STATES OF AFFECT : TRAUMA IN PARTITION/POST - PARTITION SOUTH ASIA By Rituparna Mitra A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English Doctor of Philosophy 2015 ABSTRACT STATES OF AFFECT: TRAUMA IN PARTITION/POST - PARTITION SOUTH ASIA By Rituparna Mitra The Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pak istan in 1947 was one of the crucial moments marking the break between the colonial and postcolonial era. My project is invested in exploring the Partition not merely in terms of the events of August 1947, but as an o ngoing process that continues to spli nter political, cultural, emotional and sexual life - worlds in South Asia. My dissertation seeks to map analytical pathways to locate the Partition and the attendant formations of minoritization and sectarian violence as continuing, unfolding processes that constitute postcolonial nation - building. It examines the far - reaching presence of these formations in current configurations of politics, culture and subjectivity by mobilizing the interdisciplinary scope of affect - mediated Trauma and Memory Studies and P ostcolonial Studies, in conjunction with literary analysis . My project draws on a wide range of cultural artifacts such as poetry, cantillatory performance, mourning rituals, testimo nials, archaeological ruins, short stories and novels to develop a heurist ic and affective re - organization of post - Partition South Asia. It seeks to illuminate through frameworks of memory, melancholia, trauma, affect and postcoloniality how the ongoing effects of the past shape the present , which in turn, offer s us ways to reim agine the future . This dissertation reaches out to recent work developing a vernacular framework to analyze violence, trauma and loss in South Asia. Critics of trauma theory argue that clinical approaches developed in specific Euro - American socio - cultural contexts often write over postcolonial systems of knowledge - making, mourning, and recovery. Ananya Kabir, Kumkum Sangari, and other postcolonial critics are seeking to develop a vernacularized framework to view violence, trauma and loss in S outh Asia. It is at this challenging threshold of affect - mediated postcoloniality and trauma studies that my work asks to be located. Copyright by RITUPARNA MITRA 2015 v To Ma, Baba, Onur vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my Dissertation Co - Directors Kenneth Harrow and Jyotsna Singh without whom this dissertation would not have been finished. Their sustained support, guidance, breadth of vision and intellectual integrity helpe d this project evolve through its ups and downs. The vastness of their theoretical and critical grasp pushed me continuously to ask deeper questions and strengthen my scholarship. Their vital contribution as close readers, as advisors and as intellectual e xemplars is equaled by their humaneness and compassion. I owe them many intellectual and personal debts. I would like to thank the other members of my Guidance Committee for their intellectual support Swarnavel Pillai for his incisive comments and sugges tions that honed my interdisciplinary approach and Salah Hassan for consistently pushing me to ground my theoretical moorings more firmly. I would also like to acknowledge Ann Larabee and Soma Chaudhuri for their guidance at the early stages of the project . I would like to thank the Department of English especially the Graduate Chairs Ellen Pollack, Scott Juengel, Stephen Rachman and Zarena Aslami for supporting me at crucial phases. Michigan State University has , through its many resources , provided me with valuable support at challenging junctures and I would like to acknowledge my health teams, especially, for helping me manage support services remains substantial. I h ave been fortunate to have been a part of a vibrant, compassionate, intellectually stimulating community of fellow graduate students, whose scholarship, pedagogy and focus have always motivated. I thank every one of them for their generosity, energy and co mradeship. I would like to express gratitude to my parents for their support and understanding that has grown manifold through the years and for the life skills of determination, hard work, and integrity they have nurtured in me. My extended family in Indi a, vii the US and Turkey have been an enduring source of support and strength. Finally, I would like to thank Onur, for partnership, nourishment, creativity and love; above all, for the shared joy of exploring intellectual worlds. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTI ON: Partition and Affect - Mediated Postcolonial Trauma Studies ..........................1 Accessing Partition through Affect and Trauma Studies ................................................... 12 Ongoing Partition........................................... .................................................................... 23 Accessing State Violence through Affect and Trauma Studies ......................................... 27 CHAPTER 1: Re - thinking Trauma : Love and Longi ng in Amrita Pritam....................................35 Introduction: Grief, Memor y and Belonging Post - Partition.............................................35 Partition and the emotional life of the nation - state ...................................................... ......43 .......................................................54 Deploying ishq/viraha - prem (love) as Partition lament ....................................................59 Love and loss as political effe cts .......................................................................................67 Critical mourning and viraha : Re - contextualizing the elegy in Pritam .............................72 .............. ............................................79 Listening as critical memorialization .................................................................................84 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................92 CHAPTER 2: Palimpsests of Trauma: Excavating Memories in Qur ratulain Hyder...................94 Introduction: Memorial Landscapes i n South Asia ...........................................................94 Theoretical Framing of Postcolonial Trauma, Affect and Partition Studies ...................102 Recasting Partition Studies through Affect ............................................. ........................103 Summary of Sita Betrayed ............................................................................................... 107 Trauma - infused Palimpsests: Sindh .................................................................................108 Trauma - infused Palimpsests: Sri Lanka..........................................................................118 Cinematic rendering of affect - scapes .................... ...........................................................126 Conclusion ......................................................................................... ..............................1 3 2 CHAPTER 3: Death - Making Traumas: Dislocation of Pain in Pos t - Partition Kashmir.............135 Introduction: A Sensorium of Vulnerability ....................................................................135 History, Trauma and Identity in Kashmir ................................................................... .....145 Trauma sensorium in Kashmiri short stories ...................................................................156 Trau ma sensorium in Agha Shahid Ali............................................................................170 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................194 CHAPTER 4: Post - Partition Traumas: History and Memory in Githa Hariharan .......................196 Introduction: Intercrossed Memori es ...............................................................................196 Postcolonial Trauma ........................................................................................................199 Memory and Affect in In Times of Siege ...... ...................................................................205 Affect and Witnessing in Fugitive Histories ...................................................................219 Conclusion ............................................................. ..........................................................239 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................................. ......241 1 INTRODUCTION Partition and Affect - Mediated Postcolonial Trauma Studies The Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 was one of the crucial moments marking the break between the colonial and postcolonial era. My project is invested in exploring the Partition not mere ly in terms of the events of August 1947, but as an ongoing process that continues to splinter political, cultural, emotional and sexual life - worlds in South Asia. My dissertation seeks to map analytical pathways to locate the Partition and the attendant f ormations of minoritization and sectarian violence as continuing, unfolding processes that constitute postcolonial nation - building. It examines the far - reaching presence of these formations in current configurations of politics, culture and subjectivity by mobilizing the interdisciplinary scope of affect - mediated Trauma and Memory Studies and Postcolonial Studies, in conjunction with literary analysis, to ultimately, imagine more peaceable futures for the region. My project draws on a wide range of cultural artifacts such as poetry, cantillatory performance, mourning rituals, testimonials, archaeological ruins, short stories and novels to develop a heuristic and affective re - organization of post - Partition South Asia. The creation of Pakistan as a homeland fo r South Asian Muslims involved the division of erstwhile British provinces of Bengal and Punjab along religious lines. At the same time, there were large - scale migrations and population exchanges of Hindu sharanarthis 1 from areas such as Sindh in Pakistan as well as of Muslim mohajirs 2 from the Gangetic heartlands and the Deccan to Pakistan, leaving these cultural spaces depleted. While the celebratory narratives of decolonization and nationhood marked the official historiographies of 1947, the trauma of 1 Sanskrit - der ived term for refugees or shelter - seekers. 2 Arabic - derived term with evocations of peripatetic migration from Mecca to Medina 2 Pa rtition, in particular its ethnocidal sexualized violence, was largely elided in these constructions. According to revisionist historians such as Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side of Silence (1998), Partition displaced about twelve million people; countles s homes were abandoned or destroyed; properties, families, and cultures were divided as new, often contentious national borders were drawn over older ethnic, linguistic and cultural identities. Large - scale sectarian violence accompanied these movements. Es timates of the number of dead from ethnic cleansing, malnutrition, contagious diseases, etc. vary anywhere between the contemporary British figure of 20,000 to the later estimates of 2 million (Butalia 3). Butalia concluded that a million people died and, about 75000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different form their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion 3 (ibid). A number of refugee camps were set up and the fledgling Indian and Pakistani States grapp led to come to terms with such extraordinary losses. Much of their practices, discourses and fantasies of nationhood and citizenship were indelibly marked by this struggle. Until the 1980s, the Partition received virtually no discursive or material space in official historiography or memory. It was marked by an absolute silence and its memories encrypted in both public and private realms. As pointed out by Butalia (1998), there have been no public memorials or commemorative monuments on the Partition, neit her have there been tribunals or courts of justice to provide legal/juridical restitution for the violence (361 - 362). Official Partition historiography by the nation - state has been marked, instead, by a preoccupation with bureaucratic frameworks. Ritu Meno n and Kamala Bhasin point out in Borders and Boundaries: Women In India's Partition (1998) , that there is an abundance of written material on the partition: 3 considerably. 3 va st amount of newspaper reports and pages of government information exist on the resettlement 4 . The 1990 and early 2000s saw a spurt of revisionist historiogr aphical, sociological and cultural scholarship on the Partition. Feminist historians such as Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon and historians of the Subaltern School like Gyanendra Pandey, and anthropologists like Veena Das, among others, reopened the Partition to scholarly analysis 5 . While Butalia and Menon were concerned in particular with feminist narratives and oral testimonies of violence, Pandey was realms of d ominant historiography 6 . Das was invested in examining the anthropology of pain and its language. She argued that literary language and tropes were more productive transmitters of suffering and pain than legal or sociological and empirical modes. In Critic al Events (1995), Das writes about two theories of pain: its communicability versus its incommunicability. Questioning methodologies for a more sensorial anthropology o f pain. She posits that the language of the situations of violence (184). Drawing on Wittgenstein, Das locates pain outside the individual body and by reclaiming it as an invitation to the other, locates it in the social realm (195). This 4 Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders & Boundaries : Women in India's Partition (New Brunswick, N.J. : Rutgers University Press, 1998), 3. 5 See Gyanen dra Pandey , Routine Violence (2006), Remembering Partition (2001); Veena Das Mirrors of Viol ence (1990); Critical Events ( 1995); Life and Words (2007) etc. 6 . Gyanendra Pandey (2001), reminds us that face - to face local communities have to live with disturbing memories [of the Partition] more uncertainly and continuously than nations and states. This particularly uneven mosaic of remembering and eliding that marks their memory - making (acknowledging the violence even as they seek to dismiss it) is informed crucially by not the pastness of Partition violence but its continuing presence. In the affec tive and with the horizons of the nation - state. 4 as collective trauma. In the course of illustrating her theories, Das turned also to Urdu writers of Fasaadat ke Adab 7 to illustrate her arguments. Literary language provided metaphors and everyday lives. Due to the exceptional interdisciplinary sc empirical, positivist modes were excavated to reveal testimonial voices. Silence and forgetting were unraveled to be forms of memory. In the decades since then, Partition Studies has established itself as a significant field of inquiry. The question of why current scholarship nce many, though not all of these scholars are located in western academia, charges of exoticizing Partition or flogging a dead horse are rampant. stands as relevant today as it did then. Butalia, Pandey, Das and others reveal that one of the brutalizing sectarian violence against the Sikhs in 1984 and the gradual growth a nd entrenchment of Hindutvavaadi politics. The demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992, the Mumbai riots, and the growing ghettoization and insecurity of minorities in India (and in the region), provided the grounds for a re - evaluation of the histo ry of this violence and an ethical imperative to go back to the past to understand the future. In Mourning the Nation (2009), Bhaskar Sarkar argues. It represent 7 Literature of R iots by Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi writers of the Progressive Movement that of ten represented the violence in realist, stark modes. 5 Works by Amrita Pritam, Qurratulain Hyder, Agha Shahid Ali and Githa Hariharan which my chapters examine, exhibit this proleptic awareness of a loss of future possibilities. At the same they use memorial routes to try to connect back to these very lost possibilities. Through my Sita Betrayed A Country without a Post Office (1997) In Times of Siege (2003) and Fugitive Histories (2009), my project, then, opens up a memorial terrain in South Asia where pasts, presents and futures are actively debated and recreated. The terrain. In this memorial terrain, every act of sectarian violence is haunted by the Partition; Kabristan is as - ups of sectarian violence such as the recent events in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, beginning on August 27, 2013, as in the protracted conflict around Kashmir whose roots lie in 1947 and beyond. Recent studies o f social and political as they are referred to, have been sho wn to be neither sudden, nor aberrant, but part of a sustained, systemic political terror that the nation - state practices towards its citizens and subjects 8 Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006) offers us a way of talki 8 : http://www.warscapes.com/conversations/conversation - mahmood - mamdani 6 continuation of contemporary political arrangements, and into the production of majorities and not the spectacular, written into the everyday encounters with the poli tical, or alternately where the political becomes a subject of everyday life (manifest in our behavior towards strangers, for instance) is central to my analysis of the Post - Partition trauma - everyda the Partition more urgent than ever. Hence, my project is interested in mapping the Partition not as events restricted to the violent months of 1947, but as an ongoing p rocess casting its shadow on the Hindu - Muslim/India - lives. I will use frameworks from trauma and memory studies and postcolonial studies to explore this shadow further, not in terms of causality or determinism, but in terms of a critical relationship with the past. A further reason to continue to frame the Partition within critical inquiries of memory and trauma may be understood in the context of developing theories of literary and cu ltural analysis of collective traumas like the Partition. The explorations in the decades of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s were predominantly occupied with testimonial narratives, oral histories, and empirical studies, since they developed out of the social s ciences. However, Veena Das, Gyanendra Pandey, Dipesh Chakrabarty 9 and others also privileged looking at literary texts, to parse them for the semiotic depth and imagery that legal or historical narratives could not afford. In this context, literary schola rship on the Partition received a new lease. Realist naturalist depictions of 9 See, for instance, Dipesh Chakrabarty Habitations of Modernity , 2002. 7 violence, in particular the literature produced by the Progressive Movement (Urdu, Punjabi, Hindi) which had a wide critical life in Urdu/Hindi/Bengali Studies came to form the c hief material for literary analysis by Anglophone scholars via translations 10 . In the first phase of literary and cinematic studies of the Partition, feminist historiographers such as Urvashi Butalia and Ritu Menon offered a reading of testimonial litera ture, anthropologists like Veena Das privileged literary language as a viable vehicle of others of the Progressive Movement came under the radar of Postcolonial Liter ary scholars globally and in India. Rather than official historiography of the riots and records of bureaucratic transfer and exchanges, these literary and affective representations offered archaeology of untold histories. Literary studies of the Partitio n in English and Comparative programs gradually began to draw from the developing field of Trauma and Memory Studies. Developments in trauma theory as it applied to Holocaust representations came to form a critical route through which Partition was accesse d in many of these readings. Gender, trauma and the novel became important sites of Partition inquiry 11 . Partition Scholarship drew on Freud - derived Caruthian models of literary trauma studies: in particular narrative disjunction and trauma 12 . If Veena Das h ad developed an 10 The Partitions of Memory Partition Dialogues Bhish 11 (2005) or J Unsettling Partitions: Literature, Gender and Memory (2006) that include analysis of Bapsi Cracking India Sunlight on a Broken Column . 12 Holocaust Studies in particular has brought into focus the epistemology and politics of representing violence. Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience (1996) has argued that trauma is marked by b elatedness and the search for a narrative that is never quite able to catch up with the belatedness and close the gap. Dori Laub and Soshana Felman In Testimony Crises of Witnessing in Literature,. Psychoanalysis and History (1992) while discussing the poe t Paul Celan argue about the failure of language and the impossibility of witnessing , and yet go on to affirm that in the aftermath of violence creative narrative remains one of the most important terrains where the implications of the trauma can be worked language. Shoshana Felman in conjunction with Dori Laub, a psychiatrist working with Holocaust survivors, argued 8 language. Apart from the interest in narrative, Holoca ust - derived models also cast witnessing and testimony in new light 13 . Shoshana Felman in conjunction wth Dori Laub, a psychiatrist working eliminating its own witne ss, in part on basing her conclusions on Holocaust testimonies (Felman and Laub 1992; xvii). The eventive model of trauma examined violent disruptions but Laura Brown had n Psychic Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), that the older frameworks withdrawal and other symptoms of Post - Traumatic Stress Disorde r are not only long - term belonging as they do to an extended temporality but they can also spread laterally and intergenerationally through narrative and social transmissions and witnessing. Thus, not only may trauma be transmitted intergenerationally, but also among the members of a socio - political group. A number of fiction writers many of them diasporic like Shaun Singh Baldwin and Bapsi Sidhwa, began to stage second - generation returns to Partition traumas, opening up a transgenerational and dias poric terrain for situating Partition trauma. These allowed returns to be staged across temporalities and spatialities , showing the way forward to a more nuanced development of collective traumas. iminating its own witness , based in part on basing her conclusions on Holocaust testimonies (Felman and Laub 1992; xvii). 13 See especially Priya Kumar, Limiting Secularism Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (2010). 9 Partition literary scholarship in all these phases outline d, focused mainly on the novel. The heightened focus on narrative disjuncture and trauma as semiotic excavation, while intervening into the cultural and political edict of silence, and bringing to life sexual and gender traumas, failed to address non - discu rsive or semi - discursive representations (music, dance, gesture, lyric, ritual) of cultural memories of the Partition. Moreover in focusing on the works of Progressives in translation or Anglophone novels and short stories staging transgenerational returns , works that defied easy categorization like Qurratulain Hyder or Jyotirmoyee Devi, for instance, were ignored. The eventive/exceptional model of trauma 14 and of Partition assumed by scholarship models ignored the slow insidious violence that had characteri zed much of heartlands of northern India, for instance, reveal t he devastating changes to the sociocultural fabric, even though these losses did not always follow the same cast as that of the brutalizing physical violence. But Amrita Pritam, Qurratulain Hyder and the Bengali Jyotirmoyee Devi (not included in my disser tation) are some writers (contemporary to the Partition) who offer a perspective into the Dismissed at first for reducing the political to the sentimental and roman tic, scholars have recently begun revisiting them to develop frameworks for studying the Partition afresh through the theoretical pathways of affect - mediated postcolonial and trauma studies. My project situates itself in with what I identify as a third an d new phase of Partition scholarship which builds on the foundational materials to make further inroads via Affect Studies 14 of the wounding event. This foreclosed a whole range of experiences which in many cases have lasting effects on women for example sexual obje ctification , denial of access to resources, etc. 10 cultural interpretations. I examin a Sita Betrayed extensively. I al Kashmir Valley (1997) and Koshur short stories translated and published in the 1990s that articulate Kashmiri traumas through affective and phantasmagoric frameworks. Finally, I e In Times of Siege (2003) and Fugitive Histories (2009) that in the context of the Hindutvaadi State. Thus, looking at Partit ion as a recursive process, allows me to bring contemporary as well as mid - twentieth century artistic productions under the rubric of Partition Studies, allowing an expansive temporal as well as spatial mapping of memory communities. For instance, Pritam a - Partition affect - worlds of the Indo - Islamic genre of qissas (romances), Sufi Hindavi poetry and other cross - fertilized spaces that the Partition splintered. Agha Shahid Ali returns to his vernacular affect - worlds of Kashmiri Sufism and the Ghazal traditions of Indo - Muslim South Asia to mobilize mourning and memory violent delinking from Indianness or Indicness that the self - determination movement in Kashmir embraces. Part of the historicist aspects of my cultural analysis will - fertilized life - worlds. One of the shrinking and erasure of these spaces. At the same time, I stage an intervention through Affect Studies into semi - discursive, visual, aural, sensorial aspects of creative productions that older theoretical models could not fully mobilize. 11 My work dra ws mostly from Indian scholarship on the Partition, but is also acutely aware of how India - has been produced by scholars on cross - border Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi expe riences of the Partition; my chapters draw from a few of them like Farina Mir and Ananya Kabir. I prefer to employ a South Asian framework for my dissertation as many of the examined works such as oss - border public lives . Moreover, Hyder located herself at an angle from both nations as Chapter Two shows; her residence in and relationship with Pakistan, though stridently against its military dictatorial anti - progressive regime, continued to mine worl either 15 . Agha Shahid Ali and the public lives of his poetry have a complicated relationship with e cultural and memorial realms my chapters trace. This is another key feature of Partition scholarship as many of the works in Punjabi, Urdu or Bengali (the linguistic and cultural communities, along with Koshur or Siraiki, splintered by Partitions) confou nd nation - statist point us to South Asian Anglophone terrains (albeit ca rrying the burden of colonialist origins), that along with the linguistic terrains mentioned above, contain the affective and cognitive - orderings. Excavating cultural histories of music, poetr y, narrative, aural and visual representations, thus, presents a crucial part of my project. It is in these cultural histories that the cross - pollinated South Asias of my project come alive. Due to the finite space occupied by the dissertation, I have 15 The Blind Age : Discovering a Postcolonial 12 not been able to include all the historicist material, but intend to nuance them further as I develop these chapters into other projects. Literary Studies occupies a distinctive vantage point from which it can immerse itself in interdisciplinary worlds. Studie s of Partition, I believe need to be situated in historicity and vernacularity 16 in order to fully develop frameworks for studying interest in history as a space emotional lives. As mentioned before, my project draws on a wide range of cultural artifacts such as poetry, cantillatory performance, mourning rituals, testimonials, archaeological ruins and short stories and novels, amongst others, to develop a heuristic and affective re - organization of South Asian trauma - scapes. By trauma - scapes, I refer to the post - Partition memorial terrain and the complex of affects, sensations, images, sounds, rhythm s, performatives, representations etc. that engage with negotiating and interpreting this terrain. Accessing Partition through Affect and Trauma Studies Studies of trauma, mourning and memory and melancholia have been influenced by the affective turn in t he humanities and social sciences 17 . Studies of affect are a significant entry point into understanding embodied emotion, memory and trauma. They offer us among other phenomenological world a crucial aspect of understanding embodied, externalized and collective emotions such as those associated with socio - political losses. In their Introduction to 16 Sheldon Pollock understands vernacularization and the study of local worlds as rooted in historicity. Rather than e - 1500 - 42 17 The investment in theoretical explorations of emotionality and affect in the mid - 1990s what Patricia Clough has identified 13 The Affect Theory Reader (2010), Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg present at least eight different theoretical orientations of affect in contemporary humanities. Stemming from Deleuzian and Spinozoan roots, understandings of affect have ranged further and in diffuse directions. As they put it, affect remains at its basi marks a body's belonging to a world of encounters (2). It is this responsiveness of the body, its openness and entangleme nt with the sensory world that allows us both a way to analyze the materiality of trauma and to break out of the representational paradoxes and aporias that trauma theory wrestles with. One of the key vectors identified by Seigworth and Gregg is work rtaken by feminists, queer theorists, disability activists, and subaltern peoples living under the thumb of a normativizing power that attends to the hard and fast materialities, as well as the fleeting and flowing ephemera, of the daily and the workaday, (understood in ways far more collective and "external" rather than individual and interior), where persistent, repetitious practices of power can simultaneously provide a body (or, better, collectivized bodies) with predicaments an d potentials for realizing a world that subsists within and exceeds the horizons and boundaries of the norm(7.) It thus offers a way to access more nuanced psycho - analytically and post - structurally inflected understanding of violence and the body. Another vector is identified in critical discourses of the emotions (and histories of the regimes of expressivity that are tied much more to resonant worldings and d iffusions of feeling (8). It is this trail that leads from exteriorization of emotion and the worlding of the body with its concomitant rejections of mind/body, emotion/cognition binary that is of particular import to studies of trauma. 14 Subaltern and Femi nist recuperative work since the 1990s, as we have seen, has made deep inroads into examining testimonial archives of survivors of Partition trauma. At the same time, the heuristic significance of the affective field around the Partition has gained scholar ly Language and the Politics of Emotion 18 that reproduce the social and political field that surro und and constitute them. They are cultural products reproduced in individuals in the form of embodied experience. Lutz and Abu - involvement of emotion talk with issues of sociabili ty and power - 2). Emotions can function as idioms for communicating social tensions and conflict 19 . Kabir whose interventions into Partition Studies are groundbreaking. She claims that lyrical, affective modes co - exist within narrative modes in South and West Asian cu ltural formations which might be more amenable than traditional state - sanctioned modes like statist historiography to understanding the sensorium of Partition. Her claim is not that affect or music is non - discursive. Music, rhythm or lyric have their own d iscursivity and narrative range, hence it might be more productive to situate affect and discourse not as binaries but at angles to one another. testimony an d talk being the privileged means of reparation and healing. It is a way to bring somatic and kinesthetic readings into play along with traditional textual/semiotic readings with 18 Catherine Lutz and Lila Abu - Lughod, Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),11. 19 - Lughod exa mines how emotions come to have new social meaning and a different social basis as social systems change in Egypt taking on socially disruptive and defiant roles ( Lutz and Lughod, 24 - 45). 15 their reliance on linearity and linear temporality. She does not, thus, propo se a universal model but a possible way of including cultural productions that have traditionally fallen outside the - reliance on the realist novel. Affect Theories for instance, help us open these line ar modes of expression into somatic and sensual experiences. It is via routes such as these that we return to artists such as Amrita Pritam or Qurratulain Hyder derided as sentimental and clichéd, to uncover a yet unexplored storehouse of material to take Partition Studies to the next level. Athena Athanasiou, Pothiti Hantzaroula and Kostas Yannakopoulos offer a way out of the impasse of an affect/discourse binary: they write that the the oretical engagement with emotions and affectivity in the mid - subjection, theories of the body and embodiment, poststructuralist feminist theory, conversation of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory with political theory and critical analysis, queer theorisation - social, pre - ideological and pre - discursiv e psychological and individual states, but as social and cultural practices (5). One of the most important outcomes was the challenge to conventional (western) oppositions between emotion and reason, and discourse and affect (5). For instance, modes such a s language came to be way to exploring postcolonial contexts via cultural productions and formations that would otherwise not be accessible. For instance, classical music and dance in India while following what could be termed discursive modes can also be opened up to studies of exteriorization, 16 corporealization and collectivization of affect. Music, visual art, dance, ritual, architecture etc. can be brought into analysis not merely as texts, but also through more sensorial, emplaced ways. My chapter will demonstrate how individual and collective sites of memory and mourning are produced through interactions with affect and embodied emotion via some of these sites. My work, then, is focused on understanding processes of mourning and memory in South Asia by exploring emotions as collectivized practices, gestures and representations. The editors the notions of emotion, affect and social passion (6). Affect is, of course, semantically a slippery word to pin down; the notion of affe affected by the other, but also as unconditional and response - able openness to be affected by others liter ary representation and social or cultural trauma. This affective/sensory model allows us to bypass some aporias and erasures within Trauma Studies as it has been embraced in literary and social analysis. In the following section, I explain how. The sensor ial grounding that we find in artists like Pritam, Hyder, Ali and Hariharan that my dissertation explores, is rooted deeply in everyday habitus and practice; ways of responding lity, elements of - Trauma Studies cannot proceed solely along theoretical lines developed in other life - worlds. At the same time, we must not be caught up in the Wes t/Rest binary as Michael Rothberg terms it. and social formation . It remains always a putative unity; its unity is preordained regardless of its 17 - 8). Processes of colonization, decolonization, neo - imperialism etc. have been shown to make s uch binaries theoretically and materially void. Theoretical frameworks such as deconstruction and post - structuralism (the two foundational vectors of trauma studies in the humanities) are often accused of a Euro - American bias. Yet they have been shown by R obert Young, for instance, as born also of Franco - Maghrebian encounters (Algerian war of independence) and challenging enlightenment and Eurocentric ways of thinking. Frantz Fanon drew on phenomenology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, among other sources in h is theorization of colonial violence and interpreted as a move towards excavating the authentic or the indigenous, or reviving a mythical West/Rest binary but a move towa rds expanding and multiplying frameworks to understand the Partition and the continuing communal conflicts in the region. Scholars of postcolonial trauma want to open the field up to questions of how societies other than those traditional trauma studies h as explored - grapple with their c ollective traumas. Stef Craps in Postcolonial Witnessing (2013) points out that most of these early theorists were - western cultures (12). Like Craps, a number of scholars have recently pointed out that poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, the two main theoretical fields through which studies of trauma and memory entered literary analysis (via Caruth and Felman) have roots in Eurocentricism and hence might be incomplete. Irene Visser in her article - western templates for psyche disorders related to traum with other contemporary demands for a diversification of postcolonial modes of address, such as 18 Postcolonial Theory, for and engagement with non - western (African, Indian, Korean, Chinese) self - su icular evolved out of processes of industrialization, modernization and the world wars and may need reworking in other contexts 20 . In The Harmony of Illusions not timeless [but] glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with ed and negotiated. Roger Luckhurst in his Introduction to The Trauma Question (2008) offers a mapping of genre or discipline can own trauma as a problem or can provide definitive boundaries for it (Luckhurst 4). Luckhurst provid American Psychiatric Association. In the 80s and 90s, literary analysis (textualist, deconstructionist, loc ated in the western academy) embraced studies in trauma. In this context, poststructuralist criticism was particularly oriented towards (5). Luckhurst writes t hat these approaches harness the aporia inherent in a traumatic experience, i.e. the paradox in the 20 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 25, Number 1, 2005, pp. 16 - 29. 