Humans, Hanguls and “Indian Dogs” in Kashmir

Joining the human rights comics (Hong) genre popularized by Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and including Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Malik Sajad\u27s graphic novel Munnu (2015) seeks to expose human rights violations in Kashmir to an international audience. This paper will closely consider how Munnu constructs its human rights claims on behalf of Kashmiris by recourse to the non-human. Attending particularly to Sajad\u27s use of the humanoid hangul to figure the Kashmiri, and to the presence of (non-humanoid) dogs everywhere in the novel, this paper will ask: how does the non-human come to figure -- in surprisingly gendered ways -- the rights-worthiness of humans in an occupied territory? How does it reinscribe or contest the primacy of the human enshrined in human rights discourses? And how might an attention to non-human figures reconstruct studies of the occupation and claims to human rights in Kashmir

Reading Violence: Gender, Violence, and *Representation in India and Pakistan (1947--Present)

229 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008.The first half of this study focuses on the literature and historiography of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. I explore the violence between religious communities as represented in the work of Bhisham Sahni, Abdullah Hussein and Saadat Hasan Manto, as well as the phenomenon of family violence against women in the work of Urvashi Butalia and Shauna Singh Baldwin. The remainder of the study moves beyond the Partition to examine "honour killing" in novels by Salman Rushdie and Nadeem Aslam, caste violence and police brutality in the fiction of Arundhati Roy and Mahasweta Devi, and a recent protest by a group of tribal women in Manipur who publicly stripped to protest the sexual violence of the Indian military. In moving from the gendered violence of Partition to that of the postcolonial moment, I observe the persistence of communal ideologies since the Partition, as well as their rearticulation with national and state identities in India and Pakistan. I also argue that these writers' frequent representation of the gendered violence within communities effectively contradicts the besieged narratives of self-persecution at the heart of communities and foregrounds the shared patriarchal contract across warring communities.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

Cached Resistance: The "Unheard" Narratives of Militancy in Kashmir

Militants in Kashmir embody a proactive segment of political activism against India’s rule. Often very little is discussed, documented, or disclosed about the lived experiences of these active participants of Kashmiri political resistance. Local rebels are repeatedly depicted as a mendacious and erratic fringe of the Valley’s socio-political landscape, erasing their revolutionary activism, as well as the political ideology they symbolize, from public consciousness and memory. The statist narratives of the conflict, especially the portrayal of insurgents, is not only weaponized to undermine the political activism in the contested territory but to further validate state repression against dissenting voices. The chapter attempts to reconstruct Kashmiri rebels through their “silenced” histories contained within the intimate memories of their family members. Through in-depth interviews, I explore how the close kin of Kashmiri militants recall, comprehend, and rationalize their rebellious family members’ motives, values, and actions. It features memoirs of three recently active and prominent Kashmiri militants, which provide intimate acuities about their lives, beliefs, and experiences before joining the armed movement. By unveiling the personal histories of these militants from the standpoints of their families, the chapter seeks to broaden the understanding of militancy and militants in this disputed Himalayan Valley. I further intend to humanize the discourse on Kashmir’s militancy by bringing to the fore the narratives of individuals who are either diminished as obscure statistical figures or predominantly understood as “gullible pawns” of the broader geopolitical schema of the Kashmir conflict