 Jaloos (Renu) 66 jamawar 143, 145, 149 Jammu: food and culinary activities in 72; “guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency” in 54; Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act and 26 – 7; languages spoken in 4; map of 5, 6; militarization in 27, 86; “The Pandit Exodus” to 53, 56; purchasing property in 27; refugee camps in 56, 65; religions in 4 – 6; UN-administered plebiscite for 13; see also Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK); Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir (IJK); Jammu and Kashmir, princely state of; Jammu and Kashmir, provincial unit Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) 54 – 5, 81 Jammu and Kashmir Tourism Development Corporation (JKTDC) 170 Jammu and Kashmir, princely state of 5 – 6 Jammu and Kashmir, provincial unit 27 Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) 87 Janwar (film) 172

Index  243 Jashn-e-Azadi (Kak) 23, 190 Jhelum River 4, 105 – 8, 187 Junglee (film) 172 justice, purpose of 15 justice plot 11 Kabir, Ananya: on “happiness within postcolonial discourse” 17 – 18; on ‘Kashmircentric’ authors 22, 161; on Lalla Rookh 3; “Nipped in The Bud?” 172; “On Postcolonial Happiness” 17 – 18; on postcolonial Kashmir 3; “Postpastoral” 22, 161; “Reclaiming Kasheer through Zalgur” 117; on The Tiger Ladies 40, 124; see also Territory of Desire (Kabir) Kachru, Braj 4, 41, 70 – 1, 131 – 2 kahwa 72 Kak, Sanjay 23, 25, 86, 190 kalamdans 201 Kalhana Pandit 66 kalka 145 kamalaat 209 kangri 132 – 3 Kanjwal, Hafsa 27 Kant, Immanuel 31 Kapoor, Ranbir 174 Kapoor, Shammi 172, 173 Kapoor, Shashi 173 Karachi literary festivals 24, 52 kar-i-kalamdani 201 – 2 kar-i-munqash 201 Kash, M.C 13, 21 Kashmir: arrest of proindependence leaders in 27; The Book of Gold Leaves set in 1 – 3; communication blackout in 27; “guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency” in 54 – 5; Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act and 26 – 7; language of 4; map of 5, 6; militarization in 27, 86; patron saint of 70; purchasing property in 27; Rajatarangini on history of 66; religions in 4, 55, 86; Srinagar 1 – 4, 68 – 9, 140 – 2, 200, 211; UN-administered plebiscite for 13; see also Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK); Indianadministered Jammu and Kashmir (IJK); Jammu and Kashmir, princely state of; Jammu and

Kashmir, provincial unit; Valley of Kashmir Kashmircentric authors, defined 22 Kashmiri Bicycle Movement 91, 111 – 13, 117 – 19, 230 Kashmiri ki Kali (film) 172, 173 Kashmiri literature: “agents of legitimation” in 197; androcentrism of 125; authors of 197; classification of early 70; commercial viability of 44; communicable affect of 19; consciousness of 200; eclecticism of 23; in English 21 – 3, 36 – 41; goals of fictional 87; human rights advocacy and activism in 12 – 14, 37; identity in 35, 42; intermediality of 23; on library at home 65 – 9, 81; life narratives as 22, 41 – 4, 230 – 1; metaphors of 70; Persian literature and 70; poetics of resistance through 23 – 8; readers of 36 – 9, 41; Sanskrit literature and 70; translation of 22 – 3; tropes of 20, 70; vaks 70 – 1; Zutshi on 37; see also individual works Kashmiri Literature (Kachru) 41, 70, 71 Kashmiriyat: as an analytical concept and a lived practice 35; Bildungsroman and 68; in The Book of Gold Leaves 212 – 13; in Chef 189; class and 72; in The Collaborator 90 – 1, 103; in Curfewed Night 69, 72 – 82, 103; definition of 33; as an ‘empty signifier’ 34; food and culinary activities and 69 – 72; Gangahar on 39; home libraries and 66, 81; human rights and 73 – 8, 81, 131; human rights literature and 78; as an identity 33 – 5, 68 – 9, 131; Lal Ded and 70 – 1; in life narratives 35; Nooruddin Rishi and 70 – 1; in Our Moon has Bloodclots 68 – 74; pleasurecentric temporality and 90; political affiliation and 34; religion and 33 – 4, 69 – 73; in The Tiger Ladies 131, 134, 136 – 7, 141, 143; tradition of oral storytelling and performance of 69; in women’s personal spaces 137; Zutshi on 34 – 5; see also cosmopolitanism