19 event may occur as an absolute inability to know it (Caruth 102). A further Freudian paradox is provided by the strange temporality of traumatic memory: an event can be understood as traumatic after the fact, through the symptoms and flashbacks that these signs of disturbance produce (Luckhurst 5). Luckhurst concl Psychoanalyti c theories with their reliance on Freudian foundations also depended also on literary trauma studies. Stef Craps (2013), among other postcolonial trauma scholars, wants to move beyond this focus on a crisis in representation to the materialities (social and cultural) of trauma narratives and their conditions of production and reception. Ananya Kabir, as we have seen, posits the affective as a way around the representatio nal paradox and moving beyond crises of representation and narrative exposition as ways to understand trauma in South and West Asia. My dissertation also argues that affect theory adds to the theoretical complex of trauma a collective, externalized sensori Psychological models of understanding trauma have been largely focused on individual es rather than being embedded in social and material contexts. In their approach this problematic through the spatial and temporal aspects to collective memory and mourni Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (2001) 20 ocess, trauma is mediated through various forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective 21 ). Saunders and Agahie follow the development of Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Neil Smelser,and Piotr Sztompka in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004) al resources and the social networks that provide trauma scholars, in particular, want to focus on the materiality of trauma and problematic of healing and re forming via material means. Frantz Fanon, in particular, is recuperated by most postcolonial trauma critics like Craps, Scott and Aghaie and others, for his significant contribution to this politically informed trauma studies 22 . Ron Eyerman (2001), then, defines cultural trauma as a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group that has achieved some degree of cohesion (2). He agrees that the linking of the past to the present through repres entations and imagination material, Eyerman asks for interventions into forms not articulated through language but through senses, or affective responses to music, art or physical geography (8). In his subsequent extension of the theoretical foundations of cultural and collective trauma, Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering (2011), one of the contributors Nicolas Demertzis asserts that 21 See Ron Eyerman Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)(2 - 3). 22 Scott and Aghaie write that Fanon not only for re - embedded individuals within a social context and disrupted European psychology with African experience, but also for reintegrated the material meaning of trauma into a term that had largely become psychol ogized (20). 21 the fundamental elements of cultural trauma are memory, emotion and identity (146). The material and affective embedding of these social and collective configurations is t hus a site of fascinating study. My dissertation reaches out to recent work developing a vernacular material and affective framework to analyze violence, trauma and loss in South Asia. Critics of trauma theory and criticism argue that clinical approaches d eveloped in specific socio - cultural contexts often write over postcolonial systems of knowledge - making, mourning, and recovery. Ananya Kabir, Kumkum Sangari, and other postcolonial critics are seeking to develop a vernacularized framework to view violence, Aag ka Darya instance, offers a repositioning of viraha (drawn from Sufi, Bhakti and Sant representations of love, d 23 - driven analysis of the unconscious its structures and foundations cannot b e jettisoned, the language and social matrix through which the unconscious is expressed, the systems, rituals and gestures deployed, need attention (Buelens, Durrant and Eaglestone 72 - 3). It is at this challenging threshold that my work on Partition asks t o be located. In a similar vein, Ananya Kabir in her more recent work - Amnesias (2013), urges us to recuperate a vernacular vocabulary (accents, inflections, gestures that constitute embodied memory) that brings in its train histories of lo nging for specifically South Asian pasts 24 Viraha and related concepts such as ishq or moonjh mediate a longing for places and states of mind that historical and personal circumstances keep out of reach (140). This is hauntingly captured, for instance, in writer 23 Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation , ed. Kavita Panjabi (Kolkata: Orient BlackSwan, 2011), 256 - 287. 24 - Amnesia s, 140. 22 some even call treason. This treason or treachery is nothi ng but the longing for the fragrance of - Partition subjects, in particular Muslim minorities or non - heteronormative men and women, censured by the State as betrayal, often produces m emories mediated by intransigent emotions. These affective complexes not only challenge unidimensional claims of the nation - state on intimacy, affect and belonging, but also provide cognitive frameworks to explore the affective and emotional faces of polit ical formations 25 . 26 and Ananya Kabir 27 : in terms of its situatedness (Pollock 28 ) and as linguistically and culturally inflected medium in Kabir 29 as here of South Asian melancholy and loss. As evinced by my mappings (th at occlude place - specific life - worlds) and two as vernacular (and a vernacular of) affective complexes as Partition narratives where a reading of emotions and affect not as interior states but as embodiments of habitus, socio - political phenomena, offers a cognitive mapping of 25 See for e.g. Begona Aretaxa,"Maddening States", Annual Review of Anthropology 32.1 (2003): 393 - 410. 26 Sheldon Pollock understands vernacularization and the study of local worlds as rooted in historicity. Rather than - 1500 - 42. 27 n Indian Modernism predicated on a binary ((100 - 115). This should be read not an anti - secularist The attacks on Hussain through the 90s and his self - exile in 2006 speak tellingly of the increasingly clamorous mandate of the Hindu nation, eclipsing Muslim access to th ese vernaculars. 28 29 See Kabir Post - Partition Amnesias and Secret Histories of Modernism, 102. 23 - American frameworks of understanding trauma, mourning and remaking. Ongoing Partition In framing the Partition of South Asia within i ts memorial terrain and in terms of affect - the present (and stakes in the future,) that goes beyond causality or determinism. My argument is not to look at pos t - 1947 South Asia through a deterministic lens, as I hope my chapters will elucidate. Nor am I linking the events of 1947 to later sectarian violence and minoritization ramings via studies of memory, melancholia, trauma, affect and postcoloniality that elucidate ways in which the ongoing effects of the past shape the present and offer us ways to reimagine the future. This, then, is the thread that ties together the variou s theoretical lenses I bring to my analysis of the formations that are invested in the shadows cast by anterior events, in the co - existence of multiple temporalities and in a critical relationship between present and past in the interest of the future yet to come. It is this interleaving of Postcoloniality and Trauma that lies at the critical center of my interrogation; my chapters develop their overlaps and divergenc es, as they apply to literary and cultural analysis. haunting of the political, cultural, emotional, and sexual her Introduction to the seminal Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), the literary and cultural 24 as a mere repression or defense, but as a temporal delay that carries the individu al beyond the of literary aporia and the impossibility of witnessing, which is one strand in Literary Trauma Theory; the other, according to Irene Visser, is J but as therapeutic healing, one with significantly greater potential for postcolonial reconfiguration of trauma with its investment in history, location and specificity (Visser 274). Affect - mediated trauma theory, as I will argue, allows us to imagine other ways of relating trauma, in particular collective trauma, to how we live and respond to the world; it helps us locate and analyze a sensorium of trauma. My literary explorations of Partition trauma gestur e to both aporetic and therapeutic models, while also going beyond them. Affect - mediated understandings of trauma look into the exteriorization of emotion and the worlding of the body. As I will argue sustainedly through my chapters, studies of affect are a significant entry point into understanding embodied emotion, memory and trauma. To return to the latency and belatedness of trauma, however, we need to explore further its foundations in Freudian psychoanalysis. Irene Visser writes that in his early wor k on hysteria, (Studies on Hysteria, 1895), Freud engaged with the effects of trauma as painful experiences that had not yet been integrated into the personality, but having been repressed remained buried in the unconscious only to resurface later as distu rbing symptoms (273). In his early formulations, Visser goes on to analyze, Freud was preoccupied with early childhood trauma of a sexual nature, imbricated in a painful remembering , in the intrusion of the painful past into the present, belatedly. Mourning, melancholia, memory and other temporally complex psychological, 25 cognitive, embodied states with external, material cognates (phenomenological, historical, social, pol itical etc.) form a cluster that studies of trauma need to engage with. The political and creative aspects of trauma and loss have been explored by much recent Loss: The Politics of Mour ning (2003) lays out a clear - voiced framework for the political, collective and creative potential of loss in modernity. Their thesis that trauma and loss are productive rather than on a Benjaminian vision of history as Janus - faced Angel, the editors lay out their intellectual vision of a field in which the past is brought to bear witness to the present as a flash of emergence, an instant of emergency, and a m oment of production. In this regard, [they sum up,] understand this aliveness of the past in terms of the political work of the postcolonial present? As multiple crit its inception the incongruity of its discursive tones and themes, in contrast with a rather blunter New Left Review postcolonial State on those on its mar division, and attests to the continuing need for a decolonizing program targeting the oppressive structures in political, social, cultural and epistemic systems and their practices. To span the field s of studies of trauma and studies of decolonizing work, then, this acknowledgement of the remainders of the past in the present is necessary. 26 Here, then, lies a heuristic and epistemic pathway to locate the Partition, minoritization and sectarian violence as ongoing, unfolding processes. The remainders and detritus of the ethnocidal violence of 1947 and its effects on psyches (individual, familial, collective), on - sets, on cultural schisms need to be explored - to understand how systems of oppression, exclusion and dehumanization continue to flourish, in order to be able to imagine a future that offers, perhaps, other ways of living and responding. The Partition of the Indi an subcontinent being one of the crucial moments marking the breach between the colonial and postcolonial era and having a far - reaching presence in current configurations of politics, culture and subjectivity, and needs to be understood further through t he interleaving of postcolonial trauma studies. Jaya Kasibhatla, for son and rights as an effect of the Partition. The colonial edifices of the postcolonial nations compound moment of Partition and this moment of emergence exerted a long - lasting influence on the isis therefore appears indistinguishable from the figure of the terrorist (13). Thus, the democratic institutions of modern India are rooted in the exigencies of the state of emergency which allows laws (of protection) to be suspended and places large bodi es of its populations under constant surveillance, discipline, and threat of destruction. I will be examining these concerns more fully in Chapters Three and Four. This threatening figure of the citizen as shored up by the postcolonial nation has far - reach ing effects in state - sponsored 27 violence as my chapters will illustrate. This brings me to an exploration of the affective faces of Accessing State Violence through Affect and Trauma Studies To discuss the social and political aspects of Partition and post - Partition traumas, it becomes essential to take into account the postcolonial State (and para - statist formations.) Here, too, affect - mediated studies of these formations have much to offer. Given that the state is experienced by those on the margins through violence, in embodied, penetrative ways (Aretxaga 396) how may the body (understood as an emotional, psychic, sexual, corporeal, affective conglomerate) be reframed, affectively, t o comment on state power? Commentators such as Taussig, Feldman, Aretxaga, and Kabir have illuminated how, in contexts of terror and spaces of death, the body and its languages, sounds, fluids and wounds may be read, not only to document the effects of ter ror and exhume the repressed, but also to understand negotiations with terror, and modes (mimetic, parodic, cryptic, confrontational, compromising etc.) of resistance and contestation to power 30 . Nation - state making in South Asia continues to be premised up on violent fantasies of what it means to inhabit and safeguard communal identities; gender and sexuality remain central to the everyday grounding and defending of these fantasies. Victims of genocidal rape and violence in Partition and post - Partition con texts continue to be reduced into real and tropic boundaries between national and religious groups. In the Indian context, the figure of the traitorous, violent, rapacious Muslim male has become the threat against which the State ceaselessly produces its elf as screen and fetish, turning its paranoid gaze upon him while eliciting, in return, a similar fear and mistrust. Partition memories, then, haunt the psychic life of 30 See Taussig (1987), Feldman (19910, Aretxaga (2003), Kabir (2009). 28 the region and form the field through which further violence - in the name of the nati on - state - is violent faces of the nation - state while exploring concurrent modalities of belonging and community (in the region and globally) that may allow for m ore peaceable political trajectories. Studies of the active involvement of the State in Partition violence are relatively recent. As Pandey reminds us (2001), the imperative to return to the Partition was born of the political exigencies of an increasingly communalized and violent India (6). Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh (2009), Vazira Zamindar (2007) and others are scholars of a new history of the Partition that helps widen our understanding of its nature as political violence. Talbot and Singh (2009), in - 1950, learing out minority (84), others like Romila Thapar, Imtiaz Ahmed, and Dipankar Gupta while writing of the 2002 Gujarat violence, draw attention to shared feature utility of riots to politicians, state complicity in the perpetration of organized acts of violence and that all th ese features were present in the cycle of violence from 1946 to 1950. Far from being jathas and Muslim tribal war parties were carefully planned, well financed and strongly armed organizations (8 6 - 87). Many ex - servicemen from the British Indian Army and the INA (Indian National Army) were in their ranks 31 (86). Often the rioters were directed by searchlights, microphones and signposts marking 31 29 ethnicity of the victims (86). There is evidence that th e lower ranks of political parties were involved as were the police of all three warring communities (86). Hence, while individual in which such violence was s machinery and agents, its affects and ideologies, haunted (and continue to haunt) Partition and post - Partition violence. How do we access the psychic lives of these political formations? The processes of posed to them being rational and abstract forms), an examination of the multiple sites in everyday life or under extraordinary conditions where these formations produce and reproduce themselves. It also involves looking at the nation, the state, and citize nship (membership in the political) as a set of ongoing practices, discourses, processes, effects and performatives (Butler 1990) that are also visceral,habitual, psychic, phantasmatic, (Navaro - Yashin 181) and thoroughly sexual (Aretxaga 2000, 2001, 2003). Clearly, this involves an interdisciplinary and trans - disciplinary approach involving political, anthropological,, psychological, affective and literary prongs; an approach which, in recent years, has made substantial inroads. Much of the prior scholarship in this area has been critiqued for its inability to cross methodological and disciplinary borders: Srirupa Roy in Beyond Belief ( 2007), for example, cautions that structural - functionalist accounts of the political remain incomplete while psychological approaches ignore political and social structures (Roy 10 - 12). Affect - mediated postcolonial framings of Trauma Theory, might, I ar gue, help bridge this gap. 30 The Partition is seen as a unique foundational wound to the nation, framed as a severing and dismemberment with no parallels. Cultural and psychoanalytical analyses of the nation posit that the uniform, homogenous fantasy of the nation - state is constituted through loss. Much of the nation - - object (a screen or power) to conceal this loss. Recent scholarship has sought to re - frame loss and trauma in ways that reveal how the y underpin political superstructures. It, further, studies how mourning and melancholia may transform into political solidarities. Much of my project remains committed to illuminating these transformations and solidarities, using literary, creative and cul tural, works as units of analysis in conjunction with this recent scholarship. As Judith Butler sums up in her Afterword Loss (2003), the understanding foundational essa working through loss (healing the self), melancholia pathologically remains tied to the lost object refusing to let it go (the self turns against itself). In recent revisions to this t might depathologize those attachments, making visible n ot only their social bases but also their unpredictable political aspects of loss that my chapters seek to mobilize. - thinking Trauma: Love and Longing in Amrita Pritam's Partition nazms composed by Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam in the immediate 31 aftermath of Partition, functioned - via their affective, imagic, auditory and performative modes as channels for represe ntations of female longing, vulnerability and grief as well as of female agency. Re - molding representations of ishq (love) inflected by Sufi and Vaishnava lineages, her widely read and performed (untitled) invocation to the Sufi poet Waris Shah (written in 1947, translated by the poet at a later unspecified date), contains resonances from pre - partition communities as well as Indo - Islamic performative and listening practices of the Punjab. These not only question the religious and nation - statist binaries in the region, but also counter the communalization and nationalization of female sexuality in the aftermath of the genocidal violence during and since partition. Through the vernacularized Indo - Islamic lyric tradition Pritam draws from, we can look afresh at connected Asian (a complex of South, Central and West) encounters offering a new and distinct access to the memorial terrains of Partition. Sita Betrayed Sit a Haran (1960, translated as Sita Betrayed by C.M. Naim in 1999) which re - creates poetic and affective histories of the sub - continent through a bricolage of vernacular literary, performative and archaeological sites. Mobilizing reinterpretations of cultura l history, memory and geography, that evoke the irresolute, uncanny and melancholic, Hyder undertakes a critique of these materials of nation - Sita Betrayed to cast spatialization, temporalization and collectivization in darker, irresolute - Partition m emorial terrain is characterized by repeated monuments from statist fixity and uncovers 3 2 observations subjacent gra ffiti, scrawls, and traces often under more manifest signs. These inscriptions, variously exuding insecurity, clandestineness, or mocking irony, as I will show, constitute an address at odds with that of the official Statist and Neo - Imperial stances. Moreo ver, in its excavation of traumatic interstitial histories of exile, the novel expands and multiplies its minorities like Sindhi refugees in India, or Mohajirs from stock characters who people Partition narratives), Sita Betrayed is radical in its constitution of a trans - South Asian and even global exilic ethos. By making the subjectivity of the virahini (woman separated from her lo ver in subcontinental literary and affective traditions) central to these entangled histories, while at the same time subverting its affective and migratory tropes, Hyder locates female vulnerability and loss within renewed frameworks. This allows Partitio In Chapter Three, - Making Traumas: Dislocation of Pain in Post - Partition - Partition imaginary in the decades of the 1990s and 2000s. Reading translations of short stories in Kashmiri, written between 1950 and 1980 and translated in the 1990s and Agha Shahid Al poetry from the collection The Country without A Post Office on the limits here, the Kashmiri Muslim. My chapter reads injury a nd grief against their grains to reveal what they say about the phantasmatic and affective faces of the violent State (Indian and Pakistani). Through this reframing of vulnerability and grief, emerges a poetics and performative of the sensory, that disrupt s the fetishization of the South Asian (here Kashmiri) Muslim as either victim or perpetrator in statist or global terror discourse. 33 Chapter Four, Post - Partition Traumas: Entanglements of History and Memory in Githa Hariharan continues to analyze the po st - Partition trauma - scape in the context of contemporary In Times of Siege (2003) and Fugitive Histories (2009) - Brahmanical histories, and the insidious flattening of public and private spaces of dissent. In In Times of Siege the cultural erasure of the traumatized minority subject, caught in the siege of the m ajoritarian mandate in 1990s India. Hariharan, furthermore, illuminates through this novel, a vision of a transhistorical grief which originates in a sense of alienation from hegemonic Statist investments. Fugitive Histories , the second novel I examine, gr apples with the crisis of witnessing and However, like many of the other writers and artists my dissertation has been exploring, locating it in the material and collective realms, opens it up to a postcolonial analysis. The develo p of a sensorium of vulnerability, albeit in different ways than in Agha Shahid Ali. , in other words, with the ethical aspects of historicizing and memorializing, make Fugitiv e Histories such a crucial intervention into the violence scarred post - Partition South Asian terrain. To sum up, what political possibilities can remembrance and mourning offer? They may create an ongoing relationship with the past that allows critical ref lection upon the present. The 34 extent, continue to scar the factiou s present. Consequently, creative and commemorative productions self - representations of collective identities, memories and traumas become crucial channels of negotiation. It is some of these self - representations from the Partition onwards that my chapters map, to reveal unfolding political possibilities in South Asia, and beyond. 35 CHAPTER 1 Re - thinking Trauma: Love and Longing in Amrita Pritam To go back to fantasy, a good deal of the literature on the state and violence shows the state not as the product of rational technologies of control but as the subject of excess that bypasses any rational functionality. What articulates this excess is fan tasy (the fantasy of statehood, the fantasy of total control, the fantasy of appropriation of the other, the fantasy of heterosexual domesticity), which appears as a major component of political life and a key factor structuring power relations. Begoña Ar etxaga 32 It can be argued that hysterics, mourners, and melancholics are all people who remember too much. Specialists in the past, they are consummate historians. Caryl Flynn 33 Introduction: Grief, Memory and Belonging Post - Partition The remnants of t - continent cling to us even today. recesses. The emotional detritus of the partition continues to shape psychic, political and social formations across the region. In the recent extension of the theoretical foundations of cultural/collective trauma , Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering (2011), Nicolas Demertzis asserts that a major traumatic event can influence the systems of reference of 32 (2003), 402. 33 The New German Cinema: Music, History, and The Matter Of Style , 55. 36 an entire society, and in the process change established, roles, rules, habitus and narratives 34 (145). The transformation of a traumatic event or a chain of events into cultural trauma is thus a fiercely contested process where memory, identity, emotion, and fantasy 35 are key players. The post - Partition memorial terrain of South Asia is thus overburdened and factious; it is haunted by the anamorphic shadow of the Hindu - Muslim binary. Fantasies of total control and appropriation o f the Other appear as a major component of political life and a key factor structuring nation - statist formations in the region. Sexuality remains integral to these fantasies - victims of genocidal rape and violence continue to be reduced into real and trop ic boundaries between national and religious groups. In the Indian context, the figure of the traitorous, violent, rapacious Muslim male has become the threat against which the State ceaselessly produces itself as screen and fetish, turning its paranoid ga ze upon him while eliciting, in return, a similar fear and mistrust 36 of that communalization and fetishization of sexuality in everyday life 37 . Partition memories, then, haunt th e psychic life of the region and form the field through which further violence often in the name of the State - takes on intimate, sexual charges. The terrain of cultural memory, as Cary l Flinn, Michael Rothberg and others note, is multivalent and can carry the burden of several concurrent pasts. What does it mean, as Caryl 34 p. 145. 35 I use fantasy here in the sense that Jacqueline Rose in dialogue with Freud uses in States of Fant asy (1996)where is crucial to what makes group identification possible. I elucidate on this further on. 36 See Begoña Aretxaga, and fetish. 37 For news articles on Love Jihad see.http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/29/love - jihad - india - one - man - quest - prevent - it; http://www.ndtv.com/india - news/love - jihad - and - religious - conversions - in - uttar - pradesh - 659439; column http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the - myth - of - love - jihad/. 37 Flinn notes in the context of post - war Germany, to remember too much or too uncontrollably 38 ? What did it mean to remember too much in the decades immediately following Partition? During the late 1940s, 50s and 60s, in the midst of strident hostility between the newly formed nation - states, memories of pre - Partition life - worlds and modes of affini ty formed an especially contentious site. The creation of Pakistan as a homeland for subcontinental Muslims and strident articulations of Hindu nationalism in India meant the loss of interconnected histories and identities. Memories of these interconnectio ns were often censored by both India and Pakistan informed by their need to create fantasies of uniform, homogenous national communities. For classical music ignoring the historically rich cross - fertilization that had produced the music of North India 39 (Lelyveld 119). Yet, imaginaries where the communalization and nationalization of affinity were challenged remained in South Asia. One such site was the new sty le of film songs which used a "Hindi" that was in fact Urdu (and eroticized) and avoided the Sanskritic vocabulary one heard on post - style of music that challenged the aims of the national cultu ral policy. Kumkum Sangari demonstrates that songs in Hindi cinema in the decade of the 50s often carried darker tones than their context demanded. She reads in them the traces of emotions and affiliations that could not be contained by the censoring frame works of cinema as the vehicle of national story - telling. Their dark motifs romantic sensorium was subliminally connected to other forms of this - 38 Caryl Flinn, The New German Cinema: Music, History, and The Matter Of Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 55. 39 To make room for performers from music s chools rather than Muslim dominated gharanas (musical lineages) Patel banned singers and musicians from the courtesan culture - anyone "whose private life was a public scandal."119 Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All - India Radio Author(s): David LelyveldSource: Social Text, No. 39 (Summer, 1994), pp. 111 - 127Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466366 38 (274) i.e. of the political realities of the Partition . Sangari argues that the filmic song can thus - . Literature, similarly, challenged the nationalization of sensorial and emotive terrains. Embodi ed memories of pre - Partition life - worlds persisted - (Ato Quayson 40 ) , for instance, in mohajir 41 diwangi Khwabrau (1990) which makes him believe that instead of Karachi he is still in his beloved Lucknow. In the same novel, mangoes) mangoes while another character tries to graft them in his new Karachi orchard 42 . In South Asia, post 1947, memorial ization was particularly imperiled and emotionally fraught. The stakes involved in re - membering too much or too eccentrically were high. In this context, creative productions - self - representations of collective affinities and memories - became crucial cha nnels of negotiation and contestation. - thinking Trauma: Love and Longing in Amrita Pritam's Partition nazms /lyrics 43 composed by Punjabi poet Amrita Pritam in the immediate aftermath of Partition, which mobilize vernacular 44 genealogies of affect (such as ishq , virahaprem ) inflected by cross - fertilized Sufi, Vaishnavite and Sikh 40 - - 3). He wants a greater engagement with the off - to find a referential locus for narrativizing South African traumas. 41 A term borrowed from Arabic with evoca tions of hijrat ( the historic migration from Mecca to Madina ) to describe the refugees from North India who migrated to Pakistan. Hindu refugees were called sharanarthis . 42 See Writing Partition: Aesthetics and Ideology in Hindi and Urdu Literature , Bodh Prakash, 2009. 43 Punjabi poetry, in particular the non - elite traditions that Pritam drew upon (she cites Sufi poets such as Sheikh Farid, Shah Husain, Waris Shah, Piloo and Hasham as her literary forebearers) were embedded in oral, cantillatory performativ kalam (poetry). Hir Waris Shah was the first book I read Partitioned Lives: Narrative s of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement , ed. Anjali Gera Roy, Nandi Bhatia (New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley India, 2008), 4. 44 By vernacular, I mean local and specific cultural worlds and identities. Sheldon Pollock understands vernacularization and the st nd Polity, 1000 - - 42. 39 lineages, to locate a nationally intransig ent post - through its affective, imagic, auditory and performative modes representations of female longing, vulnerability and grief as well as of female agency. Her widely read and performed (untitled) invocati on to the Sufi poet Waris Shah (written in 1947, translated by the poet at a later unspecified date), contains resonances from pre - partition communities as well as Indo - Islamic performative and listening practices of the Punjab. These not only question the religious and nation - statist binaries in the region, but also counter the communalization and nationalization of female sexuality in the aftermath of the genocidal violence during and since partition. Post 1947, its renditions continue to perform renewed critiques of sectarian violence scarring the region. Through the vernacularized Indo - Islamic lyric tradition Pritam draws from, we can look afresh at connected Asian (a complex of South, Central and West) encounters offering a new and distinct access to th e memorial terrains of Partition . Only recently are these cross - imaginaries and praxes being explored to provide us with an enriched understanding of the narratives, gestures, habitus, and rituals through which the post - Partition me morial terrain has taken shape. I posit that creative and aesthetic expressions of these imaginaries and praxes possess the semiotic and rhythmic depth as well as a sensory dimension that allows them to ic representations go on to have what Maria Cizmic in Performing Pain cultural, national and ge neric boundaries. This reconfiguration allows the fantasies, desires and fears they publicize to be available for continual negotiation, interpretation and re - contextualization. These repertoires of representation, then, open up continuous possibilities of - scapes. 