(Post)pastoral Desire: Recent Trends in Representing Kashmir

Lecture by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Professor of English Literature, Department of English, King’s College, London.
Introductory Remarks: Idrees Kanth (PhD fellow at LIAS, Leiden University).

Drinks afterwards.

The lecture

In this talk, Professor Kabir will present an overview of emergent writerly trends in representing the Valley of Kashmir. In a new development within the long history of how this space has been represented in discourse, many of these trends originate within self-declared Kashmiri perspectives and subjectivities (including those of diasporic Kashmiris). The novels ‘The Collaborator’ and ‘The Book of Gold Leaves’ by Mirza Waheed and ‘Residue’ by Nitasha Kaul, a new book, ‘Gardens and Graves’, combining poetry and scholarship by Suvir Koul, the graphic novel ‘Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir’ by Malik Sajad, and the screenplay for the Bollywood film ‘Haider’ by Basharat Peer, are some of the most striking instances of the interventions by these ‘Kashmircentric’ voices into popular discourse on this highly contested space. 

The battle for Kashmir has long been fought on discursive as well as political territory, as Professor Kabir argued in her monograph Territory of Desire (2009). This paper will allow her to update some of the premises and conclusions of that work by drawing on current developments in the writerly domain. 

With increasing visbility being demanded by Kashmircentric subjectivities, have the goalposts of desire changed? Do these new works allow us to see beyond the longstanding and ultimately stereotyping representation of Kashmir as the quintessential pastoral space for modern India?

The speaker  

Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London, where, apart from continuing her work on memory politics in contemporary South Asia, she directs ‘Modern Moves’, a research project on memory, movement and modernity through the lens of African heritage social dance, which is funded by an ERC Advanced Grant. 

Registration

Ms Heleen van der Minne, h.m.van.der.minne@iias.nl

Inline image from Munnu: A boy from Kashmir