244 Index Kashmir Lit (literary journal) 25, 26 Kashmir’s Contested Past (Zutshi) 35, 37, 69, 136 Kashmir’s Narratives of Conflict (Gangahar) 39 Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (Ali et al.) 25 Kashmir Walla, The (online magazine) 25, 26 Kaul, Nitasha 27, 86, 125 Kaul, Suvir 22 Keck, Margaret E. 14, 39, 87 Keenan, Thomas 207 Kennedy, Rosanne 28 – 9, 38, 88 – 9 Khan, Irene 88, 89 Khan, Sameera 113 – 14, 116 khanqah 209, 211; see also dargah “Khanqah-e-Moula” 211; see also Shah Hamdan’s shrine Khatri, Sadia 116 Khayyam, Omar 203 khechhri 132, 136 khir 132, 136, 153 Khor, Lena 93 Khuwaja Naqshband’s shrine 211 kidnapping 183 Kindle Magazine 53 Kirchner, Bharti 158 Koshur language 4, 22 – 3, 41, 131 – 7, 139 – 40, 143 – 5 Koul, Sudha 42, 43; see also Tiger Ladies, The (Koul) Kuenstlerroman 61 – 2 Kupwara 98 Kurian, Nimmi 183 Ladakh 4, 5, 6, 144 Ladakh provincial unit 27 Lahore 52, 138, 169 – 70 Lal Ded (Lalidad, Lalleshwari) 23, 53, 70 – 1, 78, 132 Lalla Rookh (Moore) 3 Languages of Belonging (Zutshi) 70 – 1 Laqueur, Thomas 96, 102 lasawa 79 lasishah 69 Last Day, The (Gigoo) 23 “Last Saffron, The” (Chambers) 40, 57, 67 Latinitas 33 leshi 213 Levitt, Peggy 92 – 3

life narratives: from AJK 231; androcentrism in 125; citizenship in 37; The Collaborator as 101, 118; as commercial products 195; cosmopolitanism and 30, 33, 37, 61, 123, 125; on cultural human rights 124, 130 – 1, 133; definition of 13; in English 21, 37, 195; in human rights advocacy and activism 4, 8, 12 – 13, 18, 28 – 9; as human rights literature 12, 21, 40, 59, 61, 230; identity in 39; as Kashmiri literature 22, 41 – 4, 230 – 1; Kashmiriyat in 35; marketing of 194; modernist canon of 14; nationalism and 28; negative and positive rights in 21, 28, 231; nonfictional 57; as “performative” 57; pleasure in 61, 194, 230 – 1; in postcold war era 59; in public sphere 37, 52; readers of 36, 73, 119, 199, 230; role of 4; Shalimar the Clown as 51; shrines in 209; tropes of, to construct the self 57; types of 12 – 14, 37, 57; see also artist novel; autobiography; Bildungsroman; coming-of-age narratives; literary narratives; memoirs; oral narratives; slave narratives; testimonies lihaaz 68, 69 Line of Control (LOC): in Chef 163; The Collaborator on 105 – 6; map of 6; SHRC on unmarked graves close to 87, 101; Siachen Glacier 163, 181, 185 – 6; Simla Agreement between Pakistan and India on 7 linguistic totem 133 lions 153 literary journals 10, 25, 26 literary narratives: academic and scholarly inquiry into 37; Anil’s Ghost as 100; communicable affect in 19; Curfewed Night on 51; as drink 160; female friendships and 116; goals of 19; happiness in 28 – 9, 128; human rights advocacy and activism and 232; human rights reports and 88; on Kashmir, written by Kashmiris 51; Our Moon has Bloodclots as 53; Persian as language of 136; pleasure in 20, 28 – 30, 35, 110 – 11, 128; sexual desire and 110; see also artist novel;

Index  245 Bildungsroman; coming-of-age narratives; life narratives Literature and the Creative Economy (Brouillette) 199 – 200 Livemint (website) 53 Lone, Irtif 25, 33 Long Dream Home, A (collection) 22 Lorca, Frederico García 67 lotus 146 Louai, El Habib 178 Lucknow 68, 126 Lust for Life (Stone) 64 Mahjur 41 majoritarianism 184 Makhdoom Sheikh Hamzah’s shrine 211 Malaysia 130 Malik, Yasin 54 Malini, Hema 173 Malmgren, Carl 62 mannat 210 Mannur, Anita 158 – 9, 187 Manto, Saadat Hasan 66, 67 marginalized subjects: in Bildungsroman 74; in Chef 176 – 7, 186; desires of 28; enfranchising of 60; in food and culinary activities 159, 176 – 7; language of 131; melancholia and 104; the mystical laws of spirituality and 76; “new corporeal humanism” and 99; in Our Moon has Bloodclots 55; pleasure of 30, 194; as subalterns 179 – 80 Marketing the Margins (Huggan) 195, 197 – 200, 215, 222, 226 Marx, Karl 68, 206 Maskiell, Michelle 144 – 5 mawal flowers 188 mazaar 209; see also dargah McClennen, Sophia 10 – 12 McCormick, Kay 132 McKean, Lise 147, 149 – 51 McKeown, Kieran 206 McLagan, Meg 39, 99 McWilliams, Ellen 62 Mehmed II (King) 142 melancholia: in African American literature 104; in The Book of Gold Leaves 201, 214, 217; in The Collaborator 90, 103 – 4, 106 – 8; in cultural memories 18; definition of