40 In the field of Partition Studies, much work has recently been done to dismantle orthodox heuristic frameworks that have taken the nation - state as their grounds. Gyanendra Pandey in Remembering Partit ion history proceeds on the assumption of a fixed subject society, nation, state, community etc., ent driven by the need to cast Partition as a new desirable political and/or constitutional arrangement an society or the broad contours of its its sundering of life - worlds - reminds us that face - to face local communities have to live with disturbing memories [of the Partition] more uncertainly and continuously than nations and states. 45 This particularly uneven mosaic of remembering and eliding that marks their memory - making (acknowledging the violen ce even as they seek to dismiss it) is informed crucially by not the pastness of Partition violence but its continuing presence. 46 communities may be found traces of such continuing presence that si ts at odds with the horizons of the nation - state. These fragmented uneven modalities and their affective histories carry the potential to enlarge our cultural and political imaginaries. This new understanding has influenced a turn towards sourcing affectiv e and vernacular sites for forms of knowledge and critical he deconstruction of [orthodox] historical narrative is a necessary step in the search 45 Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge and New York : Cambridge University Press, 2001), 177. 46 Pandey, Remembering Partition , 189. 41 for emotional and political resolutions of crises arising from the collective trauma of displacement and resettlement (34). 47 In South Asia, especially, she says, historical narrative in one guise or another statist or anti - statist has been granted the role of prime vehicle of identity - national conflicts are relegat ed to the category of fait accomplis whose conclusion is foregone depending on which narrative 32). What might an alternative to these foreclosed narratives like? Kabir suggests we delve into the affective, embodied and lyrical modalities that ubiquitously cut through South Asian cultural and historical formations to allow marginalized contours of Partition trauma to emerge. Kumkum Sangari (2011), examines the reper toires of love ( viraha ) emanating from medieval sacral and secular contexts that evolved over centuries and were reconfigured in the 1950s in cinematic and performative spaces to negotiate the pain and suffering of the Partition. 48 In a similar vein, Ananya Kabir in her more recent work - Amnesias (2013), urges us to recuperate a vernacular vocabulary (accents, inflections, gestures that constitute embodied memory) that brings in its train histories of longing for specifically South Asian past 49 Viraha and related concepts such as ishq or moonjh mediate a longing for places and states of mind that historical and personal circumstances keep out of reach (Kabir 140) . This is hauntingly captured, for instance, in writer decision to return to India after her initial exodus to born of that love that some even call treason. This treason or treachery is nothing but the longing 47 Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings 5.2 (2005): 34. 48 Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South As ia: Love, Loss and Liberation , ed. Kavita Panjabi (Kolkata: Orient BlackSwan, 2011), 256 - 287. 49 Ananya Kabir, - Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013), 23. 42 for t in post - Partition subjects, in particular minorities or non - heteronormative men and women, censured by the State as betrayal, often produces memories mediated by int ransigent emotions. These affective complexes not only challenge unidimensional claims of the nation - state on intimacy, affect and belonging, but also provide cognitive frameworks to explore the affective and emotional faces of political formations. Viewing the Partition as cultural trauma that transformed narratives, habitus, gestures, remnants and genealogies were refracted by the exigencies of newer politi cal formations they should not be read as sui generis but located in and shaped by the upheavals. While new directions in trauma studies offer many frameworks for situating loss in cultural and historical specificity, the dislocations of history, culture s and subjects brought on by trauma make such grounding open to limitations ((Buelens, Durrant and Eaglestone xii). Ignoring the effects of dislocations on history, culture and psyches would be grossly counterintuitive. Thus, interrogating historical and m emorial formations , the casting of subjects within them, and their self - representations remains central to my research project. So, while examining pre - Partition formations for the linguistic and social web they provided to narrate Partition traumas, it is worthwhile to note how the formations were inflected by the geo - political upheavals. The cross - fertilized literary and cultural genealogies examined here (the qissa , for e.g.) came to carry the burden of new dislocations which gradually led to their eclip se from northern India. 43 Partition and the emotional life of the nation - state My research is invested in mapping the affective and phantasmatic terrains of post - Partition; this includes the affective facets of the nation - state. The nation - state, its fa ntasies, memories and fears were equally shaped by the traumas of Partition. With respect to India (which remains the main focus of my exploration in this chapter), the months of communal independence and nationalist self - policies, institutions, images and fantasies of nationhood and citizenship were indelibly marked by this struggle. Srirupa Roy, in Beyon d Belief (2007) and Jaya Kasibhatla in her dissertation - ridden political field through which the traum a of the partition came to saturate the emotional and material life of the nation - state. Roy foregrounds the anxiety, limitations, and failures that marked the state at this time arguing that if nation - statist discourses and practices placed the state at t he heart of individual and national life, so that encounters with citizenship and nation hood were inevitably encounters with the munificence of the state 50 , they also illuminated the inherent limitations of such power (Srirupa Roy 21). The capital city of Delhi instead of personifying a strong, emergent nation was pock - marked and overrun by ever - of its center, its capital, then, was terrifying and demoralizing. Roy writes that for the delegates of ons (Roy 28). The view of 50 These encounters often opened up agential po ssibilities. See Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2003) for e.g. or Ritwik 44 traitorous citizen, the potential insurgent and agitator against whom she claims much of the constitutional and legal apparatus of Indian st formative influence of [partition] in the making of postcolonial constitutions is a sign of the anxiety that th e project of making the citizen is a project that unmakes sovereignty, rather than a institutions of modern India are rooted in the exigencies of the state of emergency whi ch allows laws (of protection) to be suspended and places large bodies of its populations under constant surveillance, discipline, and threat of destruction. Far from being a rational, asexual and apathetic unit, the nation - social up a framework for exploring the psychic and phantasmatic field around Partition as a South Asian trauma. Given that nation - statist fantasies were a driving force behind Partition, its violence and its consequent shaping of the region, the psychic life of the nation - state takes on significance . The readings of Roy and Kasibhatla mentioned in the previous paragraph engage with the rituals and gestures through which the State expresses itself in the post - Partition affective terrain. The post - Partition memorial terrain is marked by intercrossed ver nacular imaginaries invested in mourning, longing for and commemorating specifically South Asian pasts 51 . It is also marked unequivocally by the affective and sexual faces of the nation - state formation 52 . To theorize this terrain, then, it becomes crucial to develop an explanation of how mourning and 51 Kabir (2013) 140. 52 For the purposes of my analysis, I have presented them as two separate imaginaries; they do however overlap. 45 longing inform community - dialogue with Freud in States of Fantasy 53 (1996) where she claims that we cannot understand political identities and de stinies without letting fantasy into the frame (Rose 4). Rose, following makes group identification possible claiming it is a precondition to social reality, indee d, its psychic glue (Rose 3). Freud, of course, specifically links fantasy in its role in group identification to mourning as a predominant tie that binds (Rose 3). Eric Santner (1990) and Bhaskar Sarkar (2009) tell us that mourning and melancholia are con ditions of inhabiting modern (pathological) political formations, and thus grief and awareness of loss saturate the emotional and psychic life of the nation - states. Bhaskar Sarkar in Mourning the Nation (2009), analyzes how the post - partition Indian nation - has made mourning an imperative. The nation, he argues echoing Ernst Renan, is always born community life, even the assumption of a unified coherent national subject, revealing it to be a phantasmatic projec - state in the post - fantasy and chimeras can tell us a lot about modern statehoo ds and their controlling but fragile (Rose 10) structures. In the Indian nation - statist imaginary, the Partition is seen as a unique 53 d the intransigence of modern statehood can be illuminated by placing it in useless for the commonwealth; yet they can succeed in overcoming t he other so - called normal component and in s the analogy Freud uses in Moses and Monotheism and suggests that the modern state too can be read as a symptom, as a social construction which contains an ungraspable excess and which relies on fantasy for an authority it cannot fully justify (Aretxaga 4 ). 46 foundational wound to the nation, framed as a severing and dismemberment with no parallels. Much of the nation - cies and practices turn on it becoming a fetish - object (a screen or power) to conceal this loss (Aretxaga). How may we situate longing and mourning in formations that do not exemplify uniformity or wholeness? How may we situate longing and mourning, for i nstance, in the creative and cultural imaginaries strewn across the South Asian terrain that contest fantasies of control and appropriation? Recent scholarship has sought to re - frame mourning and melancholia into affect - states that may transform into polit ical solidarities. What political possibilities can - Partition ethos offer? Mourning may create an ongoing relationship with the past that allows critical reflection upon the present. The general u melancholia pathologically remains tied to the lost object refusing to let it go (the self turns mourning and melancholia not as disparate but as overlapping aspects of grief 54 . In recent might depathologize those attachments, making visible not only their social bases but also their creative, unpredictable, prolonged, protracted grief carried forward and onward, facilitates the recognition that past structures of oppression, exclusion, or violence (responsible for the loss) remain in prese nt day 54 - moves in waves, alternating between mania and depression, and mourning rather than being a straightforward drive towards restoration of th e ego - ideal, is also marked by destructive, aggressive and paranoid impulses that threaten the work of rebuilding the inner self (Ramazani 30) 47 social structures. Mourning and melancholia prod us to be alert since those structures carry the Judith Butler sums up in her Afterword Loss (2003), the given way to a more inclusive, nuance and aesthetic complexes, Jahan Ramazani in The Poetry of Mourning (1994), develops a framework f or understanding how mourning under late - modern political systems is mimetically represented in the dissident elegy that undergoes a radical transformation by refusing healing as an outcome. My chapter will examine similar effects in the vernacular genres Partition lyric harnessed. been, and continue to be, several partitions in the region driven by religious ideologies. The Partition and its traumas are insistently called upon and permeate and haunt all subsequent communal violence that has split the region 55 . As my Introduction has made clear, the production of minorities and majorities, of the violence written into the everyday encounters with the political, or alte rnately where the political becomes a subject of everyday life (manifest in our behavior towards strangers, for instance) is central to my analysis of the Post - Partition trauma - annot be overstated. It is in these sites that we may locate the affective rituals and gestures of the State. 55 As Chapters Three and Four in my work will show. 48 The post - Partition affective terrain, then, is host to several imaginaries; nation - statist formations play a crucial role in this emotive field. Nation - state making in South Asia has been premised upon violent fantasies of what it means to inhabit and safeguard communal identities, and gender and sexuality remain central to the everyday grounding and defending of these fantasies. Mapping the affect ive and memorial lives of nation - states demands an examination of the multiple sites in everyday life where these formations produce and reproduce themselves. It also involves looking at these formations as a set of ongoing practices, discourses, and perfo rmatives (Butler 1990) that are visceral, habitual, psychic, phantasmatic, (Navaro - Yashin 181) and thoroughly sexual (Aretxaga 2000, 2001, 2003).This requires an interdisciplinary analysis incorporating political, anthropological, psychological and literar y studies; an approach which, in recent years, has made substantial inroads. Much of the prior scholarship in this area has been critiqued for its inability to cross methodological and disciplinary borders: Srirupa Roy in Beyond Belief ( 2007), for example , cautions that structural - functionalist accounts of the political ignore the affective, while psychological approaches ignore political and social structures (Roy 10 - 12). In my exploration of the emotional and sexual fields that constitute the political a s it is produced and reproduced in everyday life, I will be guided by the scholarship produced by Srirupa Roy, Begoña Aretxaga and Yael Navaro - Yashin who offers us far - reaching trans - disciplinary lenses. To begin, it is important to lay out clearly the in tersecting affective fields between the formations nation, state, and citizenship. Roy argues in Beyond Belief (2007), that while the Imagined Communities (1983), has been recognized for the powerful emotional field that c - analyzed in these terms. Until Anderson, however, she reminds us, the nation was also mostly studied in terms of its 49 materialist and sociopolitical determinants. Imagined Communities marked a theoretical turn by as king us to prioritize the emotional and psychic fields through which collectivities imagined, believed, or desired themselves as a community. Anderson focused on cultural identity and nation - making but did not analyze fully either the psychological drives, which the nation authorized itself. This silence around the analysis of the state as a political formation permeated also by affect, desire, and fantasy, has marked subsequent scholarship, according to Roy. While studies of nationa lism focused on identity, desire, imagination, the state methods. Thus, the gaps in an affective scholarship on the state (i.e. studies recognizing it as driven b y fantasy, desire, fear, etc.) need to be addressed. Roy contends that the state, like the nation, is also a field of discourse and practice it is established and reproduced in visible and everyday forms (Timothy Mitchell) and is intrinsic to the produc tion of an imagined nationhood. Her work urges us to identify the effects of state - 56 a carrying over of rationality associated with colonial governance (22). While her work is very important to understand state formation in the aftermath of the Partition of 1947, I would like to push her argument further and argue that while the state does represent the structures, discourse and effects through which the nation authorizes itself, it is limiting to look purely at the banal, - Yashin 2002). Looking at the claims of the Indian nation - state on the post - partition affective terrain, it becomes evident that apart from its banal routinizations, fear, anxiety, mistrust and 56 Michael Billig Banal Nationalism (1995). 50 (Navaro - Yashin 181). In her considerable body of work on the state, anthropologist Begoña Aretxaga draws he Sexual Games of the Body Politic: Fantasy And State Freudian sens scene whose structure traverses the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious tes what Rose (2003), that a good deal of the literature on the state and violence shows the state not as the product of rational technologies of control but as th e subject of excess that bypasses any rational functionality. What articulates this excess is fantasy (the fantasy of statehood, the fantasy of total control, the fantasy of appropriation of the other, the fantasy of heterosexual domesticity ), which appea rs as a major component of political life and a key factor structuring power relations (402). aseptic image of rational micro - practices, but a state suffused with affect (61); this impinges upon not only how people imagine the state and thus produce it as social fact through a variety of discourses and practices, bu the state and produce it through not only discourses and practices but arresting images and 51 subject p of fear and violence by a [power] that wants to have absolute control of a nation it is at once - statist formations occupying the post - - ual (Aretxaga 57 403). Partition violence in particular, the sexually dismembering violence was spurred on by the desire for separate statehoods claimed by discrete religious and/or national groups; hence the visceral, intimate and sexual fields of the p olitical are important to archive in its context. Violence against the religious Other invested with the insignia of rival nation - states, they became the fiel d through which political significant sites which interpreted, contextualized and commemorated these encounters. In what ways can literary and creative forms in terpret these visceral excesses of the nation - state? The answer might lie in how specific literary and visual productions take on strategic roles based on how they are situated in relation to dominant socio - political systems, language, culture and identity . In that context, we may understand Pritam and the other writers hold (1975) 58 . The first characteristic of minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari claim, is n ot whether the language is minor or major, but whether it is affected by deterritorialization ( Damon and Livingston 56). Just as writing became an impossibility for Jews in Nazi Prague (the impossibility of writing in German as well as the impossibility o f writing in any other language 57 . See also Aretxaga 2001. 58 52 bound them), writing is an impossibility for Pritam. Writing in Punjabi evokes in her a sense of loss, as the language, its history and its communities have been so violently splintered 59 . Moreover, writing about sexual trauma imposes another bind as it is culturally not permissible to allow it to enter openly into discourse. Yet, she can write in no other language, for no other language possesses the cultural and affective genealogy to both bear witness to the broken bon ds in Punjab as well as evoke memories of pre - partition ways of seeing 60 . Her entry into language wrestles with this weight, while announcing it. Punjabi thus b literatures is that everything in them is political (56). What in other literature goes down below, in the cellar, so to speak, here takes p lace in broad daylight (57); politics is not a substrata but analogy may be extended to argue that the phantasmatic and emotional substrata in discursive and ma terial systems such as the political, then, become particularly available to these literatures to source and plumb. A third feature of minor literature is it allows the forging of alternative collectivities. Since the minor writer is already outside her fr agile tenuous community, it allows her to express another possible community, forge another consciousness and sensibility (Damon relation to the nation - sta te and its dominant religions) cultural sites will form part of my analysis. 59 sian alfaz (words), was my language. It was part of everyday speech (Interview with Pritam, New Delhi, 12 January 2001 qtd, in Dutta - fertilized) language Amrita wrote in is the kind which is no longer in use as the dialects of eastern Punjab have thrown it into the background. (Economic and Political Weekly November 26, 2005 p. 4994). 60 These pre - Partition ways of seeing are not free of communal conflict, although most scholars see the calcifica tion of religious identities as an effect of colonial and nationalist processes. 53 A major concern of Pritam and other producers of critical literature during the partition such as Qurratulain Hyder, is the recognition of how violence is experienced on the marg ins of the nation - state on an everyday, routine basis. While many writers like Manto wrote of the Fasadat ke Adab (Partition Riots), many of the women writers in Urdu, Punjabi and other vernacular languages interwove into Partition violence the routine eve ryday vulnerability women experienced as liminal subjects (of patriarchy, of colonialism and of nationalism). Recent theories of state violence urge us to understand how nation - states become subjects visible and recognized through their effects 61 major components of political life, bridges Foucauldian notions of biopower and fetish. This allows us to study how a state can turn its fetishized other its own people into bodies to be governed and punished and made to live or die. This idea of the state as a symptom of the pathology of the modern world and its power structures, needs urgent contextualization in directed against its refugees, its The sites of everyday life on the margins provide an especially rich exploratory field of the arresting desires, fantasies and anxie ties of the state (Aretxaga 2001, 20003). How is the state abandonment and fear mark these encounters often played out in very intimate, embodied contexts where viole 61 for more on state effects see Trouillot 2001, p. 126), 54 The body thus becomes the field through which the power of the state flows. The State haunts its 62 . Understanding Partition as the central cultural traum a of the region, writers and artists returned to its losses repeatedly to access its affective histories, and to circulate shared refrains that throw light on these intimate and embodied everyday terrains. These shared refrains from Kai Erikson describing the social aspect of Kai Erikson argues that trauma can damage tissues that hold human groups intact; it can also - Partition trauma - scape. The theme of love, separation and betrayal embodied in viraha and related c oncepts such as ishq or moonjh mediate as we have seen, a longing for places and states of mind that historical and personal circumstances keep out of reach . 63 They also become comments on the political exigencies of Partition. In the next section, I want t o examine how s repertoires of affect to galvanize the post - Partition memorial terrain in South Asia. When politics, religion, and humanism are transmitted in lite rature, human faith is transformed. I feel in my inner recesses a certain richness that is part of our common heritage. Guru Nanak, Baba Farid, Amir Khusro, Bulle Shah, Waris Shah, and Shah Latif can we divide this whole lot 62 Andreas Huyssen argues, that memory in our ctive, alive, embodied in the social that is in individuals, groups, and nations (28). 63 See Kabir, - Amnesias , 140. 55 of poets into theirs and ours ? No doubt we divided the territory but tradition, music, art, and literature are not like geographical areas, they continue to remain undivided and are indivisible. Krishna Sobti 64 O king, reigning over the land / What sort of Jeth [summer] has come? / No sky above our heads, no earth beneath our feet. / O king, reigning over the land / What sort of Savan [monsoon] has come? / We invited it in this fate / Now, who can stop it? Amrita Pritam 65 the Partition. In an interview kainaati rishta which Dutta translates as a fraternal relationship with her universe (Dutta 1). It could also be termed an intimate haunting of emotional and perceptual frameworks. As Pritam herself puts it haunted by what I saw at the railway stations in Dehra Dun and Delhi. There was darkness all around. How nazm Pritam too, responded to the savagery around her by catalyzing vernacular net works of affect and memory that insistently challenged the nation - statist or communal binaries. As Pritam writes in her autobiography Shadows of Words (2001), by invoking the Sufi poet and Pir Waris Shah as a 64 Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home p. 138 65 From (Untitled) Baramahsa . The barahmasa is a vernacular lyrical genre in the subcontinent; they are songs of the twelve months of the year with one stanza being devoted to each month. The viraha barahmasa , the most popular form of lyric al barahmasa describes the separation of a woman from her husband/lover during twelve months of the year. 56 witness to the times, she angered both Sikh and Hindu commentators, while Marxists admonished her for not using Lenin as a cementing figure (Pritam 9 - 10). Through her lyric, Pritam chose instead to harness rich genealogies of affect animated by the Punjabi qissa complex emotional, cognitive and senso rial networks that offered a commixture of female interiority, transgressive desire, and a pluralist sense of belonging and place to negotiate the ruptures of Partition. Hir (1766) represents the most widely known and performed qissa . Jeevan Deol reminds us that unlike most other pre - modern texts, whose reputation is confined to literary or academic circles, Hir enjoys popular appeal. Its perform ances and renditions have continued well into the twenty - first century through portrayals in modern media in film, folk and popular Sufi music (142). 66 - worlds 67 qissa as a cross - referential genre gesture to an ideological horizon that - centered poetics inhabitants shared, no matter what their religious persuasion, which were not easily assimilated - The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (2010) is an extensive study of the qissa as a Punjabi literary formation. She writes that the qissa is ce ntral to a genre of story - telling in verse with Perso - Islamic roots that became indigenized in South Asia during the medieval period through the adoption of Indian meters and narratives. It traveled through Central Asia and Persia during the medieval perio d, on 66 Modern Asian Studies 36. 1 (2002). 67 - Buelens, Durrant and Eaglestone,( London: Routledge, 2014), 72 - 3 to compass embodied locales (epidermal, l and cognitive relationship with the world. Trauma violently fractures these embodied networks as well as the psyche. 57 up the genre by composing qisse principally in Persian, the court and literary language of much of north India during the medieval and early modern perio ds (Amir Khusraw (1254 - 1325) was one of them). Gradually, they were also adopted into vernacular literatures. Punjabi Sufi poets took up the genre in the early seventeenth century Along with Persian romance narratives like Laila - Majnun or - Farhad , po lovers such as Hir - Ranjha, Mirza - Sahiban, Sassi - Punnun were not created by qissa composers; t hey had been part of vernacular oral and written repertoires (ibid.). Christopher Shackle (2000) identifies the qissa as an Indo - Muslim Punjabi literary heritage distinct from other parts of the Islamic world for its use of local stories (60). 68 Carla Petie vich (2007) writes that many Sufi mystics proselytizing in rural Punjab adapted their spiritual messages to songs and stories that were already familiar to the audience (33) 69 . They very often referenced everyday life - worlds, in s such as spinning and weaving. Indo - Muslim poetry in Punjabi can be traced back to the twelfth century with couplets of the Sufi poet from the Chishti order Baba Farid or Farid ud - di Ganj - i - Shakkar (1173 - 1265). He adopted the Indic poetic convention of th e feminine narrative voice as he spoke of the suffering/ viraha/hijr of the Sufi separated from the Beloved (Petievich 6) 70 . The Sufi romances thus transmitted philosophies of divine love 71 ; 68 - Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religio us Identities in Islamicate South Asia , ed. David Gilmartin and Bruce Lawrence (Gainesville, Fl.: University of Florida Press, 2000), 60. 69 Carla Petievich, Introduction to When Men Speak as Women: Vocal Masquerade in Indo - Muslim Poetry (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007),33. 70 Since articulations of contemporary Indo - Muslim identity are tied through historical and political contingencies with a strong masculinity, and poetry, both Urdu and vernacular poetry has come to be anxiously scanned for its e South Asian environment. Critics suggested that it is distinctly foreign to Muslim culture (Petievich, 4). The politics of the virahini is thus fascin ating. 58 Hir/Sohni/Sassi came to represent any human longing for union with t he divine. Hir - Ranjha was so popular that a single kafi (verse), even a single couplet or refrain could convey complex Sufi ideas, partially through the use of metaphors the audience could relate to 72 . The narrative also worked allegorically in Sikh and Hin du devotionalism, particularly in Bhakti allegories of 73 . Commentators have elaborated on the Vaishnavite and Nath 74 elements in different versions of the Hir narrative - - playing and adopting the role of censure to be with Ranjha echoes that of representations of Radha 75 . Qissa s circulated within and animated a particular Punjabi sociocultural formation that could accommodate mul tiplicity and fluidity was witnessed in syncretic literary forms, i n the enmeshing of Persian, (later Urdu), and Punjabi, in the lability and exchangeability of devotional idioms (Mir 180 - 1), and in the shared sense of belonging to place. This plurality extended also to the sites of performance and circulation. They were performed in secular as well as religious spaces: theaters and nautankis (folk theaters), as well as Sufi shrines, Sikh gurudwaras where recitation or performance of Punjabi literature was central to ritual practices (Mir 16 - 17). In the 1920s and 30s, the qissa s, 71 Love is a central tenet in Sufi thought: Sufis elaborated this idea by conceiving of two forms of love: ishq - i - majazi (phenomenal love) and ishq - i - haqiqi (real love) the interplay between these two and the related idea of fana or annihilation are central to qissas as Sufi allegories (Mir 156). Fana , a doctrine developed by Al - Junayd (d.910) is conceived as union with god during which the Sufi is absent from this world and the self. Upon returning to the mundane world, the Sufi experiences great suffering and sadness. This pain is reflected in Sufi writings as akin to that of separated lovers yearning to be united. Yearning is thus a sign of true love for the divine (Mir 156 - 157) 72 See Mir, The Social Space , 159. 73 See Mir, The Social Space , 160 - 1 64. 74 Va¯ris The Indian Narrative, ed. Christopher Shackle and Rupert Shell (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), 241 - 263. 75 See Mir, The Social Space , 160 - 164. 59 especially Hir - Ranjha also became a part of Parsi theatrical and later cinematic repertoire 76 . In the context of violent communal divisions of the Partition, these older fluid affiliations 77 gained particular urgency. Deploying ishq/viraha - prem (love) as Partition lament which plays a significant role in her invocation of Hir was suffused by longing that had a personal as well as political basis. When Pritam , her husband and his family left Lahore in the riot - torn May of 1947, on what they believed was a short - term estrangement, she left behind a valued intellectual companion, the Urdu playwright Sajjad Haider as well as her lover, the poet Sadhir Ludhianvi. Ludhianvi later migrated to Bombay and became a successful lyricist 78 ; Pritam has written poignantly about their long and difficult relationship in her autobiographies. It was primarily her fear of losing her two friends that haunted her on her journey from Lahore to Dehra Dun in early May 1947 (Pritam 7) 79 . On another train journey back to Dehradun from Delhi where she had gone to look for work and a place to live, she was haunted by both personal (ibid.) that she encountered in the 76 The publicity shot of Hir Ranjha (1929) shows a deep and passionate kiss, starring Sulochana (Ruby Myers) the highest paid star in the country and her real life lover D. Bilimoria. A.R. Kardar also made the sound film Hir and Ranjha in Lahore in 1931. 77 A number of commentators such as Farina Mir and Christopher Shackle believe that monolithic religious identities were a modern socio - society, but not to the extent that othe r community affiliations disappeared. On the other hand, older ways of being 78 Ludhianvi was part of the artists instrumental in making cinema in the 1950s carry erotic, linguistic and stylis tic charges that challenged nationalist acculturation of affect. Film songs by using cross - fertilized language and Barsaat ki Raat (A Rainy Night) 1960, harnesses viraha - a medium for emphasizing and overcoming separation as in the filmic motif of couples - fertilized affect - scape through its mingling of Urdu, Brajbhasha and Punjabi, of Sufi and Vaishnavite imagery contributing to the viraha - ishq complex I explore. 79 Amrit a Pritam, Shadows of Words , (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 2001), 7. 60 The Revenue Stamp (1977), Pritam Hir back to Dehradun, I could not fall aslee p on the train. Verses from Waris Shah were haunting my 80 . The affective complex of the qissa is associated most emphatically with longing and with transgressive (f Viraha Kumkum Sangari (2011) traces the social and cultural meanings negotiated through literary and performative representations of love, such as the qissa . She argues that in devotional Bhakti, Sant and Sufi compositions,[of which the Punjabi Sufi qissa mun was enlarged in a way that could transgress the norm as well as embody the norm and lowing transgressive desire to articulate itself, it was ultimately contained by its sacred framework. Although doomed to fail (most qissas ended in tragedy,) desire was itself an act of choice exercised even, perhaps, most intensely, in the pain of separa tion. In the dense oral, written, visual, and performative repertoires of ishq / viraha - Partition from r viraha / ishq as a complex, and the qissa as a form evolved over time, it acquired between the mid - nineteenth and mid - twentieth centuries, an autanki and jatra (folk theater), Par si theater and early cinematic representations so that it became readily accessible as a cross - referencing affective trope (263). Sangari in her analysis of the viraha complex emphatically links its accentuated longing with agential suffering. In Bhakti an d Sufi representations, longing for union with the 80 Amrita Pritam, The Revenue Stamp: An Autobiography , trans. Krishna Gorowara ( New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 1977), 21. 