Narratives of Mourning in the Shadow of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act: State Violence and Contested Sovereignty in Contemporary South-Asian Fiction

Abstract

This essay examines how contemporary South-Asian fiction has foregrounded the violent means by which the Indian government shores up its sovereignty over Kashmir. By considering how contemporary South-Asian fiction has attempted to address the militarization of Kashmir, the essay expands on Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s account of an anti-statist imagination in much contemporary South-Asian fiction and non-fiction. With reference to the ways in which the Government of India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the Public Safety Act provide a para-legal context for extra-judicial killings and torture, the essay considers how recent literary representations of Kashmir such as Naseer Ahmed and Saurabh Singh’s graphic novel _Kashmir Pending_ (2007), Basharat Peer’s memoir _Curfewed Night_ (2010), Mirza Waheed’s novel _The Collaborator_ (2011) and Salman Rushdie’s _Shalimar the Clown_ (2005) not only document the crossing of the Line of Control by so-called insurgents, but also raise questions about the violence of state sovereignty by mourning the lives and deaths of those who dare to challenge the Indian state’s spatial performance of sovereignty. To further clarify how such narratives work to contest the spatial performance of sovereignty, reference will also be made to the distinct, but related case of the Government of India’s use of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in the north-east, and the ways in which figures such as the Manipuri freedom fighter Irom Sharmila have challenged the Indian government’s techniques of counter-insurgency through non-violent techniques of resistance such as hunger strikes. In so doing, I suggest that postcolonial narratives of mourning offer an important counterpoint to the necropolitical logic of India’s performance of sovereignty over the contested spaces of Kashmir and Northeast India.