103; energy, emotional resources, and 232; and identity construction 104; marginalized subjects and 104; vs. mourning 103; strategic political and ethical import of 104; subjectivity and 104; temporalities 90, 103 – 4 memoirs 11, 14, 39 – 42, 230; see also Curfewed Night (Peer); Our Moon has Bloodclots (Pandita); Tiger Ladies, The (Koul) Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 58 – 9 Merry, Sally 92 – 3 metonymic representations: at book readings 80; of corpora delicti, in The Collaborator 110; food and culinary activities as 202; handicrafts as 155, 202; Koshur, Urdu/Hindi, and Persian words as 133 – 4; sheepskin pouches of colour pigments as 212; in The Tiger Ladies 133, 134 – 5, 155 metonymy 133, 134 – 5, 155; see also glossing #MeToo movement 42 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 40, 125, 159 – 60, 198 Mignolo, Walter 31 Ministry of Utmost Happiness, The (Roy) 22 Mirza Kamal’s shrine 211 Mishra, Pankaj 25, 80 Mistress of Spices (Divakaruni) 158 Mitra, Neetole 114 mizrab 132 modernists 14, 104 Modi, Narendra 26 Moghuls 2, 140, 146, 151 mohalla 141 Moharram mourning processions 213 – 14 Mooney, Annabelle 95, 99 Moore, Alexandra Schultheis 10 – 12, 95, 100 Moore, Thomas 3 Moretti, Franco 78 Morey, Peter 57 Mossman, Rachael 140, 143, 145 – 6 mott 2 mourning 18, 103 – 4, 213 – 14, 232 Moyn, Samuel 8 Mridha, Somjyoti 53

246 Index Mubaraki, Najeeb 195 – 6, 213 – 14 Multiple Flavours of Kashmiri Pandit Cuisine (Chak) 168 – 9 Munnu (graphic novel) 57 Muñoz, José Esteban 104 murder 183 Murphy, Ann 99 – 100 Muslims: in AJK 5; in The Book of Gold Leaves 200 – 1; in Chef 176 – 8, 180 – 4, 187 – 90; in The Collaborator 100 – 1; in Curfewed Night 71 – 3; in Jammu and Kashmir 4 – 6; Kashmiriyat and 33 – 4, 69 – 73; killed or missing in IJK 86; in The Tiger Ladies 124 – 5, 134 – 5, 140 – 1, 146 – 7, 154; urs festivities 210, 213; see also dargah; Islam Muslim United Front (MUF) 54 mustard 71 Muzaffarabad 5 naans 177, 183 Nadim, Dina Nath 41, 136 – 7 Nagas (deity) 153 nagas (natural springs) 153 nahari 176 Naipaul, V.S. 52 namdeh 139 – 40, 143 – 4 naqashi 195, 201, 209, 211 – 12, 215, 222 – 4; see also papier-mâché art Narayan, Uma 176 Nash, Kate 38 Nathdwara tradition 149 National Conference (NC) 54 nationalism 137, 166, 184 “nation branding” 164 Nava, Mica 138 navrattan paneer 176 Nayar, Pramod K. 11, 95, 180 Necipoglo 33, 142 negative human rights 20 – 3, 28, 60 – 1, 112, 231 Nehru, Jawaharlal 3, 167, 168 – 9, 177 – 8 Nepal 216 New Delhi 126 Newsroom Post, The (online newspaper) 220 Nilmata Purana (creation story) 150 “Nipped in The Bud?” (Kabir) 172 Nishat Shalimar (Moghul garden) 173 non-narrative forms 40 non-violent protest 3

Nooruddin Rishi (Sheikh) 70 – 1, 75 Nooruddin Rishi’s shrine 74 – 6, 211 “Notes on Italian History” (Gramsci) 178 Novak, Philip 104 Nussbaum, Martha 31 Office of The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) 14 Of Gardens and Graves (Kaul) 22 Of Occupation and Resistance (collection) 22 Ondaatje, Michael 100 “On Postcolonial Happiness” (Kabir) 17 – 18 oral narratives: audience for 37; in Curfewed Night 77; in I Remember Julia 111; in Kashmiriyat 69; as life writing 13; in Our Moon has Bloodclots 53, 71, 73 – 4; The Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature on 11; in The Tiger Ladies 131, 134; Zutzhi on 37, 69 Orend, Brian 15, 16 Oriel, Jennifer 16 Orientalism (Said) 203 Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (Hanif) 36 “Our Memories Come in the Way of Our Histories” (Fazili) 53 Our Moon has Bloodclots (Pandita): as artist novel 61 – 2, 65; authenticity and veracity of 53; as Bildungsroman 43, 53 – 4, 56 – 7, 61, 64 – 5, 81; cosmopolitanism in 61, 73; curfews in 78; food and culinary culture in 70 – 3; The Hindustan Times review of 53; human rights in 54, 57, 61, 123; Kashmiriyat in 68 – 74; on kitchen garden 71; on legends, stories, and tales 69 – 71; on library at ancestral home 65 – 6, 68 – 9; marginalized subject in 55; marginalized subjects in 55; mise en abyme scenes in 57, 64 – 5; narrator of (Rahul) 55; on persecution and exile 56; pleasurecentric model and 93; pleasure in narrative of 73 – 4, 78; publication of 52; readers of 65, 74; on resistance, resilience, and bearing witness to atrocity 82; on school 65; on Srinagar 68 – 9;