61 divine gains agentive charge marked by a claim to presence based on absence 81 . Thus it is from the position of the virahini/mushaqin that love can be enacted. her lyrical invocation to Waris Shah is worth looking at: sighs the winds carried and echoed, it seemed we were back in mourning over this Watershed of History. The trees loomed larger and larger like sentinels of sorrow. There were patches of stark aridity in between like the mounds of massive graves. The words of my mind. I thought a great poet like him alone could lament the loss one Hirhad to bear. to chant my invocation to [...] In the moving train, my trembling fingers moved on to describe th e pangs I went through (21). Hir , in this context takes on another resonance aside from her subversive choices in love. Sangari discusses how viraha / ishq virahin i male travel, often accompanied by male deceit, fickleness and profligacy (Sangari 280). Images of love and (emphatically male) travel intertwined with female vulnerability are central to the emotio nal and social world of viraha . The origins of viraha prem have been traced back to the genre of medieval vernacular Indic literature termed the barahmahsa : songs of the twelve months of the year, one stanza being devoted to each month. The viraha barahmas a , the most popular form of lyrical barahmasa is concerned with the separation of a wife from her husband 81 Sangari argues that medieval Viraha as a bhava [emo tion] signifies not an emptiness but a fullness, or a claim to - in - the - 113) 62 during twelve months of the year. Theories of its genesis vary 82 . Charlotte Vaudeville in Barahmasa in Indian Literatures (1986), elaborates that the s ong of the twelve months of the year is also that of everyday life in particular the sensorial and affective (15 - 16). The Viraha barahmasa was focused on the emotions of the heroine and hinged on her sense of estrangement and vulnerability especially in relation to her surroundings. The causes of separation or its resolution were mostly evaded. If the husband did not return, the lyrics did not include a in other words, with a female interiority that was responsive and alive. This unresolved longing of the virahini / mushaqin allowed female desire in allegorical and secular iterations to be voiced agen tively and without stint. Hir is located within similar agential networks that configure suffering as qissa is marked s sexuality and desire. In spite of a markedly subdued Hir, rendered through her containment within courtly love traditions (145), the qissa can be read as subversive on many grounds: for its social critique against hypocrisy of organized religion, its inv ectives against orthodox clergy and its defiance of sharia, and also for its re - writing of female desire (145 - 146). Although in the mode of an allegory of God and the Sufi soul, a. In particular, aggression towards familial authority and the religious qazi make her a contentious figure (Deol 153 - 156) (See Fig. 4). The narrative is punctua ted with betrayals by both familial and religious 82 D Zbavitel links it to the Krishnaite Bhakti movement but Vaudeville notes that the Bengali folk - baromasi could also have made its way into Vaishnavite poetry (Vaudeville 1986, 16 - 17). 63 dishonor. Pritam harnesses these cadences of vulnerability and agency and draws new social meanings from them to me . conventions i.e. the inca ntatory, rhythmic, repetitive, kinesthetic, dimensions of poetry, be it epic, elegy, ghazal - make it well - invocation is marked by its cantillatory rhythms borrowing from narrative qissa traditions , well suited for oral renditions and performances. In the Punjabi version, the short staccato bursts of its 83 , / Tey Ajj Kitaab - e - Ishq rave, / To Waris Shah I say / and add a new page to your saga of love today 84 ) are incantatory, with a steady rhythm; the assonances and consonances allow a sonorous fluidity, making it easy to remember and reproduce. The lyric uses short syllables (one, tw o and at the most three) throughout, and the terse rhyme structure ABAB. Its idiomatic, sonorous and haunting qualities harnessing oral and rhythmic performative traditions, make it well - placed to enter social performative spaces. The emotional and psychic charge it carried, of course, ensured that it became widely known, read, ht visions from her train ride, she summons him to witness the ghastly landscape of Punjab whose 83 true to its oral, performative basis was very often untitled and known only by its opening lines or refrains. 84 Selected Poems of Amrita Pritam ed. Pritish Nandy, trans. Amrita Pritam (Calcutta: Dialogue Calcutta Publications, n.d.), n.p. 64 qissa imaginary) is red with blood. The horizon is stained, sunsets forecast the bloodshed, and the colors of the red cotton blossoms intimate the genocide. Systems of perceptual, sensorial and cognitive organization have shifted irrevocably. Waris Shah 1 730 - 1790: A Critical Appreciation of the Poet and his only Hir R.K. Kuldip (1971), writes that one of the key features of Hir trivial (23) which makes them easy to repr oduce and render. However, Waris Shah is well known for how he likes to play with the predictability his audience expects of him and the qissa form: even when a poetic figure or allusion is well known, he gives it a twist, a delightful new turn, often in a rich in associative values, secondary evocations of meaning, stimulating suggestiveness and a nemonic and allusive charges of this cross - fertilized repertoire. As mentioned earlier (see note 21), her use of the Punjabi of the qissas marked by Urdu/Persian words evokes a syncretic organization of senses. For instance, Iss Zarkhaiz Zameen (Urdu for fertile earth) Dey Loon Loon Phuttiya Zahar (Urdu for poison) Gitth Gitth Charhiyaan Laaliyan Fuut Fuut Charrhiya Kaher [my emphasis] (17 - 20) The sonic and sensory interplay of this Persianized Punjabi an earthy figurative language here rooted in flowering and harvesting metaphors - is lyrically haunting and carries in its train the memories and sensations of inter - crossed everyday life - worlds. Pritam reproduces the oft - 65 repeated qissa image of coiling and stinging serpents deployed to represent the pangs of love and viraha; Wey Waleesi Wha Phair, Wan Wan Wagi Jaa, Ohney Har Ikk Waans Di Wanjli Diti Naag Banain (And heavy with venom were the winds, that blew through the forests, transmuting into a snake, The reed of each musical branch 85 .) (21 - 24) In her recreation, the venomous winds turn every musical bamboo reed in the forest into serpents. Instead of pangs of viraha, the much - used metaphor comes to represent the trauma of ethnocidal rape and violence ravaging Punjab. Pehla Dang Madaari yan, Mantar Gaye Guwaach, Doojey Dang Di Lag Gayi, Janey Khaney Nuu Lag (With sting after sting did the serpents, suppress the voice of the people.) (25 - 28) other contexts 86 . Farina Mir agrees 85 All translatio ns of t 86 66 that since the earliest recorded Hir - Ranjha qissa by Damodar, the incl usion of specific places in HirRanjha ceases to be HirRanjha dera monastery where the Muslim Ranjha disguises himself as a Hindu Nath yogi,) and most importantly perhaps, the Chenab River (135). These places not o nly call forth well - recognized and iterated narrative events, but evoke a close relationship between person and place. social roots of an individual are as much as in his watan (homeland) or des 87 (country) as in his caste. The first question that Hir puts to Ranjha is about his watan as well as his zat orientations t hat pre - date modern (colonialist and nationalist) geopolitical alignments. WarisShah looks upon Rum and Sham, Khatan and Chin, Lanka and Kamrup as distinct lands. Bengal is a distinct country. The east up to Delhi is not Punjab. Kabul and Qandahar are not a part of Punjab. Kashmir is a distinct country. By this process of elimination, the land of the five rivers is the The understanding of a discrete topography and regional identity of the Punjab informs the imaginary while locating it within an expansive Eurasian radius. This topography is first and foremost, an affective one. Mir (2010) establishes that by referring to particular natal places as des, watan etc., the qissa 87 geographical sub - region. The doabs or river banks are also sub - regions, he thus refers to the Jats of the Chenab or the songs of the Chenab. Overarching the des and the sub - region is the country of Punjab (Grewal 111). 67 ties. Ties of kinship, caste, and locality thus transcend sectarian divides. Phenomenologist 88 . They furnish convenient points of attachment for memories which are crucial to the engendering of a collec not only those present at the moment of making (41 - 42). Pritam draws on these affective and representational horizons whi le at the same time overturning many of the qissa perceptual underpinnings 89 . Additionally, while Pritam draws from conventions of other folk forms such as the viraha baramahsa where nature provides a resonance to suffering, her representations Love and loss as political effects - giving rivers after whom Punj - ab is named (Persian panj :five, ab : water) are flowing with poison which is relentlessly seeping In Partition Dialogues: Memories of Lost Home (2006), Asok basti s (settl ements) where the refugees settle are hostile and strange, godless places. These settlements 88 Public Memory , ed. Kendall Phillips (Tusc aloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 189. 89 Note: In an interview to Deepali Dhingra in The Times of India 7, 2007, the poet and lyricist Gulzar discusses how Punjabi literature is indebted to Pritam for infusing it with new different from the traditional Punjabi imagery found in poems. It was new. This was the major change she brought in p http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bombay - times/Gulzar - recites - for - Amrita - Pritam/articleshow/2008708.cms 68 have no sacred spaces and no devotees. They are either infected places or are so utterly barren of human affections as to make life a graveyard of lamentations (8 - 9). The trope of a poisoned or an infected socius/polis was commonly employed in representations of Partition trauma; in Pritam, it takes on specific gendered connotations. i s vague, amorphous and therefore all the more terrifying. We are not told who has mingled poison, or why the winds are venomous. While the fear and terror are located in an indistinct source, emotions like grief or terror here are not merely internalized s tates transposed onto the landscape. They indicate a social mood. They also echo the role rumor played in public records of Partition violence. Gyan Pandey (2001) alerts us to the diffusiveness as opposed to specificity that characterized official reports of Partition violence in particular sexual violence (68). public discussions of partition violence. Her representation counters the communalization and nationaliza tion of female sexuality in the aftermath of the genocidal violence As pointed out by historians such as Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side of Silence (1998), there have been no public memorials or archives on the partition neither have there been tribunals or courts of justice to provide legal/juridical restitution(361 - 362). These acts of violence have been discussed and archived in mainstream political forums such as the Constituent Assembly debates or nationalist newspapers through a limited nationalist l the nation and sees the violence done to them as wounds to the nation - state. Butalia parses these records to demonstrate that the language of filth and cleansing was pervasive in Hindu nationalist disc safaya (cleansing) 69 ng them back to their community, it was reasoned, could the nation be made morally whole. Accounts abound (162 - 163). Above all, the fear of the cohabitation and inti macy of Hindu women with Muslim men posed a threat to the Hindu ideal. Right - wing newspapers like Organizer reiterated that back to the nation - statist collective: they are effects of its violent desires, not symptomatic of s exual defilement or shame. Yael Navaro - Yashin in her ethnography of Turkish political culture in Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (2002), offers us an incisive everyday lives and the subjects (ibid.). This image of t lyric. The violence of nation - making permanently shadows the land and calls for an ongoing, protracted grief. Everyone is complicit in its cause and burdened with its aftermath. Given the nature of the ethnocide where ordinary people turned against and massacred one another (spurred bl ue, webs of trust and community lie broken and women are the ones most unmoored by the loss of trust. The state and its effects - the partition violence born of desire for statehood - haunt, 70 poison, and lay to waste the everyday lives, habits, and moods of s Shah 24 - 31 ). In an image telling of the - Viraha baramahsa qissa to comment on the gendered d evastation caused by the Partition inaugurates a new grammar into Pritam enlarges on the socio - political charge of the viraha - ishq complex by locating the lute, where the songs of love sounded? / And all Ranjha's brothers forgot how to play the flute / Blood has rained on the soil, graves are - 34) Pritam mediates her representation of the partition through the emotion of betrayal. She sees it as a betrayal of women by a patriarchal system involving the family, community and nation - The complicity of an entire community is emphasized. Thus the textures of meaning contained in qissa , shift, and n - mistrust have been, and continue to be, every day commonplace states for women, is moreover, a telling comment on their historical marginalization. n Refugee even in intimate family spaces which have culturally functioned as supportive trust networks. In 71 en are unmoored from their most intimate kinship and community bonds. As liminal subjects in patriarchal networks, women Mistrust among Cambodian Refugee Woman: A 90 , demonstrates that trust is culturally constructed. Trust in Cambodian women survivors of Khmer Rouge responses to the traumas should be explained not only in terms of a universalist human psychology but also in terms of a more or less implicit cultural heritage (36). She affirms that the biosociocultural position of women confronts them more than men with trust as an issue in hu man relationships and with suffering when the bonds of trust are broken or abused (37). In - 2) 91 impedes identification of vulnerability or betrayal with victimization . These affective states mobilize, instead, an interrogation of the relationships and power configurations that structure - state legitimizes itself 92 . Partition makes these encounters more visible and the violence more spectacular by bringing together a network of kinship, community, and nation - statist operations. Pritam is one of the writers who interrogates and explores this configuration with vigilance and clarity. 90 Marjorie M Mistrusting Refugees , ed. E. Valentine Daniel and John Knudsen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 91 California Press, 1995), 1 - 2. According to E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen, victims of nation - state making such as refugees, are particular ly positioned to develop critical attitudes towards dominant structures. 92 As we have seen, the sites of everyday life on the margins provide an especially rich exploratory field of the arresting desires, fantasies and anxieties of the state (Begona Aretxa ga 2001, 2003). 72 Cri tical mourning and viraha : Re - contextualizing the elegy in Pritam Jahan Ramazani in The Poetry of Mourning (1994) develops an inter - disciplinary framework from psychological and literary methodologies to locate how mourning under late - modern political syst ems is mimetically represented in the dissident elegy. The modern elegy undergoes a radical transformation by refusing healing as an outcome. My chapter will examine similar effects in the vernacular genres Partition lyric harnessed. Ramazani in his Introduction to The Poetry of Mourning: the Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney his polarization of mourning and melancholia (28). He asserts that rather than s eeing melancholia as pathological and mourning as a therapeutic ideal, Freud did admit in letters and other writings, that mourners [too] typically remain inconsolable, never filling the gap of loss (Ramazani 28). In Freudian terms, melancholia is burdened with severe self - criticism, by an inner splintering between two parts of the ego, one part narcissistically identified with the lost object and the other part attacking this encrypted object. Yet Freud also allowed that both mourning and melancholia share a tendency to self - reproach (Freud 251, 258), a cessation of interest in outside world, a loss coins to analyze the protracted grief one often encounters in modern elegies (29) that respond to modern/late - modern losses. Modern elegists, he argues, reanimate, often violate elegiac traditions to respond to the experiences of late - modernity which are founded in loss. Rather than use the elegy as a therapeutic device to work through grief and create an aesthetic substitution for rich sonic structure and mourning conventions i.e. the incantatory, rhythmic, repetitive, 73 kines thetic, dimensions of poetry, be it epic, elegy, ghazal - make it well - suited to performing grief (86), alerting us to the socio - political conditions that demand such protracted mourning. Pritam as a writer may be located in modernity. According to Darsh an Singh Maini, new Punjabi poetry began with Mohan Singh (1905 - 1978) and Amrita Pritam (1919 - 2005) (8). Her forces of fascism, the character of British imperia lism, the heroic struggle of the Soviet Union, the tremendous upheaval in India, the Bengal famine etc. 93 has called the prolonged ti me of viraha. The prolonging of mourning may be located also in viraha/ishq as an emotive complex without closure. Sangari argues that medieval viraha as an affective configuration expressed sadness but without the elegiac closures of grief or nostalgia. A s a bhava (affect), it signifies not an emptiness but a fullness, or a claim to presence based on - in - the - viraha is never fully resolved (Sangari 1990 113). Yet, the anticipat ion, unfinished presence and incomplete - time - in - the - making which are so essential a feature of the ishq/viraha complex are spaces and preet diyan shahzadiyan (p rincesses of love qissas ) crying in the graveyards mutates the emotive terrain into something far darker and maleficent. Rather than mourning to forget (the impulse to heal the self), the critical mourning enacted here powerfully burns into and shapes memory in the context of partition violence. Given the cooptation and erasures around sexual trauma, the critical mourning an d memory work 93 Studies in Punjabi Poetry , Darshan Singh Maini. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd. , 1979. 74 steady rhythm. The cantillatory rhythms, sound repetitions and refrains make it well - suited to performing grief. The sound repetitions and the four li ned refrain framing the lyric gave it open - endedness as did the reflexive, intertextual qissa repertoire it cited. These iterative charges added to its feature as an open - ended, resonating artifact that could carry the burden of prolong ing mourning. Apar t from providing a sonic, rhythmic and temporal analogue to protract ing grief, then, the cross - referential networks of representation it circulated within Qabraan Wichon Bol / Tey Ajj Kitaab - e - depths of the grave, / To Waris Shah I say / and add a new page to your saga of love today) became a shorthand to evoke the losses of the shared post - Partition emotive terrain. The new avenues of aural circulation such as radio transmission, playback singing, recorded songs and new listening communities enabled a wider dispersal of sonic artifacts over a larger social by Pakistani Punjabi artist Inayat Hussain Bhatti in the Pakistani Partition film Kartar Singh (1959). The refrain was the title of a play produced at the Lahore Al Hamra Arts Council in 1970 and then in 1972 and had various repeat performances in the cit y 94 . Contemporary Pakistani pop Sufi artist Asrar retains the refrain but goes on to add verses addressing contemporary losses in the post - Partition sub - continent 95 . In terms of the qissa meaning 96 . 94 The play was written by Soofi Nisar Ahmad and was a poignant satire on how contemporary society had moved away from the ideals of love a nd justice symbolized by the Sufi poet (50 Years of Lahore Arts Council (Alhamra): An Overview; published by Sang - e - Meel Publications, Lahore in2000). 95 The addition of music and background scores expanded its sonic, affective and perceptual realms as shall see in the final section of the chapter. 96 See Sangari and Deol. 75 specter, a present absence. We may draw some clues from Ramazani (2004) who says that in - pers pectives permeated by loss and ruin (Ramazani 131). What kind of surrogate perspective can Waris Shah afford? To Pritam, Waris Shah is less a representative of this afterworld of loss and ruin, and more a messenger from a shared memory terrain; he represents an absence, a loss, and an alternative to the present. Invoking him is a generative act a fulfilment of presence. We may read this absence more productive ly through the emotive field of the viraha genre. In baramahsa poetic convention, as we have seen, the absence of the beloved enabled the virahini and generated a responsive subjectivity. It represented the capacity of the heart to anchor, su stain and internalize what was materially absent, lost or unattainable 97 . In Bhakti, convention, absence or the act of recalling the (A)bsent marked (H)is presence. In Sufi modalities, the separation of the devotee from the Pir/Murshid was the moment the de votee had to internalize in order to understand the intensity of ishq role as a border - crossing emi ssary 98 , able to move between past and present, death and life, and more significantly between the communal and national borders violently established. Undoubtedly Waris Shah animates the lyric, most powerfully as that which is present through absence. Thr ough him the emotional and psychic lineaments of a shared pre - Partition memory terrain are being evoked. He thus represents an alternative to the present. In invoking him, Pritam also invokes an (im) possible alternative. However, it is ultimately the virahini whose ravaged interiority orients and illuminates the traumascape. Viraha , as we have seen, 97 Sanagari argues that this capacity of the heart to anchor, sustain and internalize what was materially absent , lost or unattainable became a powerful metaphor in the context of the partition (256) 98 See Embodying Charisma (1998). 76 becomes a socio - It is here that Pritam radicalizes the elegy. Instead of being substituted, sublated and laid to rest, the dead permeate lifeworlds , in effect, making forgetting impossible and blocking the withdrawal of affect 99 . This prolonged mourning is expressed thro ugh the viraha complex drawing on its depictions of a desolate female interiority as well as its emplotment of suffering in the virahini lifeworld. The violence of nation - making permanently haunts the land 100 and calls for an ongoing, protracted grief. The enveloping of the entire socius in this loss is thus imperative. The material and affective world is complicit in its cause and burdened with its aftermath. Given the nature of the ethnocide where ordinary people turned against and massacred one another ( spurred Keido today), implying a communal internalization of violence. Her lament that all brothers ( Raanjhey Dey Sab Weer Ajj ) have forgotten how to make the flute sing of love, not only mourns the erasure of cross - fertilized ways of being 101 but also colors the collective with its guilt. Waris Shah can thus, bear text is surely harnessed for its syncretistic energies, but it is this new metapoetic text , this new chapter ( agla varka ) burdened by shared expand ing s - 1947. one often encounters in modern elegies (2 9). I see it also as a critically interrogative mourning. 99 The withdrawal of affect from a person, object or idea is termed decathexis in psychoanalysis. 100 Yael Nava ro - Yashin 101 drawing from cross - cultural tropes of Ranjha as a Krishnaite figure. 77 create an ongoing relationship with the past that allows critical reflection upon the present. Theo rists of loss hold that the prolonged, protracted grief carried forward and onward, facilitates the recognition that past structures of oppression, exclusion, or violence (responsible for the loss) remain in present day socio - cultural structures. Mourning and melancholia prod us to be alert since those structures carry the same power to injure as they did in the past. The Partition elegy alerts us to the violent aspects of the nation - state that inhabit the post - Partition terrain. The nation mourns to forget and successfully metabolize Partition losses. When viewed through the 102 to substantiate a shared citizenship. Jonathan Flatley in Affective Mapping: Melancholi a and the Politics of Modernism (2008) offers us a paradigm to understand how mourning and melancholia can create shared citizenship. state long associated with melancho lia was caused by the failure to mourn a loss. Instead of mourning, which Freud saw as a kind of libidinal decathection from the lost object, the melancholic internalizes the lost object into his or her very subjectivity as a way of refusing to let the los with the pathologies of the modern world instead of inducing isolation and depression. As such, melancholia forms the site in which the social origins of our emotiona l lives can be mapped out and from which we can see the other persons who share our losses and are subject to the same social forces. We might say that the melancholic concern with loss creates the mediating structure that enables a slogan to 102 78 become a historical - these losses to which I have become attached? What social structures, discourses, institutions and processes have been at work in taking something valuable a way from me? With whom do I share these losses or losses like them? What are the historical processes in which this moment of loss participates in other words: how long has my misery been This imaginary of shared losses, of bei ng deeply entangled with the grief of others creates a connected practices, habits, imaginaries and affects located in particular socio - cultural matrices 103 vernacular critical affective state. Inhabiting this critical state allows us to ask what structures continue to to critique contemporary remains of the Partition and informs our understanding of late - modern South Asian traumas. properties as it was worn as an amulet by grieving Parti tion refugees, harnessed Sufi practices of through 1950s radio airwaves (Dutta 7 - 8) 104 invoking unprecedented internationalist solidarities. The sensory and perf - Pak border in multiple memorial contexts. poem is 103 . this global is for them, is about hope, possibility, and potential that emerge from their affective connections with other people (18). 104 - 8. 79 sung at the mazar (tomb) of Waris Shah in Multan (Pakistan) on the occasion of Jashne Waris Shah . People cried and sang when they heard the n azm over the radio (Pritam 1998:26). In her autobiography The Revenue Stamp (1977), Pritam mentions how in his foreword to a book by Faiz, Urdu poet Ahmed Nadeem Kazmi (sic) disclosed that he had read the poem in jail 105 . On his release he recounted seeing copies of it with common men who would weep when they read it (Pritam 1977, 21). The lyric then helped the t raumatized Partition subjects to relocate themselves via the affective genealogy of the qissa formation to a shared pre - Partition memory terrain. It also enabled them to make new meanings in the post - Partition affective world and live through the trauma. 106 In the following section, I would like to develop a framework for understanding Partition trauma and recovery in the South Asian context. Critics of Euro - American paradigms of trauma argue that clinical a pproaches developed in specific socio - cultural contexts often write over postcolonial systems of knowledge - making, mourning and recovery. Ananya Kabir, Kumkum Sangari and other postcolonial critics are seeking to develop a vernacularized framework to view violence, trauma and loss in South Asia. Trauma Studies has been critiqued for the scant attention that non - Euro - American contexts have received until recently and for uncritically importing Euro - American centric paradigms into other contexts. Michael Roth berg in his Preface to The Future of Trauma Theory economic contexts ((Buelens, Durrant and Eaglest one xiii).). Stef Craps, one of the most 105 Qa Association. 106 By vernacular, I mean local and specific cultural worlds and identities. See note 13. 80 trenchant critics of the Eurocentric model argues in Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013) that medicalization and pathologization of traumatized subjects often deprives them of agency. Clinical under standings of trauma often replicate European mono - cultural constructs. Not only are clinical practices of therapy developed within specific cultural structures unhelpful in many postcolonial contexts, but the hierarchy of knowledge systems often ensures th - driven analysis of the unconscious its structures and foundations - cannot be jettisoned 107 , the language and social matrix through which the unconscious is expressed, the systems, rituals and gestures deployed, need attention. (Buelens, Durrant and Eaglestone 72 - trauma - scapes asks to be located. lyric mobilizes the charismatic and healing energies of shared subcontinental belief systems to offer modes of recuperation. These channels also open up unprecedented modes and gestures of mourning and memorialization. I will analyze one such context where lyric took on haptic (reliant on a sense of touch comingling with other sense) and charismatic properties to help refugees negotiate Partition traumas. In her July 16 2001 interview with sessed and dislocated, tied this nazm i nto a knot, and wore it as an amulet (Datta 7 - 8). The lyric then was materially embodied in a ta'wiz, which in turn, relocated their bodily and psychic suffering to a different meaning - making realm that of the chari smatic. A ta'wiz is a locket (metallic or cloth) containing paper inscribed with Quranic verses or other Islamic prayer symbols usually worn as an amulet. It is a popular practice among South Asian Muslims and Sufis (although many schools of theology 107 Eaglestone 72 - 3). 81 consi der it unIslamic); it circulates in ritual contexts of healing and protection. As cultural historians of the subcontinent note, veneration of Sufi saints and pirs and pleas for boons and cures across the subcontinent are not limited to followers of Sufi gn osis. Hindus, Christians and Sikhs participate in this belief - (Oberoi qtd in Mir 176). Dominique - Sila Khan illustrates in Crossing the Threshold (2004) that two different communities would stri ke a sacred alliance with each other to protect and heal the Other in specific ritual contexts (32). Like Mir, Khan too demonstrates that identity was seen as This view allowed such transactions to take place without disturbing the identity of either party Embodying Charisma (1998) provides a striking reading of these charismatic relationships as rooted in everyday, material worlds. The figure of the charismatic Sufi saint as a threshold person mediating between two distinct symbolic orders (sacred and with these figures in everyd ay life. In their Introduction, the authors ask us to look at the power of ritual as deriving not from belief as a set of abstracted ideas but from ritual as a complex set of transformative, embodied and negotiated ethical and aesthetic practice(8). Building on the ir framework, I argue that this complex of aesthetic and ethical practices with healing resonances helped cast the experiences of Partition in a similar frame of trial and consolation. Werbner and Basu write One important feature of journeys to Sufi shrin es, anthropologists have shown, is that through overcoming of ordeals, sometimes (as in some initiation rites) actual, physical ordeals, at other times in the form of symbolic encounters with dangerous demons or ritual clowns (Kapferer 1983; Werbner 1989) supplicants perform a version of that 82 crossing themselves that Sufi pirs are thought to perform. Through then touching the mystical threshold - crossing power to themsel ves (154 - 5). survivors to mourn the experiences while seeing in them a gential meaning - making possibilities. Drawing on the genealogy of sacred alliances of healing entered into by different communities would also enable a collective mourning and memorialization of these experiences a shared imaginary that repudiates sectar ian or nation - statist divisions. - Yashin 181) 108 . The political violence of Partition produce d a panic and a terror that haunted the subjects (ibid.). The refugees use the talismanic charge of the verse worn as a ta'wiz to counter the meanings inscribed on them by violent nation - statist fantasies. Feldman in his study of The Body and Political Ter ror in Northern Irelan - Partition South Asian then, bodies became metonyms for sectarian nation - statist fantasies; women, especially, as we have seen became conflated violently with the nation - state. The acts of mutilating, hacking, and raping women carried the symbolic weight of disfiguring the nation and defiling the c ommunity (Butalia 175 - 198). token) enabled Partition survivors to reclaim meaning over their bodies and the affect - worlds 108 Yael Navaro - Yashin, Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002), 181. 83 they inhabit. Thes e gestures and practices situate the subjects of Partition trauma as agents rather than pathologized vessels of national honor. Kabir (2014) points out that one of the hurdles she encountered while dealing with trauma in non - eging of certain interpretive structures devolving that melancholic novel have gained precedence in literary trauma studies. Lyric poetry and song, she has argued resist incorporation within these closures. Ramazani as we have seen made the same argument for modernist elegiac poetry. My analysis demonstrates that apart from the aural and kinesthetic aspects of lyric poetry and song, there are other embodied extra - poetic contexts that need to be studied to understand the expression of Partitio rich archive of mourning and memorialization in the post - Partition affective terrain. a charismatic connection to War is Shah helped relocate Partitioned Punjab within more peaceable horizons: In the aftermath of the Rawalpindi riots that began the mass migrations that marked the creation of India and Pakistan, a train full of fleeing Hindu a nd Sikh refugees stopped at the station, to be met by a mob of enraged Muslims. Led by slogan - shouting , the crowd swarmed the platform with the intention of attacking the train. They were halted in their tracks by the sight and sound of a Sikh opi um - addict hanging out of the 84 - closed, the opium - addict sang away, and hatred turned into fellow - 10). (Deol 141) The incident (whether real or imagined,) calls attention to the affective, aural, kinesthetic and charismatic modes of the collaborative vernacular culture that remained open for Partition survivors to mine. The affective and sensory hist ories of this cultural formation have been following section I will elaborate on these practices of listening as critical memorialization. It is a practice that draws on somatic, affective, psychic, cognitive and charismatic modes to create archives of shared memory. Listening as critical memorialization Nation - state making in post - Partition South Asia continues to be premised upon fantasies of what it means to affective, auditory and performative modes of a collaborative vernacular culture to site critical memorial practices which evoke emotional and psychic states that fracture nation - st atist certainties. The auditory, embodied and performative dimensions of lyric poetry enable it to 85 109 across the violent Indo - Pak border in multiple record how the lyric harnessed the 70s and pulsed through 1950s radio airwaves invoking unprecedented internationalist solidarities. Listening practices in poetry recitals in the Indic Sufi culture of the sub - continent are unique and kafi s from qissas have been an integral part of these recitals. The concept of sama is often used to characterize this listening community. While s ama has religious roots, it moves and resonates equally in the non - spiritual domain. It represents a set of practices for listening to compositions of Sufi mystical poetry set to music. Its chief feature is its participatory, collaborative nature the space and r elations produced are called mahfil - i - sama (Mir 106). Mahfil - i - sama with the experience of mystical love through listening to mystical poetry set to music, but is an expe sense crucial to sama is listening, the encounter is enhanced by powerful rhythm suggesting dhik zikh r ve immersive 110 involves the transmission and engendering of affective and sensory histories. These acts of memorialization resonate equally with extra - musical contexts carrying inheritances from both Islamic Sufi and Indic subcontinental modes of audience participation . Uttara Asha Coorlawala 109 Maria Cizmic, Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press,2011), 24. 