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. Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature Ethnic Resonances in Performance, Literature, and Identity Edited by Yiorgos Kalogeras and Cathy C. Waegner Gerardo Diego’s Creation Myth of Music Fábula de Equis y Zeda Judith Stallings-Ward Biotheory Life and Death under Capitalism Edited with an introduction by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Peter Hitchcock Mythopoeic Narrative in the Legend of Zelda Edited by Anthony G. Cirilla and Vincent E. Rone D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis John Turner The Anthropocenic Turn The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age Edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes Beards and Masculinity in American Literature Peter Ferry Kashmiri Life Narratives Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan Rakhshan Rizwan Migrant and Tourist Encounters: The Ethics of Im/mobility in 21st Century Dominican and Cuban Cultures Andrea Morris For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com 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 For Samee. 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 Collaborator 86 3 Imagining Local Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Human Rights in Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies 123 4 Palatable Fictions: Negotiating Narratives of Consumption and Subalternity in Jaspreet Singh’s Chef 158 5 Portable Pleasures and Papier-Mâché: Strategic Exoticism in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves 194 Conclusion/Postscript 230 Index 234 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 lap- ping 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 congrega- tion. 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 pub- lished 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 roam- ing the streets of Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir, with a bride- groom’s garland of Indian currency notes round his neck. He delivers spiritually-themed sermons on simplicity and minimal living from the