Index  247 Vaishno Devi shrine in 209; as victim narrative 52, 53 Oxford Handbook of Happiness (David et al.) 20 Padukone, Deepika 174 Pahadi language 4 pain: in The Book of Gold Leaves 217 – 18; language of, universal appeal of 230 – 1; life narrative/life writing and 110 – 11; narrativization of 194; objects of consciousness and 18 – 19; profiteering from 196; protection from 95; Scarry on 18 – 20, 116, 119, 230 paisleys 145 – 6, 151 Pakistan: The Book of Gold Leaves on 216; under British colonial rule 5; food and culinary activities in 187; ‘Girls at Dhabas’ feminist movement 91, 113, 116 – 18; Haider banned in 52; human rights practices in 231; independence of 5; Indus Valley archaeological finds 153; Islamabad 5, 6; Karachi literary festivals 24, 52; “Kashmir Day” in 170; literature of 36 – 7; map of 6; Punjab 52, 169 – 70; shah rag of, Kashmir as 169; Simla Agreement between India and 7; The Tiger Ladies on 138; UN 1949 ceasefire of war with India 6; see also Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK); Line of Control (LOC); individual states and cities of Palestine 38 Pandey, Gyanendra 179 – 80 Pandita, Rahul 52, 53, 57; see also Our Moon has Bloodclots (Pandita) Pandits, Kashmiri: definition of 4, 55; ‘exodus’ of 53, 56, 86; From House to Home stories of 22; A Long Dream Home stories of 22; lotus motif on shawls for 146; a “monopoly on economic capital” and education by 124; on natural springs 153; see also Hindus; Our Moon has Bloodclots (Pandita); Tiger Ladies, The (Koul) papier-mâché art 195 – 6, 200 – 9, 211 – 18, 223 – 6 Parikh, Crystal 11, 147, 149 Park-Fuller, Linda 80, 94

Parrey, Arif Ayaz 2, 53 pars pro toto 133, 139 Parveen Kausar, Shahnaz 187 pashmina 144, 149, 166, 202 Pastries (Kirchner) 158 Patel, Vallabhbhai 168 – 9 Peer, Basharat 22, 24 – 5, 52, 55, 80 – 1, 161; see also Curfewed Night (Peer) Peer, Ghulam Ahmad 55 Peer, Wajahat 71 peppercorns 164 Performing Utopia (Bowditch and Vissicaro) 17 Perpetual Peace (Kant) 31 Persia 140, 145 – 7 Persian language 133, 135 – 6, 139, 143 – 5, 201, 209 Persian literature 68 – 71, 77 – 8, 203 Phadke, Shilpa 113 – 14 pherans 2, 132, 134, 188 photographs: in Chak’s cookbook 168 – 9; The Collaborator on manipulating the identity of the dead through 102; by Girls at Dhabas 116; in IPTK’s report 97; Kabir on desire for Kashmiri 40; by Kashmiri Bicycle Movement 112; of naqashi painting, for The Book of Gold Leaves cover 222 – 3; Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature on 11; in Shahid Ali’s family library 67; The Tiger Ladies on, of veiled Kashmiri woman 154; by Why Loiter 114 phulkas 177 Pichawai paintings 149 pir (Sufi saint) 209; see also individual saints Pisachas (deity) 153 pleasure: agency and forsaking of 81; azadi as 112; in Bildungsroman 61 – 4, 81; in The Book of Gold Leaves 220, 226; in Chef 43 – 4, 226; citizens vs. ‘subaltern’ citizens access to 44; The Collaborator’s narrative of 90 – 1, 101 – 8, 110 – 11, 118 – 19; in coming-of-age narratives 63, 82; cosmopolitanism and 30, 33; creating bonds of solidarity 232; cultural participation and 128; in Curfewed Night narrative 73 – 4, 78 – 9; democratization of 190;