110 Judith Becker, Deep Liste ners: Emotion, Music, and Trancing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). the brain to involve memory, feeling, and imagination. [ These] processes are simultaneously physical and psychological, somatic and cognitive (29 ). 86 (2003), offers us a map to read Indian classical dance choreographies and audiences as archives. t her next performance and consequent audience the (structure) body of the dance carries its aesthetic equivalents of that same history. The audience itself ca 111 - 50). Practices of performing, composing, reading and listening to qissa s had historically created collaborative social spaces. Usually but not always performed to musical accompaniment, these cultural practices were not confined to religious sites such as Sufi shrines but also became a part of secular life (Mir 120 - 121). For example, Mir includes an illustration (see fig.5) from Romantic Tales from the Punjab ( 1903), which shows a a mirasi a hereditary musician responding to requests from a crowd at a wedding to perform Hir Ranjha and Ranjha! Hir and Ranjha! O excellent mi rasi pipal tree, a space reserved also for gathering of village elders, panchayats etc.; the mirasi thus occupied a space associated with village communal activities (Mir 121). The collaborative give and take between performer and audience which marks aural and performative cultures in the sub - continent is in evidenced here. As the example illustrates, in these contexts , the audience listen to a tale already known, and interacts with the performer during the performance, thus giving rise to networks of cross - referentiality. In this section, I would like to elaborate on 111 Audience Participation: Essays on Inclusion in Performance , ed. S usan Kattwinkel (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 2003), 49 - 50. 87 listening practices, audience participation and memo ry - formation within the cross - referential In Sufi Music of India and Pakistan: Sound, Context, and Meaning in Qawwali (1986), Regula Burckhardt Qureshi elaborates further on the interpretive exchanges engende red by these sonic/rhythmic cultures. She speaks primarily of the Qawwali . Qawwali is sama realized in practice; it reveals also the strong influence of Hindu religious music (83). However, these participatory conventions hold equally true for other devoti onal Sufi performances and non - devotional aural cultures 112 of the region. They are marked by a particular flexibility and adaptability to context, and a focus on the spiritual and emotional needs of the listener. So the focus lies not on the music (or canti llatory text), but more on the listener and what he draws from - according t the point of ecstasy, words are effectively applied through the power of rhythmic repetition as practiced in zikhr ( Burckhardt Qureshi 107). This power of words and rhythms to evoke a particular mood or emotion is significant. The referential meanings of Qawwali music (including words, rhythms, gestures and mood) form a flexible and dynamic archive from which the social, cultural, and political functions of this sonic cultur e can be assessed. The citational and intertextual aspects of the sacred and secular music networks within which the qissa , kafi nazm /lyric belong, make them a particularly expansive medium of communal memory - - Andalus Remembering Al - 112 One such site is the mushaira - a traditional poetry symposium characterized by collaboration, dialogue, repetition, and innovation. When the poet recites the first line, the audi ence recites it back to him, there is a back and forth, poet repeats, audience follows suit. 88 disciplines bodily habits in such a way as to allow for the construction (invention) and reenactment (imagining) of communal memories and histories (Paul Connerton, among others , suggests that communal memories are formed and mediated through bodily should reveal some of the ways in which communities imagine themselves and cultural others i n the process of remembrance and memorialization (313). I would like to examine an account Pritam gives of one such referential and archival performance of her lyric in her autobiography (1977) 113 . In 1975, when the Pakistani littérateur from Multan, Mashqu r Saabri visited Delhi on the occasion of an Urs [marriage of the pir with God, i.e. his death anniversary], he told me that for the past many years now, a jashn - e - WarisShah (celebration of WarisShah) is held annually which includes exhibitions of folk - art s, folk songs as well as a mushaira . This celebration always commences with my poem WarisShah. On a 100' x 80' stage, an poem is sung for about 25 minutes. The stage i s absolutely shrouded in darkness and then smoke is shown billowing up in a spotlight, and then WarisShah rises from the grave... Famous singers from Pakistan sing each verse, and in accordance thereto, the scenes on the stage keep changing...and when the poem comes to its last part, such a loud echo is created as if the whole of creation is filled with love and happiness. - enactment of communal memories is inflected both by the affective compass of the qissa 113 Outlook, Web , on October 31, 2005 http://www.outlookindia.com/ article/1947/229059. His translation offers more details than that by Krishna Gorowara which I have used elsewhere in the article. 89 fashioned through the stage props. Speaking of the attachments of place and memory, Edward Cas What does such longing mean, moreover, in the middle of the bitter 1971 war between East and West Pakistan triangulated by India a war most emphatically connected to the detritus of 1947? Pnina Werbner and Helene Basu write that Sufism utopian experiential imaginaries shared emotiona throughout my argument, this affective horizon is located within specific vernacular formations that draw on rich inter - crossing histories to animate relationships between memory a nd identity that confound the polarized narratives of the region 114 by Pakistani and Indian artists - Asrar (2012), Gulzar (2007) or the Wadali Brothers (2003) - become critiques of contemporary violence and partitio ns that continue to scar the region. recitation is a quiet, intense narration with background monosyllabic modifying vocals and strings as accompaniment. In an interview to The Times of India , Gulzar discusses how Punjabi literature is indebted to Pritam for infusing it with new idioms to respond to the conditions of 114 The palimpsestic past Pritam harnesses, though, is not a utopian reconstruction of a conflict - free homogeneous community li ke that projected by the nation - state. It is, on the other hand, a trenchant recognition both of the of Sufism is not that of a brand of Islam sanitized and secured for consumption that it has come to represent for a script for a common collaborative culture. 90 contemporary India. from the traditional Punjabi imagery found in poems. It was new. This was the major change she hin the poetic genealogies Pritam deploys, while noting at the same time, her radicalization of them. In a second rendition by the Wadali Brothers, Sufi musicians and singers, we have a different mode of performance here the singing delivery of the poem s et to music is privileged. The music is slow, swelling, and mournful; it begins and ends with haunting chants of Waris with rising and varying notes and repetit ions. There is constant interplay and exchange between the two singers; one singer intones a phrase, the other takes it up, embellishes, emphasizes, and amplifies its meaning through varying repetitions until the phrase/image is both burned into memory and the grief it evokes intensified. One of the most important conditions for s ama is of course the arousal of mystical emotion. In a non - l to be qawwali (Burckhardt - Qureshi 119). The repetitions in varying tones serve to emphasize and re - emphasize the ruptures, traumas and divisions Pritam evokes. If the aim of the sama perception (Kapchan 475), 115 arousal enacted by the Wadali Brothers through the intensification and culmination of rhythms and sounds ushers in a new understanding of trauma, memory and its communities. A listening community glued by shared perceptions is created and reinforced among the audience. This 115 See Debor - 483). 91 Pinjar ( The Skeleton ) 116 (2003); it thus mobilized rich multi - sensorial modalities. Waris Shah 2012) by the Pakistani artist Asrar went viral on the internet upon its release. In his version, while the original refrain is retained, the stanzas in between are replaced to voice contemporary echoes of violence in post - Partition South Asia. The lyrics e cho some of the imagery (of the coiling snakes), words ( Dard - Mandaan Diya Dardiya , (sufferer with those suffering) sounds and sensory geography of the original. However, in the spirit of the adaptability and reflexivity of performance outlined earlier, the y are molded to critique current socio - political contexts. (The five rivers flow with oil rather than life - giving water; religion and sectarian differences churn brutalizing violence, honesty is up for sale and no one listens to the words of the suffering) . Asrar, is a Lahore - based vocalist, composer, lyricist who runs his own production studio called Soul Speaks. He primarily uses the internet and social media as a platform for his work which may be termed Sufi Pop/Rock 117 . Another rendering of this lyric is performed by the Mekaal Hasan Band, a Sufi Rock band formed in Lahore and featuring Indian and Pakistani artists. The song features in their albums Sampooran (2004) and Saptak (2009); its dirge - like vocals are punctuated by the flute, carrying memories of the labile religious metaphors of the eclipsed qissa formation. These newer modalities of circulation occupying the South Asian global imaginary thus deploy and recreate unprec edented forms of shar ed listening and commemoration. 116 Directed by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi, the music had lyrics written by Gulzar. 117 h ttp://tribune.com.pk/story/568636/asrar - searching - for - sufism - in - times - of - pop/ 92 Conclusion The plasticity, incantatory repetitiveness and depth of the lyric combined with the historical and generic boundaries. Commentators such as Jahan Ramazani (2009), Maria Cizmic 25), malleability (Cizmic 156), and sonic analogues to suffering (Cizmic 165). Thus , the elements, through embodied performance, through reception, through repeated contexts of Fari na Mir notes that Amrita Pritam invoking the ethos of this pre - Partition formation would never quite find something like it in either post - Partition India or Pakistan (183). While that is to an extent true, the lyric resonances of this formation continue t o circulate in the post - Partition memorial terrain of South Asia. Crucial work is necessary to identify and sustain them. In this chapter, I have explored the role of poetry and lyric in evoking critical mourning communities in the Post - Partition trauma - sc ape. In the context of South Asia, where cross - fertilized lineages vie with violent border - making practices, the cross - referential perambulations of affect, sound and rhythm demand study. Their role in shaping affective global imaginaries cannot be oversta ted. Michael Nijhawan addresses this issue by arguing that we need to move beyond the association between song and nationalism that older critics like Benedict Anderson privileged. Instead, by studying forms of popular culture and song in contested context s such as post - partition Punjab or Palestine, where daily negotiation of borders is marked by violence, we can glimpse alternate [more inclusive] imaginaries (Nijhawan 146). As we have seen, Partition ar poetic channels into the scarred post - 93 Partition memoryscape. These routes enable deeply connected solidarities sited on critical memory practices that interrupt violent nation - statist frames. By challenging the sublation and cooptation of Partition memo 1990 113). Through them, more peaceable trajectories for the region become possible. 94 CHAPTER 2 Palimpsests of Trauma: Ex cavating Memories in Qurratulain Hyder The unity of India was no longer merely an intellectual conception for me; it was an emotional experience which overpowered me. Jawaharlal Nehru 118 We may need to wander amidst multiple ruins and practice an archeology of the comparative imagination. Michael Rothberg 119 Introduction: Memorial Landscapes in South Asia My dissertation reads the South Asian Partition as an ongoing presence rather than singularly bound to the events of 1947; a presence deeply imbr icated in the traumas of postcolonial modernity. The Partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, as my Introduction argued, was one of the crucial moments marking the break between the colonial and postcolonial era. It was a sem inal event that violently pulled apart communities, polities, and cultures, deepening religious divisions that had not been as sharply drawn earlier. The political, social, and cultural divisions from this event haunt the region from the borderlands of K ashmir to the heartlands of Ayodhya. The effects of sectarian violence (ironically) travel readily across militarized State borders a mosque demolition by the Hindu right - wing on the banks of the Saryu (Ayodhya) in 1992 is mirrored concurrently by violen ce in 118 Nehru, The Discovery of India, 27 . 119 Michael 95 Bombay, the razing of temples in Lahore or mob attacks on Hindus in Dhaka. At such moments 120 2007) created by the religious division of populations and dis tricts in 1947 reverberate around the region to produce vexed subjectivities. The constitution of Pakistan (and later Bangladesh) as identities, histories and lives, a s well as for the reciprocal minorities in the other nations in the region. In his book Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2007), Aamir Mufti sifts the post - World War II Jewish Question in Europe throug h postcolonial filters of the vulnerability of the post - Partition Indian Muslim. He unravels the process of minoritization, via Arendt, to reveal staggeringly traumatic socio - cultural ruptures, thus displacing it from liberal secular narratives. Mufti writ simply a sign of the failed efforts of the League of Nations but rather a necessary product of its during the interwar y ears highlights the radical destabilization and re - inscription of the cultural and social totality at large that is inherent in the minoritization of any one social group or tion of the socius a corollary of citizenship, nationalism, secularism, Partition, exile may be read as the the trajectory of the Indian Muslim, as identified by Mufti, is caught in its crosshairs, South Asia contains other identities marooned also by the exigencies of state and citizen making: Tamils in Sri Lanka, Bihari Muslims in Bangladesh, Gilgit - Baltis in Pakistan etc. to name a few. 120 Gyanendra Pandey in Routine Violence spectacular, aberrant, eventful and instead excavates how violence permeates and is constitutive of everyday minority lives. den, nor aberrant, but part of a sustained, systemic political terror that the nation - state practices towards its citizens and subjects . 9 6 While the violence again st minorities in Pakistan and Bangladesh has grown more - Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 illustrates the - s dilemma took on particular urgency in the immediate post - Partition years where the Muslim minority in India, in particular, could align themselves with the post - independent nation - themselves to a Nehruvian composite culture and contends that the Part created by the 1857 rebellion - - 2). During the e mergence of - public sphere ( Mufti 5). However, as the elitist Nehruvia n complex of political and intellectual secularism that had been tied to the 50 s and 60s postcolonial state in India inevitably collapsed, emancipation, separatism, conversion, the language of state protection and - 3). The normalization of Hindutvaadi the Verge of The Discovery of India (1949), 97 wi th cultural and political imaginaries that make havoc of any notion of a coherent and self - contained national culture, and instead of the classical culture of the Indic world look outside this subcontinental sphere to confident, celebratory tones 121 in The Discovery of India , with its seemingly casual dismissal of other narratives, have come to represent the height of Nehruvian vision. As we have seen, in Chapter One, ho wever, anxieties and insecurities of the new state determined, even constituted, this confident screen. My current chapter argues that Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder, who is often linked with this Nehruvian project of nationalizing a civilizational past, pr esents instead through Sita Haran (1960) translated as Sita Betrayed by C.M. Naim 122 in 1999, an uncanny and nationalist narratives and praxes. By spatializing, temp oralizing and collectivizing eeriness and melancholy through some of the very sites (geographic, historical, cultural, textual etc.) that - infused palimpsests is located very m Muslim separatism. My chapter looks afresh at the moment of Partition and nation - building, focusing on the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, to excavate affective histories of South Asia obscured b 121 th is against the grain, linking it also with other nationalisms. See, for instance, Nehru on the Khilafat movement, the Indian Muslim agitation on behalf of the Ottoman Caliphate after its defeat in the First World War (DI, 350);Note 9; p. 277. 122 Hyder insis ted on translating/transcreating her own work into English although as the process was slow, very few someone else to translate ( to C.M. Naim) after much persuasion - Asaduddin, in Rakshanda Jalil ed. Qurratulain Hyder and The River of Fire (2011 ). 98 Sita Betrayed , which, however, casts memorialization in uncanny, darker terms. Hyder constructs a trans - subcontinental trauma sensorium a memorial landscape shaped by sensory experiences to contain the marginalized, affective histories of the Partition dispossessed that are obscured by the The Discovery of India . The protagonist of University, is presented as a reader of obscure cultural and social histories that cannot quite be resolved within either the Nehruvian dialectic of antiquity within modernity that the new Indian from the 123 . Her mapping of history and memory, as I will demonstrate, is structured via palimpsestic surfaces that represent a melancholic post - Partition South Asian landscape one that also reflects the tempora l breaks of history 124 . The post - Partition affective terrain as we have seen in the previous chapter was, and (Kabir 23) that Partition had rendered inaccessib le. However, this longing was punctured also by 123 - colonial S anskritic The Discovery of India cultural roots outside India in Baghda d, Spain and Constantinople, see esp. p. 262. Official Pakistani historiography identity. See Aitzaz Ahsan, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakis tan (Oxford, New York and Delhi: Oxford zma Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (May 2011): 173 - 185. See esp. p. 177. 124 My use of palimpsests as a trope weaving materiality of memory in lived spaces with literary reading techniques is drawn from Andreas Huysseyn , Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), esp. p.7 99 suspicion, bewilderment, and a sense of being caught between the familiar and the strange 125 . 70) that categorizes the relationship between citizens of the rival states in post - Partition South Asia. (She uses it to refer to co - religionists of rival nation - states.) The imperatives of citizenship create a dynamic of suspicion based on a paradox of sa me but not inflected with suspicion, resonates strongly with Partition severances. While Jalal uses it to refer to co - religionists of rival nation - states, it cou ld, I posit be multiplied to configure the perplexing relationship between severed linguistic communities (Punjabi for instance, Urdu and Bengali). This uncanny and angled mirroring is also evident in post - Partition journeys across the border 126 . The trope o f elseness, carries associations of elsewhere (or the dialectic between home and displacements and migrations. Qurratulain Hyder, in a sense, reads post - Partition, pos tcolonial 1950s South Asia along Sita Betrayed , Hyder particularly focuses on the post - Partition land scape, which is inflected with memory; her depictions are characterized by repeated gestures of unearthing the past. However, in privileged in his readings on Indian history, her post - Partition memorial landscape offers a - 127 Rather than being assimilated and digested into the present, the past is mise - en - scène is set up 125 Khwabrau (1990) from Chapter One, for instance. 126 For instance, many first - hand accoun unsettlement that first - time travelers across South Asian borders feel. Shadow Lines engages with this. 127 See Martin Jay , , War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century , ed. Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19999), 221 - 239. 100 histories 128 ally inflected - lines, evocatively representing the homes, families, and identities. My thesis is that Hyder mobilizes tropes of the palimpsest and of montage to construct spatial and temporal projections of mourning, melancholia, and memory 129 . Thus, importantly, this focus on affective landscapes and histories enables her to intervene in theories of postcol onial trauma, by producing a new repertoire of affects/effects. Stef Craps and Gert Buelens for instance, urge a move away from the pathologization and depoliticization of social trauma, seeking attentiveness to material (social and political) transformati on alongside psychological and testimonial healing 130 . Expanding these critiques, my essay seeks to show how evoking Partition mourning and memory in materiality, while also challenging Euro - American centric theories of trauma. In doing so, it is at the same time, invested in moving beyond the discursive and heavily inves ted in realism and naturalism on which I will elaborate on later. The temporalization of elseness is not only spatially registered through the trope of a mise - en - scène is set 128 Ahmad, In The Mirror of Urdu: Recompositions of Nation and Community 1947 - 65 (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South As ia: Love, Loss and Liberation , ed. Kavita Panjabi (Kolkata: Orient Black Swan, 2011), 256 - 287. 129 Aijaz Ahmad, In The Mirror of Urdu , argues that Hyder in Aag ka Darya deploys montage, very much Eisensteinian to assemble landscapes as regenerative, 10. Sukr ita Paul Kumar in her interview with Hyder in Conversations on Modernism 130 Studies in the Novel 40.1 and2 (2008): esp. 4 - 6. 101 up r fixity and uncovers observations subjacent graffiti, scrawls, and traces often under more manifest signs. These inscriptions, variously exuding insecurity, clandestineness, or mocking irony, as I will show, constitute an address at odds with that of the official Statist and Neo - Imperial stances. This excavating impetus 131 extends to other surfaces, surfaces eroded and carved by Partition traumas: fragments of pre - Partition memory and affective sensoria are repeatedly unburied by characters, and cast their uncanny shadow on the ir contemporary habitus; artifacts lost or abandoned by fleeing refugees are unearthed by arriving ones; poems in inaccessible or half - remembered cross - pollinated vernaculars (like Sufi Hindavi poetry) have meanings ferreted out that haunt cross - religious (and national) romances; postcolonial landscapes are reimagined and carved anew through past literary and performative modes; traumatic histories encrypted within tombs, relics, ruins and memorials are revealed; dream and memory states, hallucinations and internal monologues unearth collective traumas, and so on. In this chapter, I would like to continue my exploration of creative works that are situated eccentrically from formulaic representations of the Partition and thus yield suppressed histories. Wh ile I agree with Ananya Kabir on the need for vernacularizing affect and trauma studies 132 to Mufti), statelessness and dislocation thrown up by the South Asian Pa rtition is inextricably 131 The palimpsestic surfaces and excavating impetus is not an organizational metaphor I employ; Hyder deploys it as a trope as we shall see. 132 See Kabir (2014) p. 72 - 73. 102 linked to the post - World War II situation; they were almost contemporaneous events 133 after all. synchronous, if definitively discrete events. Mufti creates an internationalist Third Worldist crisis. In his Marxist critique of intertwined bourgeois liberal narratives of Enlightenment, Imperialism, Nationho od, Secularism and Citizenship, his attack on the evacuation of the public sphere of all signs of religo - cultural difference is defiantly not an anti - secularist gesture, but a rigorous critique of Enlightenment, European imperialism and its detritus. Kabir however against the theories of understanding cultural loss and trauma (often derived from the same Euro - American imperialist ethos) that need to be rethought when applying to distinct contexts of loss and healing. It brings us thus, to a th eoretical engagement with the affective or memorial turn in literary and Postcolonial Studies. Theoretical Framing of Postcolonial Trauma, Affect and Partition Studies As my Introduction has illuminated, studies of trauma, mourning and memory have been influenced by the affective turn in the humanities and social sciences 134 . Studies of affect, my work proposes are a significant entry point into understanding embodied emotion, memory and trauma. They offer us among other things, a way to understand the sub immersion in the material, phenomenological world a crucial aspect of understanding embodied, externalized and collective emotions such as those associated with socio - political losses. Affect - mediated understandings of trauma allow us to read cultural productions that have 133 I owe the sharpness of this observation to Debali Mookerjea - - 29, 2015;Panel Chairs: Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Gautam Basu Thakur. 134 See for instance, Patricia Clough The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (2007). 103 - reliance on the realist novel. It is a way to bring somatic and kinesthetic readings into play along with traditional te xtual/semiotic readings with their reliance on linearity and linear temporality. My first chapter has argued that it is via these that we return to artists like Amrita Pritam derided as sentimental and clichéd, to uncover a yet unexplored storehouse of mat erial to take Partition Studies to the next level. Qurratulain Hyder has also variously described her keen sense of sensorial grounding in the world. Particularly relevant to my current chapter is this sensorial - temporal cast to memory and affect studies. Public memory, he urges, is always attached to place: it occurs when people meet and interact and is enacted in a place (32). Not only does place produce memory it also embodies it. Remembering place is related closely to several auditory, visual and kinesthetic modalities (Casey 189) which furnish convenient points of attachment for memories (189). Partition Studies is slowly bringing within its purview cognitive a nd affective mapping of material traces of Partition trauma that embody spatial and temporal aspects of Pakistan and Kandy, Sri Lanka inflected with the affective his tories of these regions. Recasting Partition Studies through Affect To reiterate, the varied trajectories of trauma and affect theory lend themselves to situated evocations Laurel Steele writes: 104 [Hyder] made choices to represent a [post - Partition] reality tha t was unacceptable to Urdu versus English (she claimed both); Muslim versus Hindu (she wrote of a syncretic culture where relationships were complex and symbiotic); In dia versus Pakistan (she wrote about both) to her, these divisions were simplistic and artificial (187) 135 . Aijaz Ahmad in In The Mirror of Urdu: Recompositions of Nation and Community 1947 - 65 (1993,) has written evocatively about how Urdu literary and cult ural production in South Asia was irrevocably changed by the Partition and yet its linguistic and cultural communities overrode statist borders (3 - 4). It is important to point out here that while lyric poetry negotiated the Partition through metaphor and i magery, in most of immediate post - Partition Urdu fiction, there narrative reparation from trauma (Ahmad 4). The noted short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, for instance, belong to th is trend and faith in naturalistic representation. The feelings of exile and dislocation, however, lyrically and affectively haunt the sub - - 1950s. Ahmad observes that m any of these writers [including sense [ my italics] precisely, of location [ italics original] in reference to an affective and senso rial reading. One important influence on the work of Hyder was the genre of the Naya Afsana (New Story) of the 1940 and 50s, which according to Bodh Prakash in Writing Partition: Aesthetics and Ideology in Hindi and Urdu Literature (2009) employed a psycho logized realist stance to express contemporary situations employing newer perspectives (33). Some of the key themes of the New Story he identifies such as fear and 135 We just Staye Annual of Urdu Studies 23(2008): 187 . 105 suspicion in personal relationships, the transience of human relationships, the focus on wom interweaving themes that are of interest to my study. While stories in the earlier realist stage were focused on incidents, the New Story such as focuses on an interior scape, feelings of alienation, and other tropes that were common to post - industrial West and to the post - colonies, albeit in different ways 136 . In Pakistani Urdu jadeediyat (modernism) was inflected by the Liaqat Ali Khan and Ayub Khan military regimes. Urdu writers in tending to mine the worlds left behind in India, drew ire and charges of treason to the forward - looking project of the new Pakistani State (Prakash 40). In my by writers on both sides of the border India and Pakistan combined memory, affect, and the trauma of displacement in particularly situated ways, making them rich sources of study in postcolonial South Asian contexts One critic, Sukrita Amma Basant Kya Hoti Hai? Aag ka Darya helps us gain a situated understanding of displacement and memory 137 . Kumar reminds us that of migrants from North India) asking what the Hindustani word for Spring Basant meant. This term was unusual to her as opposed to the Far si - inflected term Bahaar due to post - Partition Statist linguistic regimes (107 - 116). With the loss of the Sanskrit word, was lost an entire sensorium embodied in North Indian (Ganges - Yamuna valley) Springs distinct from the marine and desert influences in Karachi. Paul Kumar in The New Story: A Scrutiny of Modernity in Hindi and Urdu Short Fiction dislocations in Hindi and Urdu literature interacted with modernist modes of representing 136 See Prakash (2009) 17 - 47. 137 Qurratulain Hyder and The River of Fire: The Meaning, Scope and Significance of her Legacy , ed. Rakshanda Jalil ( Oxford, New York and Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011) 106 fragmented ruptured twentieth century metropolitan worlds. She examines how the New Story n the subcontinent - 138 . Drawing on these modernist artistic modes, Qurratulain Hyder not only examines blurri ng the divide between past/present, mind/body, cognition/emotion, inside/outside and private/ public via the sensorial apparatus she employs, she opens fresh affective routes to social losses. So, while Sita Betrayed produces an intensely subjective locating that loss within a collective sensorial world. Here, to reiterate what I have stated earlier, affect - mediated postcolonial trauma th eory with its access to how emotions are exteriorized or how sensoria are embodied, can offer us a more penetrating look into Hyder and keep her work intellectually alive 139 140 of trauma through tropes of the palimpsest and modes of the montage, as mentioned earlier, allow spatial and temporal projections of grief and memory. In sum, I believe, exploring her affective landscapes and their histories we can get a distinctive sense of material traumas as they permeated Partition history and shaped the conditions of postcoloniality that the subcontinent experienced as both independence and rupture. 138 Both Bodh Prakash and Paul Kumar briefly mention Hyder in their analyses; Prakash (2009) comments on her Aag ka Darya (160 ) , an beautiful merger of the past with the present and a fine treatment of human history with private sentiment in her short stories (31). 139 Hyder in an interview with Sukrita Paul Kumar, Conversations on Modernism (Shimla: Indian I nstitute of Advanced Study, 1990), 53. Hyder acknowledges that both Urdu scholarship with its outmoded models and western academia where her works were not accessible mostly due to lack of translations have ignored her leaving her 140 By sensorium I mean a phenomenological world shaped by sensory experiences. 107 Summary of Sita Betrayed few years in adulterous affair with a common friend, that leads to the collapse of her marriage with Jamil (although she does not ask for a divorce yet) and loss of claims of custody over her young son, Rahul. At the very start of the novel, on an ordinary November afternoon, Sita hears that Jamil has remarried 141 be called that), and casts her among variou s isolating, melancholic landscapes: in Delhi where she lives and works and moves among artist and theater friends, she remains isolated. Later, she travels with her cousin - in - law by marriage and friend, Bilqis, to Karachi for a family wedding where she me ets the handsome and irreverent Irfan Kazmi. They grow emotionally closer as they undertake a journey through the landscapes of Sindh and Punjab, while being moved by the affective surroundings to unburden their memories to each other. They keep in touch c landestinely and later meet in Sri Lanka where Jamil and Irfan are both attending international conferences 142 . Sita plans to ask Irfan to negotiate with Jamil for custody rights over Rahul. The plan goes awry. She goes traveling among the ruins of Polonnaru wa where an American political scientist with an amateur interest in archaeology, Dr. Leslie Marsh and she meet and begin a brief relationship. She then returns to a (violently jealous) Irfan. Irfan and Jamil bond over a common linguistic Awadhi heritage o f Sufi Hindavi poetry and Irfan musters up the courage to tell Jamil he wants to marry Sita. Sita and Irfan move to Paris and for a brief while seem happy. 141 Sita and Jamil had a religious ceremony so Jamil could remarry under the existing laws for Muslim marriage in 1950s India . 142 In these conferences, we get a glimpse of the Non - Aligned Movement and international re - organization in the Cold War Era . 108 dur a liaison with an old acquaintance, a very famous Bengali painter. Irfan hears the rumors and to divorce her and Sita decides to return to Paris and writes Irfan a missive. On arriving in Paris on a cold rainy January afternoon, a strange man opens the door to their flat and tells the shocked Sita that Irfan Kazmi and Madame Kazmi (a young colleagu e) are on their honeymoon. The novel ends with strains of a familiar viraha Cordoba returning to haunt Sita and memories of Bilqis cinemat ic frames and shots. A strong gust of wind bangs the door shut on unresolved inner lives. Trauma - infused Palimpsests: Sindh Woven into the narrative of Sita Betrayed are the material and affective histories of South Asia, which are imbricated into each ot her, and which emerge layer by layer, like a palimpsest. However, as I have mentioned in my introduction, she inflects these histories not with a sense of The repeated acts of a reading and disinterment of buried pasts by Sita, social historian par excellence and verbally expansive narrator of pasts - is consistently marked by a an eerie, melancholy slant. This has a lot in common with what Elizabeth Bowen (one acknowledged influences 143 - (324). In Hyder, these presences in pre - and minoritizations. 