248 Index food, culinary activities, and 43, 160; forms of 43; Freud’s “pleasure principle” 14; gender and 29, 113 – 14, 116; human rights and 15 – 20, 28 – 30, 43 – 4, 81, 160, 232; in human rights literature 17; in life narratives 61, 194, 230 – 1; in literary narratives 15 – 20, 28 – 30, 35, 110 – 11, 128, 232; loss of, in mourning and melancholia 103 – 4; of marginalized subjects 30, 194; as organizing principle of human rights advocacy and activism 17; in Our Moon has Bloodclots narrative 73 – 4, 78; political economy of 30; public performance of, as subversive act 30; resistance through 30; sexual 16 – 17; The Tiger Ladies on culture and 131; UDHR on 15, 16 – 17; in victim narratives 18, 28, 230 pleasurecentricism 82 pleasurecentric model: academic and scholarly inquiry into contexts of 232; agency and 116; cosmopolitanism and 91; Curfewed Night and 93; definition of 93; historical antecedents to 117; human rights norms and 118; mobility-centred 43, 91, 116 – 19, 230; Our Moon has Bloodclots and 93; vs. testimonies 113, 118; for victim narratives 93, 116, 230 pleasurecentric temporality 90 PMLA, “The Humanities in Human Rights” 10 poetry: in Bollywood films 173; The Book of Gold Leaves on Mahraaze’s use of 3; in The Collaborator 100; creating and consuming 230; on dastarkhuwan borders 69 – 71; desire for human rights in 194; ghazals 7, 68, 172; Kashmiri, translation into English 23; Kashmiri as language for 136; of Khayyam 203; of Lal Ded 23, 53, 70 – 1, 78, 132; melancholic mourning in 104; by modernists 104; in Nilima Sheikh’s work 147; in Our Moon has Bloodclots 53, 71; in poster for #IWillGoOut 115; resistance through 23; Routledge Companion to Human Rights and

Literature on 11; Shahid Ali on mother’s love of 68; shruk 3; vaks 70 political resistance 26, 104 Pollock, Sheldon 32 – 3 positive human rights 20 – 3, 28, 60 – 1, 112, 127, 231 “Postcolonial Exotic, The” (Huggan) 159 – 60, 196 – 8, 219 Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Brouillette) 198 – 9, 219 – 20 postmodernism 130 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 110 Prasad, G. J. V. 135 Premchand, Munshi 66, 67 Prisoner No. 100 (Habib) 23 private sphere 137 – 40 Promise of Happiness, The (Ahmed) 14 public sphere: activism and engagement in 23, 43; advocacy network from 39; all-affected principle for 38; The Book of Gold Leaves and 215, 223, 226; circulation of Kashmiri narrative texts within 37; Habermasian 38; journalistic 87, 161; Kashmiriyat in 74; life narratives in 37, 52; literary networks of 36; pleasurecentric model in 93; political clout in 26, 101; public opinion as a political force in 38; repression of 60; theory, assumptions of 38; vocabulary of human rights in Kashmiri 13; Westphalian frame for 38 Punjab, Lahore 52, 138, 169 – 70 Punjabi language 5, 131 qeema pav 175 Quint, The (news website) 26 quotidian universals 58 – 9 Ragnya see Bhawani (goddess) Rajatarangini (Kalhana) 66 Rajput Muslims 4 Rama and Sita (deities) 153 Ramadan 72 Ramayana 146 Ramazani, Jahan 104 Ranade, Shilpa 113 – 14 rape 113, 163, 183, 187

Index  249 Reading Autobiography (Smith and Watson) 13, 42 “Reclaiming Kasheer through Zalgur” (Kabir) 117 relativism, radical cultural 129 religion: Chef on 182; code-switching and 135; cosmopolitanism and 30, 143, 155; diversity of, in IPK 4 – 6; food, culinary activities, and 191; happiness, pleasure, and 29; human rights and 8; Kashmiriyat and 33 – 4, 69 – 73; Lal Ded’s works and 71; shrine visits and 209 – 10; UDHR on 130; unity-in-diversity principle on 166 – 7; Why Loiter feminist movement and 113 Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid) 36, 160 Renshaw, Layla 95 – 6, 102 – 3 Renu, Phanishwar Nath 66 Residue (Kaul) 125 Resistance through Rituals (Hall & Jefferson) 218 Return to Harmony 3 (Shahid Ali) 67 rice: in Bhawani’s offerings 151 – 3; Chef on rations of 181 – 2; Curfewed Night on growing of 71; in daal chawal 175; dervishes showered with boiled 75; in khechhri 136; in khir 136, 153; Our Moon has Bloodclots on 72; pudding, in Wazwan Festival poster 170, 171; vs. roti 158; in shireen 72; starch water from boiling 142; in The Tiger Ladies 136, 141 – 2 Riqelme, John 13 – 14 Rofel, Lisa 132 rogan josh 72, 132, 169, 176, 183 – 4, 187 – 90 roghan 201 Root, Brian 97 Root, Deborah 217 rooted cosmopolitanism 31, 32 roti 158 Routledge Companion to Human Rights and Literature, The (McClennen and Moore) 10 – 12 Roy, Arundhati 22, 25 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The (Fitzgerald) 203 Rushdie, Salman 40, 51 – 2, 125, 147, 159 – 60, 198 Russian literature 41, 67

Said, Edward W. 161, 203 Saivaite philosophy 70 salah 210 Salahuddin, Syed 54 salwar kameez dupatta 135 samovars 72 sang-baz 25 Sanskrit 66, 136; see also Hindi language; Urdu language Sanskrit cosmopolis 32, 33 Sanskrit literature 66, 70, 146, 150; see also Hindi literature; Urdu literature Santner, Eric 104 Saraswati (goddess) 65 sati 179 Scarry, Elaine 18 – 20, 110 – 11, 116, 119 Scattered Souls (Bashir) 22 Schaffer, Kay 12 – 14, 17 – 18, 59, 73 Schofield, Victoria 6, 13, 56 Schulz, William 214 Scottish literature 133 Seasons of Youth (Buckley) 56, 58, 62, 64 – 5 secularism 184 Sedden, Christopher 5 Sekhar, Aruna 114, 115 selective lexical fidelity 134, 139 Seventeen Tomatoes (Singh) 22 sexual rights 16 shaal 144; see also shawls, Kashmiri Shah, Fahad 42 Shah, Yusuf 54 Shahar 68 – 9; see also Srinagar Shah Hamdan’s shrine 3, 211 – 14 Shahid Ali, Agha 51, 53, 67 – 8, 147, 149 – 51, 161 Shahmiri dynasty 211 shah rag 7, 68, 169 Shaivite Hinduism 34, 53, 70, 153 Shakespeare, William 52, 58 – 9, 67 Shalimar the Clown (Rushdie) 40, 51 shame, defined 207 Shamsie, Kamila 36, 51 Sharika (goddess) 150; see also Bhawani (goddess) shawls, Kashmiri: during colonial period 3, 144 – 5, 166, 202; in cover art of Tiger Ladies 151; jamawar 143, 145, 149; motifs in 145 – 7; Multiple Flavours of Kashmiri Pandit Cuisine on

250 Index 168; Nilima Sheikh’s work and 149 – 50; in papier-mâché boxes 202; pashmina 144, 149, 166, 202; in postcolonial India 166 – 7; Territory of Desire on 167; in The Tiger Ladies 124, 140 – 1, 144 – 7, 149 Sheikh, Nilima 147 – 51, 148 She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith) 41 Shia Muslims 4, 200 – 1, 213 shikara 132, 168, 170 – 5, 171, 172 shireen 72 Shirin-Farhad folktale 69, 77 – 8 Shiva and Shakti (deities) 153 Shivaratri festival 72, 132, 141 shrines 1 – 3, 72, 74 – 7, 153, 208 – 16, 223; see also dargah; specific shrines shruk 3 Siachen Glacier 163, 181, 185 – 6 Sikander (Sultan) 211 Sikhs 5, 185, 189 Sikkink, Kathryn 14, 39, 87 “Silent and Seething” (Chambers) 125 Simla Agreement 7 Singapore 130 Singh, Hari (Dogra monarch) 5, 6 Singh, Jaspreet 22, 42, 161 – 2; see also Chef (Singh) Singh, Neha 114 Slaughter, Joseph 10 – 11, 57, 59 – 61, 74, 177 slave narratives 11, 13, 57 Smith, Sidonie 12 – 14, 17 – 18, 42, 57, 59, 73 social justice movements 43 “social type” of character 58 – 9 Son et Lumière (Shahid Ali) 150 – 1 Son et Lumière (Sheikh) 150 – 1 Spivak, Gayatri 179 – 80 Sri Lanka 100 Srinagar 1 – 4, 68 – 9, 140 – 2, 200, 211 Stand with Kashmir 27 State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), Jammu and Kashmir 87, 101 Stein, Mark 56 – 7 Stivens, Maila 137 – 8, 140 – 1 Stoics 30 – 1 Stone, Irving 64 Story of my Experiments with Truth, The (Gandhi) 66 Stranger Beside Me (short stories) 40