143 Hyder counts among her influences T.S Eliot, Virginia Woolf and especially Elizabeth Bowen (Narrative: A seminar, ed. Amiya Dev, p. 209. I wi of Sita Betrayed. 109 The first significant disin terment is performed interestingly not by Sita, but by her - Partition memories of their grand house - in - law in their humble new home in Delh class Muslim family [their name Rahmat is inscribed on the house] during the Partition riots 144 (44). The description of the sparely furnished room includes a large glossy print of the Hindu God and Muhammad is his Prophet. She wants Bil permeated with resonances of insecurity, abandonment and dispossession. The portable steel The complex spatialization through concealment an d revelation and mise - en - scène of through their violent evacuations. Wh en Bilqis and Sita are in Karachi for a family wedding, Bilqis berates her relatives for the absurdity of clinging on to old names of North Indian places in their recasting of Sindh as home. Mohajirs name their homes in memory of their places in Uttar Prad 144 In these abandoned houses with their abandoned relics and objects, we can read the material histories of displacement and homelessness. A large number of ab andoned houses in cities like Delhi, Karachi, Lahore, Kolkata, and Dhaka were similarly occupied by new refugees after they had been hurriedly or forcefully vacated and become repositories of such relics. 110 de - Hinduize it. In displacements such as this one, where a single syllable deletes entire cultural and linguistic histories, yet retains traces of the disturbing origi nal, we find more instances of the unsettling palimpsests Hyder employs to embody Partition trauma. The unsettlement I mention, can be explained further via Laura U Marks (2000) discussion of the memories of cultural displacement encoded in material object s. In The Skin of the Film - Deleuzian terminology to explain how when an image surfaces from another place, another meaning of objects is not encoded metaphorically but through physical contact (80). The psychologized landscapes mate rialized, in particular, through palimpsestic spaces like Sindh activated through visceral contact, bringing together the senses, emotions, histories, all accruin g to the meaning of the material objects, that I analyze in the next section. While the urban palimpsests in Karachi evoke haunting presences, Hyder chooses to locate her most unsettling disinterments in the deserts and riverine islands of Sindh. Sita and Bilqis along with their cousins and Irfan decide to drive from Karachi to Lahore and along this nostalgic 145 journey, not only do Sita and Irfan get emotionally closer, but they do so by excavating memories and histories from the loss - infused landscape. In Senses Still (1994), Nadia Seremetakis reminds us that while nostalgia often carries a pejorative sense of romantic pain to journey. It also evokes the senso ry dimension of memory in exile and estrangement; it 145 For both Sita and Irfan, the ruin - dotted landscape evokes memories of past traces and erasures. 111 mixes bodily and emotional pain and ties painful experiences of spiritual and somatic exile to the the melancholia that infuses this journey in Hyder. Hyder then, recasts Sindh as a ruin dotted mise - en - scène ; instead of statist archaeology, and the contemporary contestations between Hindus and Muslims over claiming the Indus and t - war Berlin in The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (2005), Sindh embodies a landscape of trauma mattered compositions uncover drive to interpret the landscape and its history to a disoriented and largely i gnorant Irfan, when as a refugee in India they can be accessible to her only temporarily and mediated by the exigencies of citizenship 146 inferiority (he is mockingly self - derisive a bout his weakness in history, his shame at not being outsider are all signposts of his displacement as a Mohajir from North India. If Sita excavates personal a nd historical pasts from a once - familiar topography, Irfan uses his angled perspective of his own dispossessed past in the Yamuna - Gangetic plains of India, but also invokes the homelessness and statelessness he has witnessed in his global travels. 146 See scene at the railway station in Lahore and the confusion of the police who cannot equate Jamil with her Indian citizenship and Pakistani relatives (Hyder 82 - 3). 112 - blown decrepit mud and and deposits in the bordering Thar Desert and the rich cultural, intellectual and architectural past of the region embodied in the massive stone mausoleums and crypts in the City of the Dead on Makli Hill. Makli Hill is known to Sindhis as the burial place of sawa lakh (125000) saints in an area o f roughly six miles. A study of this site Makli Hill byAnnemarie Schimmel (1983), begins heritage site 147 i Hill necropolis through various historical perspectives 148 all the way from the Gangetic heartlands. She also mentions the accounts of Sufi poets and scholars who congregated there in migratory and cross - pollinated rubrics, but multiplies them with the Puranic/Indic casting of Sindh via Sanskrit epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana (a standard Nehruvian trope), moving through historical stages, conquests, migrations and confluences (Greek, Scythian, Buddhist). She talks at length about the labile and emotionally shared religious life - worlds of Sufism in Sindh . However, there is none of the essentialist Nehruvian claiming of South Asian 147 For more on the contesting claims of nation - statist versus popular collective memorialization in South Asia see Monuments, Objects,Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India . Cultures of History 2. New York : Columbia University Press, 2004. Guha Thakurtha writes carry authority and claim. The tension between nationalist valuation of monuments and the various alternative configurations in popular and collective me 148 / A rose like your pretty face is albat ta (6). 113 longing and anguish. In contrast to Indian and Pakistani heuristic interpretive re gimes,then, Sita continues to read the landscape and its features as runes of pain: for instance, she specifically recalls how she uncomfortable silence an d surprise at the profusion of graves in Sindh (56) immediately after - my villages my sarcastic banter with Sita, he too eventually starts excavating buried pasts. He asks Sita why Hindus attach sacredness to the pipal tree (Ficus religiosa or the sacred fig) recalling that whenever Muharram t azias (processions) touched a pipal tree in Hard oi, riots would break out. The unsettling disinterment of violent specters challenges the syncretistic accounts of Sufi life - worlds Sita had been painting. The challenge is quickly withdrawn, though when Irfan muses on how his mother too, moved by the sync reticism of shared lifeworlds, would light evening lamps, a Hindu ritual, under pipal trees. But the unsettlement lingers. Once again, the discovery of sedimented pasts does not thus proceed on the celebratory mode of Nehruvian national vision, but uncover - Partition violence. Later when Irfan asks Sita about her childhood in a Freudian move to relax her (59), memories of similar conversations with Jamil move her to a bitter anger. In response, Irfan lets his guard down and reveals his reading of the ruin - dotted landscape that carry reminders of other 114 West Berlin, Hong Kong, Jewish refugee ghettoes in America, Palestinian camps in Jordan Asia have undergone a veritable description of cultural trauma. This, in turn, encourages Sita to wander among multiple ruins within the comparative archaeology of her experiences as a Partition refugee in transit camps at various Indian locations 149 . the postcolonial landscape as an perspectives of modernism needs to be the focus of further study. Leaving behind the desolation, dust and wind - blown desert sands, the traveling party enters the Indus river plains, which are presented through the melancholic composition we have - removed from the dominant claims of either nation - stat e on the region. While the archaeological India - 150 .Hyder, by spatializing melancholy through the (then) abandoned Hindu temple complex at Sadh Belo or Bela, an island in the river Indus near the town of Sukkur, 149 See epigraph to this chapter from Michael 150 See esp.Nehru, Discovery of India , 33 - 37 and Ahsan, The Indus Saga , 8 - 9. 115 culture, analogous to the fluid Sufi identities of Sindh that resist religious binaries 151 .In the new - that only Sita and Irf an go around the island reading traces of obscured histories. The rest of the party, tired after the journey, watch them from a distance. We see Sita from their perspective herself a haunted figure among the ruins. As Nadir, her brother - in - ita climbing lone figure among landscapes of void or loss, recurs many times in the novel 152 . The temple complexes of Sadh Bela have strange, hideous and fright ening stone figures fixed to them (possibly fierce tantric manifestations of Hindu deities), which cast the site in an eerie light; this eeriness is, however, emphatically linked to the unsettled traumas of Partition. Right under these fierce protecting fi injunctions scribbled onto the wall surfaces addressed to the Devi/ Mother Goddess begging her Partitio n violence for India. Each marking of graffiti mentions the exact day of the month in 1947, when they scraped their desperation and insecurity onto the walls. Partition trauma materially (through graffiti scraped onto stone) carves and erodes spaces of sac redness and piety. The visceral memory of the loss violently abrades the syncretic, labile affect - worlds embodied in 151 Kabir was a mystic poet and saint and an important figure in the Bhakti movement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in South Asia; he was of labile religious identity and constructed syncretic religious subjects through his intensely emotional dohas Narrative: A Seminar and Sufi traditions informed cultural, political and affectiv e spheres in South Asia, see Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South Asia: Love, Loss and Liberation , ed. Kavita Panjabi (Kolkata: Orient BlackSwan, 2011), esp. Introduction 1 - 52. 152 This may be linked with representations of viraha focusing on t he emotions of the heroine and hinging on her sense of estrangement and vulnerability especially in relation to her surroundings. For more see Kumkum Sangari, Poetics and Politics of Sufism and Bhakti in South A sia: Love, Loss and Liberation , ed. Kavita Panjabi (Kolkata: Orient BlackSwan, 2011), 256 - 287. 116 - size idol of Radha (again evoking Bhakti affective spaces) th of the dying light of the sun (Hyder 66). The violence frozen in that act of destruction and the ife - like feminine figure haunt the atmosphere. Agitated, Irfan urges Sita to leave the temple. His agitation maybe understood further by excavating his embeddedness in the Awadhi (found in the city of Lucknow) culture of Hardoi in North India carved by Radha - Krishna/Bhakti affect - worlds. Sita immediately likens the place to a ghost town and reminisces about her childhood, with its myths linking dreams to evil spirits that fly through the air glowing like lamps. Eerily she points out signs of similar hauntings in the dusk around them. She adds The visual rendering of light and gloom in this scene is cinematic 153 . In these scenes that I have sketched, the affective projections of trauma, absence and void onto the surrounding landscape and its multiple histories allows us access into the immersion in the material, phenomenological world. Instead of presenting trauma as individual pathologization, Hyder effects an externalization, a steeping and a grafting of loss and melancholia onto sensory and material wo rlds. Additionally, so many histories of myth, religion, and personal memory converge here that the ghosts that haunt are not mere interior states, but though she did not use the term trauma is to be found in Elizabeth Bowen. In her Preface to the American publication of The Demon Lover , Bowen writes that the hallucinations in her stories are not a peril; nor are they studies of mental peril. They are ways of co mpleting fractured selves 153 See for instance, Michael Chion (1994) who writes in Audi - Vision: Sound on Screen 117 and of selves fractured by memories and collective histor ies. Furthermore, Bowen also observes that - consciousnesses [sic] of everybody repeatedly in the novel, Hyder mo bilizes a similar overflowing, surcharging and collective merging of Partition traumas. from the conflicting claims of divided communities, but also colors the celebrato ry trajectory of Indus at Sukkur, with its massive barrages and efficient water management systems, into a rating corpses of unmarried women in wedding finery, perhaps evoked by the overturned Radha idol in turn evokes the hundreds of thousands of women raped and mutilated during Partition. In this climate of mourning Sita and Irfan share, there is an absence of specific references to Partition violence ( unlike the naturalistic stories in Partition literature,) but the sensorium of void and eeriness creates a particular access d record of - neo - a stranger (68). The narrative tells us that Sindh of 1957 offered no sense of belonging, the address (in both sense of the term) provided by the landscape is to a Sita Mirchandani of Karol Bagh, Delhi (68); it cuts her off from the emotional attachment sh e once could claim. Once again, the moonlight on the waves and the city lights in the distance interact with the darkness to add visual 118 Sindh is even more f irmly affirmed as belonging contrary to statist logic to those who are most dispossessed. In a biting retort to a teasing jibe from a cousin - in - law about her Sindh, Sita historically held haris 154 whom you have never felt national pasts and futures, but within cultural and political losses arising out of multiple minor claims to the landscape by dispossessed subjects. By layering dispossession onto the landscape through trauma - infused palimpsests, graffiti, and visual depth, Hyder excavates affective histories of the Partition that typically remain unmined 155 . She opens a way to read Partition trauma not as individualized pathology or a crisis in representation, bu t as a material and affective transformation of memory and subjectivity. Trauma - infused Palimpsests: Sri Lanka Hyder recasts Sri Lanka as she did Sindh as a ruin dotted mise - en - scène .By locating much of these sections among historical, architectural, rit ualistic and literary remnants that point emphatically to palimpsestic Buddhist and Hindu pasts that cannot be contained under singular rubrics, she gestures to other affective and memorial fault - lines of postcolonial South Asia. that embodies what Rothberg terms a practice of comparative imaginations. Sita Betrayed is in that sense a singular work that reads Partition as a s ymptom of postcolonial modernity, by bringing under its excavatory purview, other conflicts that were rivin g (and continue to splinter) the region. In Sri Lanka: The Invention of Enmity (1994), David 154 from Harijans, a Child of Hari/Vishnu") is a term popularized by Mohandas Gandhi for referring to Dalits, or Untouchables. 155 155 119 Little discusses how in the immediate aftermath of decolonization and during the Cold War years, religion came to occupy an increasingly prominent place in [global ] questions of war and peace cultural isolation and insecurity, and to imperatives of nation - s to restore to preeminence what they took to be the ancient prerogative of the Sinhala majority, and especially of its language and religion. Tamil revivalists, responding in part to Sinhala assertiveness, employed similar appeals by demanding a political arrangement favorable to protecting their ethnic identity and interests. In sum, Little argues, the conflict drove its emotional force from competing beliefs about legitimate rule and sacred authority (x) and historical, architectural, ritualistic remnant s became (indeed remain) important battlegrounds. - - ridden spaces of central and north readings illuminate t he landscapes and affect - worlds of historically porous South Indian and Sinhala civilizations marked by an intermixture of, religion, language, culture, architecture, literature etc., that the political vicissitudes of postcolonial Sri Lanka find impossibl e to acknowledge 156 . independence in 1948.The political success of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in the elections of 1956 made the years 1956 - 8 quite turbulent in terms of Sinhala - Tamil civil riots. The first major outbreak of post - independence collective violence occurred in May 1958 which is the summer 156 Sita Betrayed in Buddhist l ife - worlds (temples, relics, statues, been] interwoven with the changing politics of the island and how that meshing contribute[s] to ethnic con 120 estrangement against the political turmoil, but does not enter into details. These historical details are as follows: the Tamil minority protested against the Sinhala - Buddhist government and its policies through civil disobedience (Gandhian satyagraha ) demonstrations that provoked violent r etaliation from the Sinhalese (Little 4). Nuwara Eliya and Polonnaruwa (central to Sita - Tamil pogroms. In Polonnaruwa, many hundred Sinhalese attacked a train believed to be car rying Tamil passengers on May 22/23. A Sinhalese planter and mayor of Nuwara Eliya was shot dead and collective violence against Tamils spread in the north central and eastern provinces. In a conversation Sita has with a young, Tamil Sri Lankan journalist in a Colombo café, as newspaper reports of another big riot in the north fly about amidst another day of uncertainty in the capital, Sita er mocks instead, and then asks her why there are riots in her country (140). They go on to discuss the ties between postcolonial nation - building and neo - imperialist and capitalist politics (140) . In its excavation of interconnected histories of exile, then, the novel expands and multiplies its address to include a trans - dispossession. Apart from minorities like Sindhi refugees in India, o r Mohajirs heartlands in Pakistan (the stock characters who people Partition narratives), Sita Betrayed is radical in its constitution of a trans - South Asian and a global exilic ethos. monuments in exact concurrence with the outbreak of Tamil - Sinhala riots of May 1958 allows the co - mapping of multiple losses onto the landscape. These Sri Lankan sections are framed via rich intertextual repertoires: the poetry of T Ramcharitmanas 121 Padmavat (Hindavi Sufi Romance) which function as translator C.M. Naim notes as en scene. They also underscore the journeys to Sri Lanka (Sinhala dvipa ) that involve a quest by a male hero (Ram and Ratansen) in search of a woman (Sita and Padmavat). Both texts are animated by a sense of viraha / longing in her enamored husband goes in search of the famed queen Padmavat. In Hyder, crucially, the virahini trope is amplified to meet contemporary exigencies: the text makes clear references to its vision of an alienating modernity and postcoloniality, where the woman is, in particular, perpetually estranged. Sita Betrayed is radical in its constitution of a trans - South Asian and even global exilic ethos that is postcolonial. By making the subjectivity of the virahini (woman separated from her lover in subcontinental literary and affective traditions) central to these entangled exilic histories, while at the same time subverting its affective and migratory tropes, Hyder locates female vulnerability and loss anew within contemporary frameworks. During t he long (and indeed ongoing) season of betrayals that is postcolonial modernity, ground for examining this work through the lens of trauma and affect theory when h e links 122 specifically gendered ways from her cultural sensoriu m 157 . While the summer sun in Colombo, the red palash trees and sunbathing western tourists landscapes are steeped in multiple melancholias, inflected by postcolonial conflicts as by gendered erasures and exclusions. To ref to Colombo at the same time that Jamil and Irfan are attending international conferences. She intendso use Irfan as a mediator while negotiating with Jamil for custody rights over their son Rahul. Ho wever, the very condition of asking Irfan to mediate on her behalf becomes, later, symptomatic of a patriarchal alliance between the two men that exclude her even while eroticizing her. At first, Jamil, although remarried, is violently jealous of Irfan and rumors abound among the subcontinental conference - abducting Sita from Jamil. Irfan casts this in an ironic light by worrying that this would spark off a political crisis between the two nations. Both in their anim osity and later alliance, Sita is present to the men only as an object to either contest or bond over. Jamil and Irfan eventually exchange verses from Hindavi Sufi poetry (from their common Awadhi heritage) in a heavily allusive encounter to which Sita rem ains a cultural and gendered outsider. Irfan repeatedly cuts Sita off (albeit half - mockingly) while repeating chaupahis Ramcharitmanas Padmavat that a drunk Jamil had earlier recited to him. This within labile cultural heritages like those of a historic Awadh where Sufi poets freely borrowed 157 The third and fourth sections of the novel located in the midst of a bitterly cold Delhi winter and a wet dismal Parisian January complete her sense of alienation, betrayal and abandonment by Irfan 157 . The finite space of the dissertation will prevent me from examining these fully. 123 from Hindu im absent. Thus these very cultural sites, cast by nationalists like Nehru as models of secular re in like the modern nation - in - the making perhaps?) At the end of her stay in Sri Lanka, she is no closer to a divorce from Jamil or custody rights over Rahul. In travelling American scholar, Sita agrees to move with Irfan to Paris while waiting for a divorce 158 . Sri Lanka then is the locus of unsettling palimpsests inflected with gendered dislocations. The most startling of these are embodied through the ironic graffiti scrawled on the Mirror Wall of Sigiriya (Lion - Rock) dating from the eight to the tenth centuries based on paleography. Sita visits these with the American political scientist with an amateur interest in archaeology, Dr Leslie Marsh who is ostensibly in South Asia on a pedagogical project of setting the natives right about their misguided leftist ideologies. Enamored with Sita, he follows her until they meet among the ruins of Polonnaruwa. Leslie is haunted by his woundi ng and imprisonment in Burma in World War II been stationed in Kandy. Sri Lanka is thus the site of multiple interpenetrating traumas for both - imperial peda postcolonial histories of the landscape. Sita reads gendered dislocations 159 onto various palimpsestic pasts musealized around them in colonial and neo - colonial nationalist frames. 158 I will not have time here to examine the legal contexts that shaped her decisions. 159 British plunder ers who had usurped his throne. 124 ndered exile is mapped onto the affective surfaces of Sigiriya, arguably - inscriptions that are at a slant from official scripts. At the site of Sigiriya (Lion - Rock), a rock 200 meters high t hat rises over immobile even as frightening lithification of affect once again conceals multiple t raumatic sediments. On the one hand, she is, referring to the obscure (to Leslie) history of the usurper Kassapa or Kashyapa(477 - 95 AD) who having killed his father and driven out his half - brother the legitimate heir, Mogulna, built his fort at the top of the cliff - face and lived there for eighteen years until Mogulna returned from exile in India with a strong army and defeated him. Kashyapa then committed suicide on the battlefield (117). Hewn into the rock, are also g endered traumas: the king of Sri Lanka , Dhattusen, had a daughter who was married to his army chief. One day, after being struck by her husband with a The army chief colluded with Kashypa to murder throne. The vulnerability of women as exchange objects of patriarchal violence is thus materialized in stone, a reminder of their continuing role as pawns in personal (Sita - Jamil - Irfan triangle) or collective (Par tition riots) contexts. 160 This materialization or monumentalization 161 and Graffitii in Sigiriy - two mural paintings of [large - breasted, ample - - two 160 The fratricidal violence evocative of sectarian violence, India as a site of exile, and Indian military might as a pawn in Sri Lankan power historically are other narratives of trauma carved in stone. 161 The erasures of m onumentalization and memorialization have been much talked about (Huysseyn for instance) but the subjacent, minor traces that require excavation invite an attentive engagement that may recast memory and forgetting in gendered terms. 125 feet below the extant paintings, on a wall are located 685 graffiti, some of them refe rring to the of the experience for many visitors between eighth and tenth centuries (58). To return to Hyder, subjacent Graffiti Wall . She chooses to selectively read the graffiti out to Leslie, ignoring the more misogynistic verses such as what Williams calls the pat comment that the women are indeed stony - (60). Sita then excavates from the palimpsestic surface (written over for centuries) verses that evoke Their colours have faded. Is there none alive now who love we girls are addressing you. You who have come to Sigiriya and do nothing but sing songs and compose poems. Have you ev er stopped to think that we are women and that we need wine 162 - importance of their own devotion. They are urged instead to focus on the needs of the very women they claim to adore: needs that they are clearly not intelligent enough to meet. This derisive, mocking voice exudes from under the deposits of centuries of voyeurism to fracture dominant modes of spectators hip and address. (Williams points out, via quotes from various historians that most interpretations of these murals 162 Williams translates t / You dumb men, trying so hard to write songs. 126 surrender superb physiques to masculine need histories and subjacent graffiti, Hyder opens access to a feminist excavation of material histories of trauma and violence. The scrawling of the two verses referred to above, on the rock surface casts the also with multiple gendered vicissitudes. Hyder then, excavates affective and material histories of trauma across South Asia, drawing attention, particularly to its gen dered coordinates. Affective post colonial landscapes are reimagined and carved anew through these coordinates. In a particularly startling sequence of dream and memory states, hallucinations, internal monologues, sounds and other sensations into a rapidly - moving montage. An analysis of this section will help elucidate further how the text brings somatic and kinesthetic readings into play along with traditional textual/semiotic readings with their reliance on linearity and linear temporality through the harnessing of cinematic and theatrical modes postcolonial traumas. Cinematic rendering of a ffect - scapes Eliya the city of lights surrounded by the fragrance of wild roses and the music of distant waterfalls. In a move repeated several times in the novel, the prose narrative in this brief section Naim has observe Ramcharitmanas 127 Bowen, Proust, Mann and others) drew on the world and techniques of cinema to effect sensory inn Generale della Rovere rrowing from cinema (294). semi - autobiographical impressions and thoughts written in a stream of consciousness style. In maturing modernism, the acceptance of dream structures was a fundamental factor unifying the narrative approaches of media, f further understand how Sita Betrayed, cinematic concepts and modes. In her interview with Sukrita Paul Kumar in Conversations on Modern ism (1990), Hyder is asked about her stream of consciousness techniques (59). Hyder monologues and other representations of inner life in the 40s, she was in h Narrative: A Seminar (1994), Hyder further speaks of - off point (208). Inner reality, time f comes with the theme and the environment (209). She links her apparatus both to the worlds of traditional Urdu daastans 163 in the 163 She counts among her influences T.S Eliot, Virginia Woolf and especially Elizabeth Bowen. See Narrative: A seminar, ed. Amiya Dev, p. 209 . 128 (psychological, cinematic etc.) to her vernacular grounding allow us to affectively map collective material traumas. Ramcharitma nas as a match cutting technique a cinematic maneuver involving bridging through a metaphorical parallel. These verse fragments blur linear sequentiality of the narrative Civil Lines, Old Delhi. These litanic segments deploy lush images from spring and the rainy season to describe the sensuous beauty of the forest where Rama desperately searches for Sita after her abduction. Thus, the erotic surcharge is shad owed by a sense of loss, separation and violence. In the following section, there is a quick - moving montage of textual segments hallucinations, impressions, memories, temporal movements, rhythms, sensations, and most prolifically, sounds which firmly si tuate the loss and violence within the sensorium of a traumatic postcolonial modernity. In fact, the title of the novel is to some extent explained here in terms of the estrangement that the condition of postcolonial modernity entails. After their brief in terlude in Nuwara Eliya, Sita and Leslie return to a resthouse at Kitugala (in between Kandy and Colombo) on the banks of the Kalini Ganga where, incidentally, much of the Bridge on the River Kwai was filmed. Leslie hurriedly leaves for Colombo on his way to Calcutta following an urgent telegraph summons, presumably related to his anti - socialist work. The darkening river and the falling night frame Sita against an eerie and loss - infused landscape . It is at this point that we enter a segment which is sometim es interior monologue, sometimes hallucination, sometimes memory and sometimes the ventriloquized voices of fictitious others. 129 The fast moving, polyphonic textual segments swell with a hallucinatory lushness and agitate with their overpowering and jarring sensations. The mood is set as the night is rendered in white flow palpates with dissonance and dread. One of the recurring images in the sequence that follows the mood - earlier visited the Temple of the Tooth in their archeological excursions). The procession begins normally enough with all ritualistic aspects on display, but suddenly shifts into the nightmarish postc coincide with the 1958 riots (anti - Tamil pogroms.) Thus, though the detailed events of May 1958 are absent from the fictitious space of the novel, these dream/hallucin ation segments offer vivid commentary. I have discussed before how Hyder blurs the divide between mind/body, cognition/emotion, inside/outside and private/ public via the sensorial apparatus she employs, and opens fresh affective routes to Partition and po social losses. In the long segment under study, then, by interweaving cinematic textures ( audio - vision, polyphony, sense of movement) into her stream of consciousness style, Hyder succeeds in locating the loss within a colle ctive sensorial world. Into the dream - order of images stray in lines (memories of overheard dialogues) from a rehearsal of the Sanskrit drama Mudrarakhshasa 130 The sense of viraha or longing in separation that marks this is flushed with the pangs of political alienation that the play is a masterful study in. Much later, another dialogue auditory flotsam and jetsam - from the play floats in that affirms this pol itical valence; the lines are an urgent claim by a guard about a spy a man without a passport - arrest. Images of conflict, treason, incarceration and third degree torture rent the flow of medieval Bengali Bhakti poetry sung by her fickle ex - lover the poet Qamrul Ismal Chowdhury (with whom she betrayed Jamil) and Projesh Chowdhury he r progressive artist friend (with whom she will later betray Irfan.) As I have argued in Chapter One, much of the Bhakti strain of edge. Here, this charge of transgression and a sense of past and proleptic betrayals darken the lush eroticism of the lyrics. Very soon, this dark tone becomes more strident. The declamatory voice, as of an announcer at a (socialist) theater performance or a meeting, cuts short the pious interdictions of Anasuya, teacher of normative Hindu femininity in the Ramayana : gentlemen! Comrades! Brothers and sisters! I beg to inform you that Sita is lost in the This wor ld of ours which is divided into two camps. The world which is a prey to Anglo - American imperialism; in which innocent people are tortured but no hanuman comes to please get th 131 who read the Ramayana, h ow many Muslim Sitas did you abduct in 1947? Just count them once. And you Muslim holy - warriors, you whose tongues never tire of cursing the The impassioned plea in the conventional address of public spe and the guilty. In a direct address, the customary trappings of public speaking or performance are shed, replaced by uncomforta ble, probing questioning. This speech reframes the central drama of Ram and his brother Lakshmana; her rescue by Rama and Hanuman leading an army of monkeys; th subsequent re - exile) in postcoloniality and in the post - Partition memorial terrain. More significantly, the exigencies of Partition, postcoloniality, neo - imperialism a nd communalism are placed in a unique sensorium . The trauma, shock and dissociation of those conditions is wires, rumble of train wheels, sputter of motorboat engi nes, roar of aeroplanes, Whrr, whrr. Phat, impressions of the shehna i in Banaras, of drum players and nauha singers mourning Karbala at Muharram in Tulsipur, the flames of a bier on the banks of Sindh and childhood memories of dead women being ferried across the Indus in their bridal finery. These loss - infused memoryscapes serve to heighten the estrangement and unmooring Sita experiences at Kitugala, 132 community of the estranged across South Asia. In my Introduction I have discussed how affect studies helps us situate and unconditional and response - ative and filmic modes into her stream of consciousness technique helps create a visually, aurally and somatically rich sensorium. As embodied by this sensorium, emotions are no longer internal states; instead, through interaction with and immersion in the material, social and phenomenological world, they gain a clear externalization. Loss, disorientation, betrayal and estrangement, thus become social and political as much as psychological states, allowing in turn, an engagement with their socio - political c ognates. The segment ends with a shift back to the Sri Lankan life - worlds haunted with their violent histories of colonial and postcolonial conflict. In a strange hallucination, the ruins of the Lanka Tilaka Temple appear like a mouth full of teeth gaping open in a hideous smile, its sacred pond of lilies lies open like a malevolent sleepless eye. The dream/ stream of consciousness the roads and highways of the harbor, grow silent and finally the only sound that is left is the Conclusion Qurratulain Hyder mobilizes both her experience as a script writer for film and her 133 exile, the novel expands and multiplies its address to include global phenomena of mohajirs narratives), Sita Betrayed is radical in it s constitution of a trans - South Asian and even global exilic ethos drawing Sri Lanka in the 1950s torn apart by Tamil - Sinhala (Hindu - Buddhist) Palestinians in Jordan, - Partition/World War II ethos (Hyder 60). Her configuring of the Partition as long duree 164 is compounded by the narrative expanding its spatial limits beyond that allows us to map the post - Partition memorial terrain along relational and comparative axes critical attention. Her uneasy, often belligerent attitude to Indian and Pakistani literary and political establishm ents has certainly contributed to the marginalization. Partition scholarship models relying heavily on Fasadat ke Adab (Riot Literature) or on the Naya Afsana (New Story) rtition as 165 can only lead to a techniques that accessed interior and psychologized states w hile being rooted in historicity and 164 Thus going against event - based models of trauma. 