strategic exoticism: in The Book of Gold Leaves 44, 196 – 7, 205, 207, 209, 215, 217, 222, 226; Brouillette on 198 – 9; decontextualization and 215; definition of 197 – 8, 217; shame and 207 subaltern citizens 44, 158, 160, 178 – 81, 183 – 91 subjectivity 104 suffering subjects 28 – 9; see also testimonies; victim narratives Sufia Nomani 68 Sufi Islam 2 – 3, 33 – 4, 70, 75, 132, 209 – 10; see also dargah; individual shrines; specific saints suicide 188 Suleman, Shilo Shiv 114, 115 Sunni Muslims 4, 6, 201 Syed Ali Hamadani’s shrine see Shah Hamdan’s shrine Tagore, Rabindranath 66 Tagore, Sharmila 172, 173 Tale of Two Cities, A (Dickens) 57 Tamil language 131 tangri kebab 175 tariqah 210 Tehelka magazine 67 – 8 Territory of Desire (Kabir): on Bollywood 40, 167; on historical legacies and discourses of desire 39 – 40; on Kashmiri handicrafts 40, 167, 201 – 2; on Lalla Rookh 3; on latticework in shrines 215; on narrative and non-narrative forms 40; Nehru on Kashmir 3; on papiermâché 201 – 2, 205; on postcolonial Kashmir 3; on shawls 167, 202; on The Tiger Ladies 124 testimonies: The Collaborator’s narrative and 103, 109 – 11; coming-of-age narratives as 56 – 7; vs. forensic evidence 102 – 3; in human rights reports 88 – 9, 94, 97, 99 – 100, 109 – 11; in I Remember Julia 111; loss of group identity in 18; vs. pleasurecentric model 113, 118; trauma model for 18, 90; see also suffering subjects; victim narratives Tettenborn, Eva 104 textured cosmopolitanism 33, 143 – 8, 151, 155

Index  251 thaal 164 – 7, 170, 175, 190 Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature (Goldberg and Moore) 10, 95 throne, lotus-shaped ornamental 153 Tiger Ladies, The (Koul): on acting at university 136 – 7; on Bhawani 151 – 4; as Bildungsroman 125 – 6; on Catholic school 126, 139; vs. Chef 158, 162; codeswitching in 131 – 7, 141, 143 – 4; on college education 124, 126, 154; cosmopolitanism in 124 – 5, 131 – 2, 134 – 46, 154 – 5; cover art for 151, 152; on cultural human rights 43, 123 – 4, 130 – 1, 155; Curfewed Night and 51; on food and culinary activities 140 – 2; glossing in 132 – 4, 139, 144; Hindus in 123 – 5, 134 – 5; Kabir on 40, 124; on Kashmiri shawldealers 124, 140 – 1; Kashmiriyat in 131, 134, 136 – 7, 141, 143; Koshur language in 131 – 7, 139 – 40, 143 – 4; Muslims in 124 – 5, 134 – 5, 140 – 1, 146 – 7, 154; narrator of 123 – 5; Nilima Sheikh’s work and 147 – 9, 151; pars pro toto in 133, 139; publication of 123; selective lexical fidelity in 134; setting of 124, 149; shawls in 124, 140 – 1, 144 – 7, 149; totemic metonymy in 133, 134 – 5 tigers 151 Tolstoy, Leo 41 Tomuschat, Christian 20 Torturable, The (Waheed) 196 Torturable Class, The (Waheed) 196 torture: AFSPA and 183; in The Book of Gold Leaves 2; human rights reports on vs. The Collaborator’s narrative 108, 110; life narrative/ life writing on 19 – 20; prohibition of 88; protection from 28; testimonies of 94 totemic metonymy 133, 134 – 5 “Translating the Past” (Zutshi) 66 “transnational advocacy network” 39, 117 “transversal politics” 140 – 1 tumbakhnari 132 Tumul 153

“unbound seriality” 58 United Nations (UN) 13, 15 – 17 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 127, 129 unity-in-diversity principle 166, 167 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR): AFSPA and 183; azadi and 113; on culture and cultural participation 43, 123 – 4, 127, 130, 155; on development of personality 60; drafting of 130; on entitlement and caste 15; on “freedom of movement” 107; on “freedom of religion” 130; French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and 9; on happiness 127; importance of 9; language of 75; on marriage choice 130; on negative and positive human rights 21; on pleasure 15, 16 – 17; Preamble of 127; universal freedoms promised by 77 Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity 127, 129 universalism, radical 129 – 30 universal subject 74 UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) 75 – 6 Until my Freedom Has Come (Kak) 25 Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir, The (Snedden) 5 Upadhyaya, Prakash 184 – 5 Urdu language: in Bollywood films 172; in The Book of Gold Leaves 211; eating daal, figure of speech on 175; entrenchment of, in Kashmir 66; on Kashmiri language 131; at shrines 209 – 10; in The Tiger Ladies 133, 135 – 6, 139; translation of works from, to English 22 – 3; see also Hindi language; Sanskrit Urdu literature 7, 22 – 3, 66 – 71, 136; see also Hindi literature; Sanskrit literature urs festivities 210, 213 US Declaration of Independence 8, 14 – 15 US House Subcommittee on Asia hearing 27 Uttar Pradesh 68, 126

252 Index Vaishnavism 153 Vaishno Devi shrine 209 Vajpeyi, Ananya 52 vaks 70 – 1 Valley (Sheikh) 149, 150 Valley of Kashmir: “Aakho ShahreSheerazo” in 2; armed insurgency in 24, 75; blogging culture in 26; in Bollywood films 172 – 6; The Book of Gold Leaves on 200, 211, 213, 216; The Collaborator on 87, 100 – 1, 104 – 5, 107 – 8; cosmopolitanism in 61, 72, 75, 124 – 5, 131 – 2, 134 – 46, 154 – 5; as a culinary destination 166 – 8; Curfewed Night on 75; curfews in 27, 78, 126; food and culinary activities in 70 – 2, 140; human rights violations in 12; images of, on Incredible India website 163 – 4; internet connectivity in 27; JKLF in 54 – 5; as mandala 4, 131, 140; Moghul emperor Jahangir on 2; multilingualism in 136; myth of creation of 150; Nilima Sheikh’s work and 147 – 50, 148; Our Moon has Bloodclots on 53, 55 – 6, 65 – 6, 68 – 72; “The Pandit Exodus” from 53, 55 – 6, 86, 141; as “Pir Waer” 211; population of 55; resistance work in 24, 231; shawl as symbol of 144; storytelling in 69; symbols of 151; Territory of Desire on 39; The Tiger Ladies on 125 – 6, 131 – 2, 134 – 6, 140 – 2, 151, 154; UNMOGIP office in 75 – 6; waguv from reeds near swamps in 140 Vanderwerken, David 57 – 8 Van Gogh, Vincent 64 Vedic Hinduism 33 vegetables, pickling and preserving 78 – 9 vernacular cosmopolitanism 31 – 3, 138, 154 victim narratives: Bildungsroman and 82; “body in pain” trope for 20, 99, 118, 230; CKSC on female 42; The Collaborator’s narrative and 89 – 90, 110 – 11; construction of, human rights and 12; diffusion and vernacularization of 95; dominant Kashmiri 42; happiness and pleasure in 18, 28, 230; human

rights language in 75; identity in 42; Our Moon has Bloodclots as 52 – 3, 55, 68; pleasurecentric model for 93, 116, 230; voice in 19, 89; see also suffering subjects; testimonies Vidyalakshmi (blog) 170, 171, 172 Visceral Cosmopolitanism (Nava) 138 Vishnu (god) 150 Vissicaro, Pegge 17 visual cosmopolitanism 33, 142 – 51, 148, 154 – 5 Vivekananda (Swami) 66 Vulnerability and Security in Human Rights Literature and Visual Culture (Moore) 100 vulnerability to bodily harm and violence 95 waguv 139 – 40, 143 Waheed, Mirza: as bricoleur 218; “A Cover Story” 222 – 4; “India’s Bloodstained Democracy” 101; “India’s Message to Kashmir” 78; in Stand with Kashmir 27; The Torturable Class 196; “Where 5,000 Graves Don’t Speak” 101; see also Book of Gold Leaves, The (Waheed); Collaborator, The (Waheed) Wangu, Madhu Bazaz 150 – 3 Wani, Burham 24 Wani, Khalid 24 War and Peace (Tolstoy) 41 Warner, Michael 37 Wasafiri 36 Watson, Julia 13, 42, 57 wazaif 210 Wazan Food Festival 170, 171, 172 wazwan (banquet) 170 – 1, 177, 190 We Must Bear (Sheikh) 147 Werbner, Pnina 30 – 2, 138 Westphalian frame 38 WhatsApp 27, 114 “Where 5,000 Graves Don’t Speak” (Waheed) 101 Whitlock, Gillian 14 ‘Why Loiter’ feminist movement 91, 113 – 18, 115 Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets (Phadke et al.) 113 – 14 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe) 60, 62 – 4

Index  253 Wilson, Richard 102 women, subaltern citizenship of 180 Wong, Sau-Ling 159 writers, roles of 4 Writing Human Rights (Parikh) 11 yaksha 132 Yeh Jawani hae Diwani (film) 174 – 5 yoghurt 158, 189 Yuval-Davis, Nira 140 – 1 Zaal 3, 200 Zain Shah Sahib’s shrine 74 – 5 Zain-ud-din Wali 213 Zain-ul-Abidin 201

zaiwyul naqashi 211 – 12 zamindar 168 Zool festival 212 – 14 Zutshi, Chitralekha: “Designed for Eternity” 144 – 5, 166; on Kalhana’s Rajatarangini 66; on Kashmiri handicrafts 202; on Kashmiri literature in English 37; on Kashmiriyat 34 – 5; Kashmir’s Contested Past 35, 37, 69, 136; Languages of Belonging 70 – 1; on Nooruddin Rishi 70; on Sanskrit 136; on shawls 3, 144 – 5, 166; on storytelling 69; “Translating the Past” 66