165 Such as Qurratulain Hyder and The River of Fire (2011) Ed. Rakshanda Jalil. 134 the material, have enormous meaning for affect - mediated studies of trauma. It is a unique combination of the historical and the sensorial, angled with a penetrating psychologized stance that make her works critical site I conclude with some thoughts and reflections on our journey into this novel. On the one Sita Betrayed exhibits a proleptic awareness of a loss of future possibilities of the nation and co mmunity. At the same time, it uses memorial, affective, and material routes to try to connect back to these very lost possibilities. What can such awareness offer? In Mourning the Nation nat he Partition staged in my essay, should be located in this expanded memorial terrain as the specter of this particular form of melancholia. Furthermore, the events in Gujarat 2002, the entrenchment of the Hindu nationalist State in India, and the growing i more urgent than ever. In sum, my investment in re - examining the Partition through postcolonial ilization of melancholia and haunting offers us a way to understand how the South Asian Partition endorses the value and promise of affect - mediat ed postcolonial trauma theory. 135 CHAPTER 3 Death Making Traumas: Dislocation of Pain in Post - Partition Kashmir Introduction: A Sensorium of Vulnerability Afzal Guru convicted for his role in the Parliament Attack of December 2001 was hanged in secret on Saturday 9 February 2012 and his body buried in the grounds of the Tihar Jail. It was a secret hanging like man 166 in secrecy, has been an increasing feature of the postcolonial nation. mber of legal scholars and activists 167 . The State remains adamant that exceptions need to be made for aberrations to the body politic such as terrorism, in particular the Islamist secessionist anti - national terrorism that Guru, the alleged mastermind of the Parliamentary attacks, represents. His execution was immediately followed by unanimous support by Indian political parties across the spectrum. In Kashmir, of course, the narrative was quite different. There was an outpouring of protest and a strident dem and for the body of Guru to be handed back to his family for the last rites. This was denied. Omar Abdullah, the then Chief Minister of Indian Jammu and Kashmir 168 , paid a visit to New Delhi to hold talks to request the transfer; however as of now, the body remains buried within Tihar Jail. The family was allegedly informed of the hanging a day later by post (the letter got delayed in the mail 169 ). Their lawyers, in turn, sent a letter to the State 170 166 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz , p.83. 167 See for example, http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/an - execution - most - foul/article4428788.ece or http://kafila.org/2013/02/11/secret - hanging - a - major - setback - human - rights - watch - on - the - execution - of - afzal - guru/ 168 His party The Jammu and Kashmir National Conference was in a coalition with the Indian National Congress, the party then heading the central government. 169 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Two - days - after - hanging - speed - post - reaches - Afzal - Gurus - family/articleshow/18444932.cms 170 http://kafila.org/2013/02/10/afz al - gurus - family - demands - his - body/ 136 Congress central government) had given permission to perform the last rites within the premises but rejected demands - burial in Kashmir continue to simmer. In March 2015, a resolution to see the mortal remains of Guru ief of the new BJP - led central government and the newly elected PDP - BJP alliance 171 in Kashmir. I have chosen to begin my chapter with these events because both this chapter, and the larger project, are invested in questions around mourning and its affective and political fields. What does it mean to mourn under the conditions of late - modern postcolonial military occupation? What does it mean to grieve [from] death - haunted spaces in the largest democracy? How may these circuits of emotion disrupt the fantasie s and desires of the nation - state? What may the materials of power, sovereignty, and nation - state making in late modernity? These are some of the questions my chapter wishes to explore. I would also like to note that within this gesture of State of Emergency since 1990), lies an entire political history of promise , fantasy, longing and violence a history which has been mapped out overwhelmingly on the Kashmiri body. It is around death a death executed by the rights - g uarantor the Indian state. It is also significant formations and contestations of political meaning and identity. 171 This rickety alliance came to power in March 2015. The alliance is rocked b y instability and a Common with its political ideology of self - rule that is quite at odds with the Hindu nationalism of the Bharatiya Janata Party - led National Democratic Alliance at the center. 137 My analysis of what I will identify as 172 occupation will begin with a study of the State and the work of State power as inflected through 173 174 . Focus will be i) On the effects/affects (discursive, mate rial, emotional) of the Indian State on Kashmiri bodies/identities and the effects, in return, on the State of Kashmiri identities/bodies. Central to this affective journey that this chapter will take will be the cultural formations and performances of gri eving that inform states of emergency such as Kashmir 175 . ii) On the power that functions as kind of necropower that subsists on violence and terror as means of governing bodies. Necropower does not allow for mourning, it only endlessly political imaginaries. The lyrical, and phantasmatic narratives and performatives I thus offer a way to res tore cultural and political identities. terrorizing practices of the State and non - State actors in the Kashmir conflict. Since the body and 176 (Taussig 128) they also, paradoxically, become important sites of counter - 172 pace, time, and the senses in contexts of incarceration. 173 State of Exception, 2003. 174 175 By Kashmir, I refer to The Kashmir Valley in Indian Jammu and Kashmir which has been under a State of Emergency since 1990 and has been the site of a violent movement for self - determination. However, as most - Himalayan borderland sharing boundaries with India Pakistan and China. Since decolonization , the territory ha s been divided into Indian - controlled Jammu and Kashmir (IJK comprising Kashmir Valley, Jammu, and Ladakh), a smaller area under Pakistan control under Chinese control 176 In Mimesis and Alterity (1993), Taussig argues that in spaces of death, attempts to explain terror could barely be distinguished from the stories contained in those explanations as if terror provided o nly inexplicable explanations of itself and thrived by so doing (128). This problem of meaning - making is decisive, he concludes, because terror is deeply dependent on sense and interpretation, terror nourished itself by destroying sense (128). 138 as death while producing itself through corpses, disappearances, torture, and executions as well as it s desire to shift death and the ritual mourning around it to something secret and stealthy, create epistemic and material murk 177 (Taussig 121). As Allan Feldman persuasively argues in his foundational study of cultural constructions of violence and the body in Northern Ireland, Formations of Violence ulate[s] codes from one prescribed historiographical surface texts/instruments bearing inscription and re - inscription of political meanings. Given that the state i s experienced by those on the margins through violence, in embodied, penetrative ways (Aretxaga 396) how may the body (understood as an emotional, psychic, sexual, corporeal conglomerate) be reframed against the grain, to reveal what it says about state po wer and its phantasmatic, sexual and affective faces? Commentators such as Taussig, Feldman, Aretxaga, and Kabir have commented on how, in contexts of terror and spaces of death, the body and its languages, sounds, fluids and wounds may be read, not only t o document the effects of terror and exhume the repressed, but also to understand negotiations with terror, and modes (mimetic, parodic, cryptic, confrontational, compromising etc.) of resistance and contestation to power. Kashmiri literary and cultural pr oduction both in the context of the First Intifada (1989) militancy, as well as the post 2008 when the movement moved from militancy to kani - jang or stone - throwing war with widespread popular involvement, engage repeatedly with themes of grief, pain, mourn ing, death, neurosis, and disease. Bodies imprisoned, paralyzed, tortured, amputated, injured, severed, disappeared and dead appear 177 Mimesis an d Alterity . 121. 139 strewn across these representations. However, rather than vulnerability as victimhood, eternal suffering, or martyrdom, ma ny of these lyrical, fragmentary, phantasmatic works engage with 4 0). Through this reframing of vulnerability and grief, emerges a poetics and performative of the sensory, that disrupts the fetishization of the Kashmiri as either victim or perpetrator in statist or dominant transnational discourse, and offers instead a layered, focused, multi - dimensional map to read and imagine Kashmir. Drawing on the representation of vulnerability in Kashmiri creative fiction, in Sufi and Shiite ritual, and in contemporary protests against State terror, I explore how Kashmiri Muslim bo dies become important terrains to stage and re - stage practices that disrupt the power of the State to unmake worlds and unmake bodies (Scarry 1985). Bodies and bodily performatives are thus deployed as transformative interfaces of violence, space, and memo ry under militarization and occupation in Kashmir. The overwhelming physical and psychological toll of living under militarization, surveillance, and occupation are explored via cultural constructions and reconstructions of nakedness, injury, torture, inca rceration, neurosis, madness, memory and pain. The lyric, short story and novel in English and Koshur deploy the sensory as an optic into everyday precarity and vulnerability. While discussing mourning and pain in these and other non - fictional and journali stic representations, I would also like to examine an alternate model of trauma which takes into account not only the rubric of repetition and return, but also the trajectory of post - traumatic growth and the political, cultural, and historical possibilitie s urged by that growth. Mourning, thus, opens up a crucial psychological and political vein in Kashmir and becomes a central aspect of Kashmiri cultural formations. 140 178 (Foucault 216.) Understanding the workings of bio - power in late - us a comprehensive lens into contexts such as Kashmir. Death - haunted spaces suc h as Kashmir where the state of exception is the rule, and permanent war or siege marks everyday life, are a well - known observation in Remnants of Auschwitz (1999) political, Giorgio Agamben has argued tha biopower in modern nation - states is the power to call a state of exception, a social - political space of force ruled by a law beyond the law, where the law operates by suspending itself. These are the zones where according to Agamben sovereign power produces a difference between itself and bare life. Reduced to biological substance, the inhabitants are fetishized into an absolute - rise to new forms of social existence where whole populations are subjected to conditions of maximum destruction or confined to the status of the living dead (Mbembe 2003). These death - worlds become zones of exception where necropower hierarchies of power operating beyond distinctions of state and non - state institutions, and govern, and punish bodies and populations as disposable (Hansen 2005). 178 - 76 (New York : Picador, 1997 p. 216.) 141 In the biopolitical regime of corpse - making (i.e. necropower), there can paradoxically be eal remains. Agamben (1999) refers to the Nazi camp as the limit or extreme situation that determined what was human and what was not. These were threshold between life a nd death, humanity and inhumanity. Mbembe (2003), referring to contemporary limit situations (which are the effects of necropower,) describes human remains of [calc figuren or dolls(50). The musselmann cannot die because it/he was never fully alive. This refusal of necropower to name death as death while ensuring it through its violent practices highlights a Importantly, while the nation - state is not the unitary sourc e of power in these spaces, and a The intimate, sexual, and phantasmatic aspect of thes e violent technologies in death - disciplinary practices and rational technologies of biopower had been noted by Foucault in his study of modern forms of punishmen t (Aretxaga 403). Feminist scholars of violence such as Begoña Aretxaga have established further, that political formations while projecting themselves as an abstract set of micro - practices are violent, sexual, and thoroughly suffused with affect (Aretxaga 142 Aretxaga argues that abandonment and fear mark these encounters often played out in very intimate, embodied contexts close to the skin (Aretxaga 396 ). Yael Navaro - Yashin too argues that the f ear, uncertainty, anxiety, mistrust that mark political and social culture become embodied in the bodies, habits, internalized reactions of the subjects, haunting them (Navaro - Yashin 181). In Kashmir, then, the body becomes the field through which the power of the state flows and it is marked, haunted by practices such as surveillance, curfews, crackdowns, incarceration, torture, disappearance, sexual violations, an d death. The skin and what lies inside, thus, become screens on which political meanings are inscribed and re - inscribed; bones, flesh, fluids, sounds, fragments, dreams and recesses of the body become scripts to be read for what it tells us about occupatio n, militarization and terror. These material and psychic traces viscerally counter the ghost - making practices of necropower. As mentioned earlier, Kashmiri creative and cultural formations engage specifically with the sensory as an optic into commenting on memory, trauma, vulnerability, and violence in everyday sensing these [death - surveillan these somatic ways (auditory, kinesthetic, tactile) of interpreting pain and mourning remain pter. A word of caution appears necessary here. Rather than a binary between materiality and discourse, what appears crucial in studies of affect - mediated trauma is an understanding of the dynamic between the two. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2006) has recently argued, feminist criticism often tends to assume that 143 their physiology in the domain of discourse(8); however, neither are the two sides mutually exclusive nor the creation of life - worlds, death - worlds, and rotting - nded corporeality and sexuality are to be understood not only as economies of pleasure, nor only as immersed in their affect - human nor inhuman, neither living nor dead, have increa singly become key products of modern political life. A study of such marginal or liminal figures neither dead nor alive leads us logically to a focus on states of trauma. Affect - mediated studies of trauma, as I have been As Athena Athanasiou, Pothiti Hantzaroula and Kostas Yannakopoulosput claim in [This] relationship between desire, power, bodies, subjectivity, materiality, trauma and alterity structures the theoretical work on which theorists of emotion draw inspiration and epistemological tools. What is epistemologically crucial to t transition from paradigms of crude social constructivism to psychoanalytically informed and Foucault - inspired poststructuralist reappropriations of the discursive closure, such as 144 those conducted in the context of theories of ge nder performativity and postcolonial studies. (Athanasiou, Hantzaroula and Yannakopoulos 8) This interrelationship between trauma, affect, feminist psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies and Foucauldian studies of power help us develop a strong foundation t o study violence, vulnerability, and pain in contexts of necropower. This enables a move away from endless exploration of forms of agency possible. The authors further expl body, whereby agency emerges as a dynamic force at once cognitive, psychic, affective and sensual To speak on Kashmir is to be polarized into statist /anti statist stances, to give voice to the violence is often to be accused of sedition or dissent a gainst the state 179 . While the Indian state refuses to acknowledge the violence of its machineries in anything but protectionist terms and investments in the region) embed ded in what W J T Mitchell 180 describes as cloning discourses of a diffuse, omnipresent terrorism in global circuits of representation Within these paradoxes of protectionist discourses cast as anti - terrorism, the liminal or interstitial subjects of Kashmir (subjects both in the sense of subject - matter and in the sense of set of roles constructed by dominant ideological and cultural systems/values) become spectralized, ghost - like, lost. The rapped within nation - statist paradigms and it is critically important to rethink problematic categories, stances, and attitudes 179 In November 2010, the Delhi Police files a case of sedition against writer Arundhati Roy and others for anti - India statements at a seminar in New Delhi. 180 W J T Mitchell Cloning Terror 145 Kashmiris from a relatively privilege d position 181 , on the other hand, is fraught with ethical and epistemological problems. By braiding affect - mediated trauma, postcolonial studies, cultural history and literary analysis, these specificities may be better accessed. My analysis of short stories in Kashmiri , written between 1950 and 1980 and translated in the 1990s and Agha Shahid from the collection The Country without A Post Office Indian state as it is experienced by those on the limits here, the Kashmiri Muslim. My chapter reads injury and grief against their grains to reveal what they say about the phantasmatic and affective faces of the violent State (Indian and Pakistani). Through this reframing of vulnerability and grief, emerges a poetics and performative of the sensory, that disrupts the fetishization of the South Asian (here Kashmiri) Muslim as either victim or perpetrator in statist or global terror discourse. My examination of how trauma an d identity are inflected by affective and cultural histories adds specificity and . History, Trauma and Identity in Kashmir Questions of history, memory, and identity remain crucial to access Kashmiri cultural and psychic formations. Theorists of trauma and affect contend that the complex relationship Dominick 181 146 traumatic, contested events in the hi story that has shaped Kashmir as a death - haunted region. It is, moreover, of great significance that this history has been mapped onto the template of the Kashmiri body and haunts the desires, fantasies, fears, and grief of subjects inhabiting this history . The Indian state of Jammu &Kashmir has been under a State of Emergency since 1990 when the Armed Forces Special Powers Act 182 draconian response to a Pakistan - backed popular armed movement in the region. However, the situation in Kashmir, the halaat as people refer to in everyday language 183 , involving the political demand for azaadi (independence), decades of increasing militarization, surveillance, and living ian State, needs to be seen beyond the India/Pakistan, Hindu/Muslim dyad that the regio India considers Kashmir as an atoot ang (an inalienable body part) and memories of the Partition, its vivisectionist violence and anatomization of the nation - state are recalled to evoke fear of similar violence and disintegration 184 Kashmir through the frames of the Partition is a fraught project. Yet, as my first chapter argues, the dismembered and violated bodies of women and men torn by this sectarian violence haunt the psych ic life of the nation - state and form the field through which further vio lence in the name 182 the Armed Forces (Specia l Powers) Act (AFSPA) was passed on September 11, 1958, by the Parliament of India. Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram , Nagaland and Tripura. It was later extended to Jammu and Kashmir as The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act, 1990 in July 1990.It is one of the permanent states of exception in areas where threats to its sovereignty are rife. 183 Everyday Occupations (2013). 184 (ed. Sanjay Kak 270). 147 phantasmic traces of the religious, social and political divisions on formations of citizenship, state and national community are traceable m ost clearly in the margins of the State and an analysis of everyday encounters with the State in Kashmir reveal the intimate, corporeal, fleshly circuits of State power as necropower. The figure of the traitorous, violent, Muslim Kashmiri has become the th reat against which the Indian state ceaselessly produces itself as screen and fetish, turning its paranoid gaze upon him while evoking a similar fear and mistrust (Aretxaga) from the took place in the crisis moment of Partition and this moment of emergence exerted a long - lasting onceived in crisis therefore appears indistinguishable from the figure of the terrorist (13). In the case of Kashmir, this fear and anxiety has historically been high due to the d the neither IJK nor Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas have been fully integrated into either ith suspicion and paranoia 185 .In Pakistani nationalist narratives, Kashmir represents the unfinished business of the Partition; according to the logic of division of territories, the then Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir with its Hindu Dogra 186 ruler, but M uslim majority population should have been ceded to its secularist principles and endanger its territorial integrity. It needs Kashmir to maintain its secularis t ideals, but also its desired wholeness. Neither nation can legitimate those voices in the 185 - Baltistan ( Everyday Occupations , ed. Kamala Visweswaran (2013), p. 85 - 114. 186 Upper caste Hindus from Jammu region. 148 wide range of political stances in the region, which disrupt their nation - statist projects and fantasies 187 draws from a long history of marginaliza tion that predates modernity, tracing Kashmiri resistance to foreign occupation to the Mughal invasion of 1588 and the subsequent dispossession of Kashmiris, by the Afghan, Sikh, Dogra and Indian regime (Fazili 214) Thus reading the Partition framing of Ka shmir askew , and against itself, I would like to emphasize not the India/Pakistan or Hindu/Muslim dyad, but the implications of border and nation - making in a trans - Himalayan region that drew its cultural identity from multiple orientations. Kashmir with a population of 10 million forms the boundary zones produced continuously by India, Pakistan and China (and historically, by the British colonizers of the region.) In his study of the relationship between borderlanders and their statist rulers, in The Bengal Borderland territoriality its strategy to exert complete control and authority over social and bio - political life within its territory produces borders (van Schendel 3). Kashmir in comm on with other borderlands 188 atoot ang 187 The postcolonial states formed out of the sub - continen t vowed to grant the rights and freedoms of citizens to its people. Yet, in the case of both Azad Kashmir (and Gilgit and Baltistan in Pakistan) and in IJK in India, this remains a deferred project. Chitra Zutshi, Nosheen Ali and others have commented on h ow both the nation - states deny full citizenship rights to Kashmiris (and inhabitants of Gilgit - Baltistan). Their loyalties remain suspect and thus the conferral of citizenship rights has been continually deferred. It is significant that neither the politic al system in Pakistan nor the one in India has internalized Kashmiris as a part of itself (Pakistan does not recognize Azad Kashmir as a province). 188 aphy facilitates infiltration and exfiltration at many points of almost a thousand kilometers of frontier 740 kilometers of - (Bose 163). 149 shah rag ze borderlands and make them pawns in negotiations that mark these contested regions. Hence it becomes impossible for the Indian State, for example, to legitimiz e any of the wide - ranging voices demanding different degrees of political rights across the pro - independence spectrum in Kashmir. Instead, it can view the desire for freedom only through the lens of Islamist terror or Pakistan sponsored militancy even when , militancy has more or less been replaced by unarmed popular resistance, evidenced in the popular protests and kani jung (war of stones) that has exploded in the Valley since summer of 2010. Borderlanders often develop counter - narratives in which the hi storical significance of the border that separates them is minimized (Schendel 4) and which, I argue, challenge dominant memory and affective landscapes. The trans - Himalayan character of Kashmir, its deep historic and cultural relationships with, and pivot al role in, the Himalayan mountain chain a historic part of the Silk Route traversing Tibet, Kashmir, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria are an integral part of Kashmiri cultural identity( Kaul/Kak 191). Kashmir then is the wider term I use to denote the trans - Himalayan region parts of which are occupied by India, Pakistan and China. As Nitasha Kaul reminds us, cartographically, the territory of Kashmir on a world map is divided into Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK called - Baltistan), India Occupied Kashmir Aksai Chin and Shaksam Valley under Chinese control (part of the Xi in China (189). The focus of my chapter is however, on Kashmir Valley 189 which is the site of a 189 My focus is on the cultural narratives and memories around the Kashmiri movement for azaadi or freedom from India (Tehreek - e - azaadi,) the locus of which is in the Muslim dominant Kashmir Valley. Jammu with its Hindu 150 prolonged, state of emergency and a zone of permanent war impelled by an overwhelming political desire for freedom from Indian military o ccupation and varying range of demands for political rights and independence 190 . It is beyond the scope of this chapter to enter into a detailed analysis of the political status granted and plebiscite promised, that did not materialize, to draw attention to the anxiety separatist, and the terrorist) are fe tishes of each other producing endlessly mirroring images of each other. The Kashmiri Muslim represents the fetish par excellence partly because from its inception, the nation - acce ssion to the Indian state was marked by intense wavering, bargaining and it was provisional. Maharaja Hari Singh, the Dogra(Hindu) ruler of Muslim - majority Kashmir delayed his decision about whether to join India or Pakistan. In October 1947, armed tribesm North - West Frontier region entered Kashmir to join an internal revolt in the Poonch region. The tribesmen went on a violent rampage; the Maharaja requested help from India in quelling the revolt and invasion and signed the Instrument of Accession, acceding Kashmir to India. The accession at the time was seen as provisional, pending a plebiscite to determine the will of the Kashmiri people. Indian forces were airlifted to Srinagar to repel Pakistani militias and the fighting escalated into the first Indo - Pakistan War, with Pakistan disputing the accession and majority and Ladakh with its Buddhist m ajority do not view India as an occupying power, and Kargilis on the border are also dependent on the Indian military and identify themselves as Indians. 190 In A Diary of a Summer, Suvir Kaul writes There are those in the pro - independence All Party Hurriyat Conference who are amenable to the development of political systems in IJ& K that will put into practice the autonomy , constitutionally available to the state. There are those who are more independentist and those (increasingly few) who desire a merger wi th the Islamic neighbor(Pakistan). To delegitimize this entire range of desires is an arrogant miscalculation [on the part of the Indian State (Kaul /Kak 24). 151 eventually sending in regular forces. In 1948, after referring the Kashmir dispute to the UN, a UN resolution was made calling for ceasefire and a plebiscite. On January 26, 1950 the I ndian Constitution came into effect. Article 370 accorded autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir within the Indian Union, with Indian jurisdiction restricted to defense, foreign affairs, and communication. In 1950 the National Conference party headed by Sh eikh Abdullah called for elections (instead of a plebiscite) to create a Constituent Assembly to determine the future of Kashmir; it won all the seats in the 1951 elections. In July 1952, Sheikh Abdullah signed the Delhi Agreement providing for autonomy fo r J&K within India. In May 1954, barely two years later, however, the Constitution (Applicable to Jammu and Kashmir) Order 1954 came into force extending Indian jurisdiction over Kashmir, annulling the Delhi Agreement and curbing civil liberties 191 . This was driven, in large part, by right wing Hindu fears about Muslim dominance. In Kashmir in Crucible (1967), a groundbreaking and significant analysis of the Kashmir his tory of Kashmir and Kashmiri relations with India. The changes effected included the extension of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, approval of the Union Planning Commission of State development programs (Bazaz 71). On 26 January 1957, the Constituent Assembly enacted the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, stating it will be an integral part of the Indian Union 192 . On December 27 1964, the All India Hindu Mahasabha put forward a demand for 370 (it was anti - secular and pro - China and Pakistan (Bazaz 85). Article 370 had, anyway, been a cipher, being dead in letter and 191 The editors Ali, Bhatt, Chatterji et al. of Kashmir: A Case for Freedom include a comprehensive timeline of - - xiv). 192 It is the force of this enactment that the family of Guru leverages to ask for rights as Indian citizens to conduct the last rites. 152 spirit for a long time since (Bose 69 - that the Union government had decided to bring IJK under the purview of two of the most centralist and controversial provisions of the Indian constitution Articles 356 and 357, which respectivel y empower the Center to dismiss elected governments of Indian states in the event of a breakdown of law and order and to assume their legislative mandate (Bose 81). In 1965, the Indian parliament passed a bill declaring Kashmir a province of India, claimin g for India the Article 356 and 357 were applied to Kashmir; the National Conference government was replaced by the Congress and an increased militarization of Kashmir took place. There was a conspicuous increase in non - Kashmiri armed police presence in the valley in the decades of the 50s and 60s with the Central Reserve Police Force, Punjab Armed Police, Bihar Armed Police being stationed there; an armed sectio n of Kashmir police was also raised (Bazaz 94). Bazaz further writes that during the Indo - Pak war of 1964 and its aftermath, no (105) and this led to a permeating belief that every Kashmiri Muslim harbored infiltrators (105). In 1972, India and Pakistan signed the Simla Agreement which redesignated the UN ceasefire line in Kashmir as the Line of Control. 1984, Jagmohan Malhotra the New Delhi appointed governor, and a Hindu nationalist, dismissed the elected Farooq Abdullah government; protests erupted and curfew was imposed. Jagmohan assumed exclusive power in 1986. In 1989, armed resistance to Indian rule broke out and since then, Srinagar has been under permanent siege. In early 1990, a group of young men in the Kashmir valley launched a guerrilla revolt against Indian rule under the JKLF Front - with the objective to liberate IJK and reunite it with Pakistani Kashmir as a single state. They received weapons and tra ining from a JKLF organization across 153 the border in AJK as well as from Pakistani military agencies (Bose 2 - 3). Although mass collective action and protests had been a recurring feature of politics in the Valley (1963 for example, see Bose 78, 79), The Val ley exploded once again in 1990 with strong popular responses for azaadi in large pro - independence demonstrations. Claiming that its secular identity would be threatened by the secession of Kashmir the only Muslim majority state the Indian State respon ded with a brutal militaristic repression and reprisal targeting not only armed - 3 to the rise of a pro - Pakistan Islamist group Hizbul - Mujahideen. 1990 - 1995 may be seen as the intifada or uprising phase marked by mass demonstrations, strikes and calls for freedom to which the Indian state retaliated with militarization, (and paramilitarization) cur few, crackdown, interrogation, torture, imprisonment of suspected militants and their supporters (107). Srinagar, thus, Wasim Bhat describes this bunker city where the gaze and the gu n are permanently measuring, surveying, aiming: The narrow streets are a maze of barricades check - points and bunkers, snarling and gnawing unending coils of concertina. Draped in camouflage nets, squat brick bunkers gaze at people through narrow slats. Mem orizing faces and calculating their defenses against the multitude. From one bunker to the next and the next, the city is in omnipresent crosshairs. (Kak 102) The militarization and emergency in Kashmir has been marked by recurring acts of violence and fo rce by both state and anti - state actors shattering the fabric of everyday life, taking enormous physical and psychological toll. 70000 Kashmiris have been killed since 1989 by the Indian 154 State, (paramilitary and military personnel), militants and agents op erating in the nefarious gray zone that lies between occupied and occupier. In December 2009 The International People's Tribunal On Human Rights And Justice In Indian - Administered Kashmir released a report 2700 hidden, unmarked, and mass graves containing 2943 bodies mostly men across Bandipore, Kupwara, and Baramulla districts of Kashmir. The bodies bore the marks of torture; they were dragged through the night and buried next to schools, homes, and fields. The graves were dug by locals at the behest of military, paramilitary, and police forces. The Indian forces claim that these graves contain foreign killin g of civilians in staged encounters with security forces) (Ali, Bhatt, Chatterji et al 111). By independence from India have deepened over the years and taken new forms. In Kashmir currently over 600,000 police and paramilitary personnel remain deployed making it the highest concentration of soldiers in the world, although militancy is at an ebb. While there has been an intense debate, especially in the recent years on the legality and constructional validity of the AFSPA, it continues to provide the juridical and material framework for justification of state violence and terror against the Kashmiris In the summer of 2010, the Valley saw another upsurge in protests and the Indian army shot dead more than a hundred protestors, most of them teenagers (Ali, Bhatt, Chatterji et al 1) after a 17 year old Tufail Matoo was struck and killed by a tear gas canister fired at close range as he walked back from school. Tufail Matoo was caught in a cross - fire between the army and three unarmed civilians in Machil in Kupwara district north Kashmir in May 2010 by Rashtriya 155 (National) Rifles which resulted in more civilian killings. In four months 112 had been shot dead on the streets of Kashmir mostly teenagers and young boys wielding stones. In place of the gun - w ielding mujahids , Kashmir exploded with unarmed civilians, young men armed only with stones, their faces covered, the chests bared - the sangbazan ( stone - throwers ). The Indian State responded with providing futuristic new body - protective gear to its soldier s, whom one commentator in Srinagar called them Darth Vader in cheap plastic (Kak xiii). New non - lethal pressure pump pellet guns that could kill at close range sling - shot charges of glass marbles and pebbles, and t stimulate human nerve endings, while barely penetrating the skin and leaving no visible or permanent injury were the new weapons of necropower. They aimed for maximum damage but left little trace (Kak xxii) These crowds were dismissed by the Indian state as Pakistan sponsored militants, drug addicts, social malcontents, urban detritus, (xv). New platforms of dissent proliferated through Social Media, You Tube, Twitter where critical communities gathered to dissent and witness. A wide range of cultural and a litany The Kashmir Intifada. In the next sections, I would like to analyze a set of cultural and creative texts that seek to interpret and grieve the occupation through setting up a sensorium of vulnerability. Dependent on the body and pain for meaning - - conflations that make Kashmir an atoot ang of India on their heads. As members of the Indian all - party delegation deputed to Kashmir in September 2010 met in the town of Tangmarg to 156 our pain 193 ). It is this pain that the Indian State inflicts, but fathoms, not as pain but as the material for and effects of power, sovereignty, and nation - state making. It is this pain and grief felt on the skin that the sensorium of vulnerability seeks to make visible and palpable. Trauma sensorium in Kashmiri short stories Muhammad Junaid , (Visweswaran 2013) , reminds us that occupation makes itself invisible despite its visible effects everywhere (161). It can, however, be made visible through its elements like the physical reorganization of space under it, parsed through its own visions of itself (illusions of a magical state) that it seeks to impose on the social world of the occupied (171). The occupying (violent, thoroughly sexual and fleshly) state - Yashin has argued, may be located also in the bodies, habits, gestures, fears, and internalized reactions of subjects (Navaro - Yashin 181 ). In Kashmiri creative and cultural productions, these material as well as phantasmagoric effects of the occupying state become the subject of insistent, repeated scrutiny. Haunting, spectrality, fantasy and the uncanny become significant media to address loss, trauma, and dispossession. Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters in what can be a transf ormative recognition (8). Drawing from her stance, I have used the trope of haunting to i) recognize the barely visible occupation through its fleshly and psychic effects Quoted by Rai from Jyoti Thottam Does India have an Endgame i n Kashmir? Time, New Delhi, 24 September 2010 ( http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2021259,00.html ) (xxi) 157 and ii) make corporeal the spectral absences that the death - making occupation/emergen cy produce. In its popular sense, haunting also carries with it the implication of unresolved death(s); it serves as an uncanny and unnerving remi(a)nder of the corporeal body usually of a body subjected to some terrible violence. Thus, it serves as a me aningful analytic into the necropolitical erasures and disappearances that mark vulnerability in everyday life in zones of terror such as Kashmir. The following stories are taken from the collections The Stranger Beside Me: Short Stories from Kashmir (1994 ) and Contemporary Kashmiri Short Stories (1999) both commissioned by Sahitya Academy a national publishing house 194 . I also read alongside them more recent testimonies and non - fiction work collected in Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings from Kashmir (20 - the hospital/asylum/prison complex is evoked in cryptic, dream - like images. In these stories, the pro tagonists are commanded to go to menacing institutions (surreal combination of prison/torture chamber/psychiatric ward/operation theater) where they face interrogation, torture and incarceration. The short stories, perhaps owing to State censorship, assume the symbolic language of the unconscious. They convert into acceptable symbols the terrorizing actions of the magical dream - State (Taussig/Aretxaga) and illuminate the fantasies, fears, impulses and urges of both the occupied and the occupier. While the c onfusion, the dissociative logic and disjuncture evoke nightmare states, we may read these as maps of the haunting, intimate penetration by necropower and as evidence of its terrorizing effects (on the individual and social body.) 194 In Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (2009), Ananya Kabir analyzes many of these stories. 158 In Territory of Desire ( 2009) Kabir argues that many of these short stories enact the terror, fear, and paranoia are all the more debilitating because they are routine. The focus on coming to terms with a particular state of being Kashmiri a state produced by the technologies yriad juridical and economic [ and I would stress sexual, intimate, and corporeal] registers to which he or she bears orms of power, can at any minute, be replaced by the exception such as Kashmir, the invisible and naked forms of power do not dislodge each other; they are th - own visions of itself on the social world of the occupied (make it receptive to the illusions of ds, is exercised by the promulgation of uncertain states of being, rather than by outright execution or death, as necropolitics would declare (Kabir 151). I would contend that the production and promulgation of uncertain states of being are also integral t o necropower, to the illusion - making and haunting tactics of the phantasmatic state. Through its various machineries and capillaries, some invisible, some nakedly violent, the State seeks to indelibly brand and imprint the Kashmiri Muslim body and mind wit h its traces. While many of these earlier short stories rarely engage explicitly with State violence (unlike the recent productions by MC Kash, Malik Sajad and others), they illuminate the recesses of the Kashmiri subjects, and the haunting presence of th e State. Jaqueline Rose offers us a map 159 to read this inversion. In States of Fantasy (1996), she first establishes that in the politics of conflict and occupation as in the Israeli - the Israeli stat e cannot grant freedom [is because], so great is the charge of fantasy that were it to be granted, the nation would lose all inner rationale and collapse on itself (4). However, the 195 33). Rose gives another example: in his 1982 novel The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill - fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian who became a Citizen of Israel , Emil Habiby gives a light - hearted version of this when folded up inside people (note 58).p101). It is this x - - symbolic of its desires, fears, paranoias, anxieties that allows the occupied to breach the defenses of the formidable occupier and through an inverted, albe 196 Using these examples from cultural representations and testimonies of Israeli occupation, Rose establishes that the haunting State can be read in its nakedness and precarity within th e head: you think you have the upper hand, but your unconscious only I can see (34). My analysis brings this framework to bear on the Kashmiri situation marked by the same fatal proximity and 197 of intimacy, collaboration and ) Jay Murphy Intervi ew with Hanan Mikhail - AShrawi in For Palestine 167 - 8. 196 197 Between the space s of domination and resistance there inevitably lies a gray zone and the internalization of the regime also needs t o be addressed (Visweswaran/Junaid ). 160 internalization between dominant and dominated. Kashmiri fiction, in particular the Koshur short stories I examine, mine this inverted occupatio n. Not only do they reveal the debilitating haunting of the Kashmiri subject by the State, but also harness and interpret strategies of countering and negotiation grounded in the body as recess, performance, matter, affect, and fantasy. In Kashmiri every day parlance, this never - halaat situation), and its psychological effects summed up in the adoption of the innocuous - sounding 198 term insecurity, vulnerability and powerlessness such as that produced under incarceration and conflict produced peculiar phobias about bodily fragmentation: physi cal pain, insufficient diet, and constant humiliation evoked in the prisoners, in acute and extreme form, the vulnerability and powerlessness of childhood. The sense of permanent physical insecurity produced, as is frequently the case in these situations, anxieties about disfigurement (Goffman 1959:21; Scarry 1985:40 - 41). These anxieties about disfigurement and bodily fragmentation are repeated in the three short stories under study and in multiple others in the collection. They represent fears and actualit ies in Kashmir. The violent anatomization of a body to its parts is a crucial step in inscribing it with political meanings. Theorists and anthropologists of violence like Allan 198 - mental illness are rampant (Kak 153). Over sixty years of conflict have led to 68, 000 people being killed and nearly every Mushtaq Margoob, a ps ychiatrist who has done extensive work with trauma in Kashmir, nearly 16 percent have Post - Traumatic Stress Disorder and 19 percent suffer from depression. The mental health network in Kashmir is overwhelming, with one hospital in Srinagar seeing 100,000 p atients a year and another psychiatric ward documenting 40000. Suicidal thoughts, anxiety, paranoia, terror and somatic effects of these mental states are highly commonplace (Kak 155). 161 codified draw on frameworks developed by scholars such as Aretxaga and Feldman who develop a revision of Foucauldian notions of power and the body. Using Feldm violence, body, space, and the command of power in Formations of Violence (1991), I will argue that the narratives forged in the short stories provide an alternative repository for these fragments and represent a re - membering, albeit a surrogate one. Feldman, following Foucault, recognizes that the command of necropower acts on bodies, on spaces, temporalities and senses reordering them to its power. He claims, however, that the imprisoned and tortured subject can through disssociation, Thus the individual body - metonymic (under torture) of the larger political body (here Kashmir) is not only restored in narrative, but further, becomes the site of disso ciation from the meanings of the regime, and hence, a site of resistance. I add that in addition to these functions, the them against themselves. The process , though, as the stories show, is mutually destructive and irreversible. In their revisions of Foucault in studies of political violence in Northern Ireland, specifically prison narratives, commentators such as Aretxaga and Feldman have argued that the sub jectivity of the actors must be seen not only as the products of rational technologies of control but also a crucial element in molding any resistance to them(Aretxaga 130). If transformation of subjectivity is what is at stake in disciplinary practices [s uch as incarceration, interrogation, torture, body checks] the direction that such transformation takes may escape the panoptic control of the prison. It may instead hinge on a multiplicity of contingent cultural, historical, and 162 personal circumstance (Are txaga 130).Feldman, too, for instance, has urged that the body made into a political artifact by an embodied act of violence is no less a political agent than the author(s) of violence (7). While the body surrenders to the ritual violence and becomes inve sted with the meanings of the regime, there is a process of bifurcature or splintering that happens, whereby the prisoner can make his body the principle of dissociation from these rituals of domination (138). There are a number of ways in which this dives titure finds expression. One of the ways is by re - through narrative of survival (119). There are other examples Feldman provides such as the experienced interrogatee manage the interrogation through managing his body. One such way is through silence; while he agentive splitting of his body into a part to be submitted to pain and a part to be transformed into a cipher to be forcibly broken and read (120). When he mimics his death and transforms his body into a cipher through silence, the body invests in its own appropriation by the interrogators as a detachable part of his political agency (138). Thus, a double political technology of the body emerges out of the interrogation process and the body that emerges is no longer the same that went in it has become passage (120 - this dynamic. - 163 gers into an ambulance, terror - space, and the senses through fear is in evidence, as throughout the hospital ride, the narrator is disoriented, confused, and loses sense of time: when my glance fell on them accidentally, it intensify later. (136). Although the narrative is not explicit about it, on close reading, it becomes evident that a blood - soaked blanket and the gaze observing and narrating. Feldman demonstrate s that through strategies such as disassociation, splitting, and bifurcation, the incarcerated/tortured body gains agentive function. Here we may say, the subject participates in allowing necropower to part of it is surrendered to the regime, part of it is retained and this bifurcature has tremendous meaning. It may signal as we have seen resistance (Feldman 120). The perpetrators of violence and torture seek to penetrate the intimate spaces of the subject and as we have seen haunt it. Through incarceration and violence, the regime seeks to colonize the interiority of the subject and does so by reordering external and internal reality. In - imprisoners seek to blot out all other realities except the immediacy of the cell. Hence, the world outside is walled out. The description of the cell with its stark, white walls, psychologically oppressive use of sound (an incessant drip - drip - drip) which - honed strategies of necropower. As 164 illusion promoted by the interrogation space th at it is absolute reality it is the interior structure extend into th e reaches of the self and allow no depths, no recesses. There is voiding of time and sleep (126) and usually through absolute whiteness a topos of the same, the undifferentiated is imposed (127). In the story, the narrator wonders why the stark high walls are painted white, perhaps to bring some light, yet in the cell there is only darkness. Later his interrogators exposure in which nothing can be hidden or disguised, in which there are no recesses, no depths, only the self, reduced to a figure against a ground (127).The bifurcation of the subject, thus allows him to submit to th end of the narrative, this receives explicit acknowledgement. The narrator asserts They took charge of me and laid me down on the white sheet, face upwards, brought some instruments an d cut my face into two. They left one half linked to my skeletal form and severed the other. One of the two brought a cloth, and, wrapping the severed half of my face in it, put it in some safe place beyond my gaze. I could not understand anything at all. They said nothing nor did I venture to speak. 137. Thus, the prisoner is subjected to anatomizing physical violence, where his body is metonymically fragmented and codified, to signal a fragmenting of the political body. However, by means of strategies such as bifurcation explained above, and through narrating his survival, - repository of wholeness, both for the individual as well as the political Kashmiri body. A close - 165 down and felt a locket that was suspended from it [my emphasis]. There was a number engraved on it. I tried very hard to read the number but could not. The fact was that my eyes had gone with the part of my face that had been removed so how could I read anything? (my emphasis,137). proprioception and haptic (reliant on a sense of touch comingling with other sense) memory, number that has been assigned to him. Ananya Kabir interprets the engraving as the indelible imprint of the State a nd yet, as I have argued using Feldman, the body also retains through its the innocuous postman brings a message from the sun who has orders from an anonymous source to not rise tomorrow. These course symptomatic of how necropower m anages and coerces life and death in states of permanent war. The postman behaves mysteriously while delivering the telegram. His appearance too, is out of the ordinary, with leathery, wrinkled skin and monkey - like fur - more bestial than human (Bharathi 10 6).The postman scribbles a surreptitious note on the envelope telling the narrator that since he has changed into something more bestial, he has lost his power of speech and can only emit monkey - - joi under his armpits to help him up. They are, the narrator, recognizes from the bones poking him, 166 two dressed - up skeletons. The last thing he feels is a bite by a cobr a 199 . When he regains consciousness, he finds himself laid flat on a table in what looks like an operation - theater. The cryptic scene of torture (which could also be hallucinations under anesthesia) is set up with four people in white overalls with faces swa thed in white bandages. The sensorium of death is completed with half a dozen overhead light bulbs giving out heat, with sounds of bones cracking as the masked skeletons moved, and their the cold corpse - like touch on his skin. The wall is made up of countl ess leaves of books joined together. Ananya Kabir makes a brilliant analysis of this story from the point of view of Koshur language. I would like to point more closely to the sense of physical powerlessness, vulnerability, the command over time and once a instrument carrying both the meanings imposed by the torturing regime, as well as that of political resistance. Silence and speech here function as ordering of time, spac e and of power: verbal command and response order the temporal and spatial coordinates of this torture chamber/operation theater. The narrator refuses to speak and responds through gestures for he is afraid he will emit screeches instead of coherent speech . This silence again, following Feldman can be read as a splitting: by not giving in to the command to speak, the narrator controls the read as agentive splitt ing of his body into a part to be submitted to pain and a part to be transformed into a cipher to be forcibly broken and read ( Feldman 120). Second, interogatees soon find out that they can control the timing of their own torture. They learn to read the t as it were (Feldman 138). As the beating [or other form of physical violence] is inevitable, you 199 In Kashmiri mythology, the cobra (naga) is a ubiquitous figure and the myth about his swallowing up of the sun is remade through this story. 167 control its timing and the interrogation becomes a rite of pass age (138 - 143). The interrogatee emerges both branded by the regime, but also having retained, and indeed created new contexts for political agency. it so the bulbs grow d waits, aggravating the situation, imposing his rhythm of time over that of the death - space. The become bestial, to emi inquiry. Jean Amery tells us in his testimony Survivor of Auschwitz and its Realities (1980) that he cannot corroborate that torture make (under torture) are impossible to communicate (33). Yelling out in pain , capable of little 200 compensated by any form of subsequent human co 200 torture he provides: where torture can turn the subject and his head in which are perhaps stored Kant and Hegel, and all nine symphonies, and the World as Will and Representation into a shrilly (35). 168 foreignness, this out - of - sortness, which is incarnated in the leathery skin, monkey fur and screeches that both the postman and the narrator develop. the prisoner. On the one turns into a screech and this codification/objectification is symbolic of the violence enacted on the larger political body. Yet, as ment ioned earlier, there is a double politicization going on here tempo of torture. He also converts himself into a cipher to be decoded. In addition, what is mos t telling is that he has encrypted his experience in the narrative we encounter after the event; thus, while a part of him has been codified, objectified, and effaced by the torture, the remainder is reconstituted through narrative. I will return to the si gnificance of this bivalence in my conclusion to this section. Next, I want to elaborate further, how the cry of pain, the scream, reclaims agency now, even h - created by the scream. The scream appears to exist independently in its own space and time. In Dumbs truck:A Cultural History of Ventriloquism all in a bodily sense (3). Inversely, voices can also produce bodies vocalic bodies (35). He which can take the body, a projection of a new way of having or being a body, formed and sustained out of the 169 one that ma ps and reorders the time - space of a violent necropower. It represents, like the narrative, yet another surrogate repository for the anatomized tortured body. How may we read this surrogate vocalic body as marked by vulnerability, but also by political age (or pure utterance like a cry or scream) can fragment and re - arising ( 324). As the narrator stutters and then breaks into a full scream, the ascending pitches fabricate their own space. Connor notes that the cry is usually emitted from parts of the body that are not reserved for ordered thought (35) here we have a screeching monkey. This acoustic space, therefore, is marked by and hinges upon vulnerability. Other theorists of sound have elaborated on this auditory ontology. Brandon LaBelle (2010), argues that soun d can create alternate/radical territories. Voice or cry can also carve time in its arising. Quoting Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan, LaBelle reiterates that, acoustic space creates itself in time without fixed boundaries, space made by the thing itself, not space containing a thing. It is not a pictorial space, boxed in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by those remade by the interrogatee in the story (jointly with the torturers) by controlling tempo of command, response, silence and scream. LaBelle, further, reminds us that theorists of the audio - visual like Michae l Chion suggest, Sound, as the result of a series of material frictions or vibrations, arises from a given object or body to propagate and leave behind the original source it brings the original source from there 170 to here [my emphasis] . This movement grants the feeling of a progression; it animates space (LaBelle 33). Under conditions of incarceration and torture, where time and space are ostensibly under the command and severely disrupts the dynamics of coercion (Feldman 128). It controls and remakes time as well as space .While it may appear that the cry of pain emitted during torture and int errogation trajectory of our argument, we can conclude that it also galvanizes new possibilities for political agency; it marks movement and progression as opposed to the void that the regime seeks to impose . To conclude this section, I wish to reiterate that in the short stories analyzed, the subject that emerges out of interrogation/imprisonment/torture, is able to forge new political agency and frame the violence contexts of violence, this reading offers a way to read trauma not (only) in terms of paralysis and victimhood, but also in terms of agency and progression. Recent theories of p ost - traumatic growth urge us to adopt this lens, albeit with care to not trivialize or erase the tremendous effects of trauma. The engagement with both the destructive as well as potentially creative aspects of political trauma in the stories studied above , allows me to do that. Trauma sensorium in Agha Shahid Ali The bodies of the aberrant Kashmiris, then, become important terrains to stage and re - stage practices that disrupt and modify the inscriptions of biopolitics. Commentators on prison narratives have written about the body becoming the sole, but embattled, s ite of resistance for the imprisoned. Stripped of everything else, imprisoned in a stark space, with the commandment 171 seeking to penetrate and map his senses and interiority, the body, its recesses, surfaces, sounds and fluids all become weapons to be deplo yed. In states of exception, necropower seeks to produces, invi sible. Perhaps the most effective way of spectralizing death (and its corollary, care for the dead) in the context of Kashmir, is along the lines of what Haley Duschinski (2010) puted territorial infiltration, contamination, and transgression in the name of public safety, [these legal - political warscapes of violence and terror] ultimately require the production of a broad constituency of bystanders among the general citizenry who refuse or lack the political will to recognize disappearance, torture, and extrajudicial killing targeting specific groups as illegitimate forms of directing v iolence towards certain segments of the citizenry marked as others and cast outside of the boundaries of the political community. It is this paradoxical juxtaposition of the ubiquitous one Kashmiri member at the Indian all - This relationship between pain, bodily affect and power forms an important ana lytic to examine in Kashmir. The body as a metaphor is of course critical to fantasies of nationhood; the Kashmiri body is referred to in Indian nation - statist parlance as diseased, other and aberrant. ry is remapped as an inalienable part of the - Kashmiri elision of the body from the 172 The materiality of the body and its dynamics with power, memory, and representation provide a crucial foundation for a poetics of vulnerability and grief, which remains a central aspect of Kashmiri cultural formations. I have examined that in the context of the short stories in the previous section. In this section, I want to examine vulnerability, grief, and mourning in The Country without A Post Office (1997). The aesthetic and rhythmic contours of song and lyric are partic ularly rich mediums to evoke these complex and fraught relationships between vulnerability, grief and the political. Affectively intense public channels of grief and desire such as song, ghazal and elegy disrupt the inscriptions of necropower and remain ke y pathways for transmitting the story of Kashmir. is a necessary step i n the search for emotional and political resolutions of crises arising from the collective trauma of displacement and resettlement (34). In the context of South Asia, she says, historical narrative in one guise or another statist or anti - statist has bee n granted the role of - national conflicts are relegated to the category of fait accomplis whose conclusion is foregone depending on which narrative viewpoint one endorses; Fragment: Writing about Hindu - to challenge the sta . Kabir nuances that stance further, by urging us to note that lyrical, affective and melodramatic modes fl ow through statist modes in many South and West Asian cultural formations. These disrupt 173 dominant narratives and render them permeable to other conflicting histories and emotional regimes 201 (32 - 33). Thus rather than positivist, empirical histories 202 , these lyrical pathways and the affective histories they transmit, enlarge what Pankaj Mishra, an important commentator on (Ali, Bhatt, Chatterji, et al. 1). Since the bod y, mourning, memory, fantasy and representation comprise crucial areas of contestation in Kashmir, they are simultaneously sites which are richly connected with these lyrical nodes. The poetics of vulnerability, grief, and mourning embedded in Agha Shahid poetry draws its emotional charge from Sufi life - worlds and song, from Urdu poetry and song, from elegies from post - war Eastern Europe, from Sufi and Shiite mourning rituals, from the political desire for self - determination. Above all, it draws its e nergies from the need to make According to Judith Butler (2003) 203 vement [psychic but also somatic movement] (Butler 472 ). This sensory, kinesthetic, and performative aspect of mourning finds an especially rich conduit in lyrical poetry. Jahan Ramazani in Poetry of Mourning: the Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994) incantatory, rhythmic, repetitive, kinesthetic, dimensions of poetry, be it epic, elegy, ghazal - 201 Kabir uses the example of a Sufi Qawwali interrupting the nation - statist fantasy of the film Mission Kashmir ; the Qawwali invokes alternate acoustic territories (La Belle) ruled by their radically alternate emotional and phantasmatic regimes (33 - where the exi led poet returns to a deserted home and picks up the dead telephone to hear the accidental notes of instrument of bureaucratic and biopolitical mana is accidentally receiving unintended radio signals. The lyrical circuits transmitted disrupt the technologies of power by evoking the affective ties between two warring nations and communitie s. 202 Chitralekha Zutshi (2004) points out, the Valley has been evacuated of a history and a people by the frameworks of fantasy, fear, and control (Languages of Belonging). 203 Loss (2003). 174 make it well - suited to performing grief and sensoriality. Agha Shahid Ali is much attuned to the sounds, movements, surfaces, flows, recesses and projections of the vulnerable body. Simultaneously through rich, layered lyric, Ali creates poetic practices that engage the interlocutor/audience in very tactile, immersive, embodied way s. The immersive practices make particular, devise alternate territories and transmissions of affect that escape necropolitical pathways. The kind of participatory a esthetics/politics of palpability that Ali conjures is also mined from sub - continental and wider regional practices such as Sufi music, ghazal, or folk poetry. They predicate with startling immediacy, how identities and lives are formed in the context of e xtreme political and social dispossession, and allow us a means to access the interested in exploring through this section is as follows: how may we parse visual, aura l, rhythmic and performative cultural expressions for strains of trauma and vulnerability? Particularly in late - modern death - worlds like Kashmir where a culture of terror pervades, where imaginaries and everyday practices remain under siege, where the Indi an State continues to frame meaning and interpretation (via various capillaries of necropower), how would we read the wounded, imprisoned, tortured, raped, dispossessed, imprisoned and insurgent body? The Country Without A Post Office (1997) was written as a response to the political crisis in Kashmir in the early 1990s; as narrated to Lawrence Needham in an interview 204 , Ali notes he wrote the poems in response to the clampdown on communication with Kashmir (telephone calls were hard to put through, letters were not delivered, and above all he did not know when he 204 The Verse Book of Interviews (2005), ed. H enry and Zawacki, 133 - 146. 175 Kabir c narratives, become trapped in an endless mirroring of self and other, charged only with an inheritances: Sufi, Shiite, West and Central Asian, Kashmiri, Hindu, East European, Balkan, Modernist etc., to construct a transnational poetics of vulnerability. The bricolage 205 206 Kashm ir is a complex imaginary, implicated and embedded in different contexts, programs and desires. The poems incarnate a longing for homeland, for Kashmir, but are mediated equally with a critique of limiting nationalisms. The very composite terrain Ali opens up through the images, sounds, rhythms, and gestures he coalesces, and in the very performance of this bricoleur identity - we find a critique of homogenizing world views Indian, Pakistani, or Kashmiri. He takes advantage of the plasticity and elasticit y of poetry to re - situate and re - shape Kashmiri cultural expression; these diverse contexts and cultures add other resonances to Kashmiri pain and stage its iteration and re - presentations in new networks and citations. This, in turn, offers new performativ es and gestures to emerge that subsequent cultural expression mobilizes. At the same inaugurate a new poetics of mourning that is embodied and open - ended as I w ill demonstrate. In the poems of TCWAPO ( as well as the earlier Half - Inch Himalayas, ) Kashmir, home, family, childhood all seem so very far away. The experience of exile is crucial to TCWAPO. It 205 According to Ramazani, modernist bricolage the synthetic use in early twentieth - century poetry of diverse cultural materials ready to hand has helped postcolonial poets encode aesthetically the intersections among multiple cult 206 The Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets , Ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, 1997 (140). Biryani is a rice based dish whose history coalesces with the cultural and political mi grations in West, Central and South Asia. 176 was written with the knowledge that unlike the other summers , Ali did not know when he would able to go home to Srinagar again. However, the state of permanent war that produces this dispossession and uncertainty remains the pervasive condition haunting the collection. at Hamid Naficy in An Accented Cinema , identifies as an exilic orientation: marked by fragmentation, estrangement, - - 2). While the sensory apparatus of Kashmiri (Hindu and Muslim) experience. The Kashmiri Muslim experience of living in a never - reordering of space, the senses, memory and representation. Ali, I would argue o ffers us a Susan Buck - 207 es are sense - perception to motor response begins and ends in the the arena for motor response, the external world must be included to complete the sensory - Morss 128). Under the necropolitical regime, most senses and the worlds they inhabit, are blocked or re - made; hence 207 Quoted in Rebecca Scherr , 2005, p.31). 177 sensorium of vulnerability involves learning to perceive and sense in alternate ways. Often, this involves, relying not on one sense alone, but learning to perceive trans - sensoria lly. Again, exilic sensory systems offer a close parallel. Explaining the exilic perception (as embodied and trans - sensorial, Naficy argues that the human body is perceived through external means (mirrors, photography, film, etc.) and internally by our own vision, organs of balance and proprioception (Sobchack 1999). Exile or traumatic displacement can throw the integrity of bodily perceptions out of array. In the Kashmiri context, occupation and political dispossession produce an estranging effect that can cause similar disarray. Subjection to necropolitical violence, too as we have seen causes dismorphism in internal as well as external perception. This takes on urgency in states of exception where phobias of fragmentation, paralysis and splitting recur. The visual sense, in particular, appears to be the dominant mode of perceiving the contemporary world. It is, consequently, a fundamental locus of necropower. In her dissertation, Syn/Aesthetics: Touch, Sound and Vision in the works of Gertrude Stein, Djun a Barnes, and Muriel Rukeyser (2005), Rebecca Scherr writes that Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Malek Alloula and other critics of a dominant visual culture stress that a politics of seeing is a reflection of the larger socio - political - economic landscape of a given culture which teaches us to interpret what may be made visible an d what may not - become the material of surveillance and discipline. The Foucauldian Panopticon is a machine for produ cing the seeing/being seen dyad (217) where the seen is perpetually kept as an object of information, never as subject in communication. 178 This privileging of other forms of sensing takes on a special significance under states of emergency where exposure to the necropolitical gaze is relentless. As we have seen, few recesses to hide in are granted to those imprisoned in this state of permanent war. Ali is especially invested in mobilizing these other ways of seeing and sensing in exile and under occupation. Along with trans - sensoriality, Naficy illustrates that in representations of exilic memory or touch and the gaze through the use of fetish objects, prosthetics, paranormal ways of loo Scherr quoting Jennifer Rodaway Relational Sense ( 1997) cautions us that sight is concerned with appearances. On its own, it gives us access only to surfaces; thus, vision (even outside states of permanent war) depends on the information provided by other senses and the memory to assist in the interpretation of visual images or surfaces (12). Given that under occupation, the gaze of the occupied subject is severely inhibited, reliance on other senses such as touch, hearing, af fect, temperature, etc. becomes even more necessary to reclaim memory, space, and identity. Ronak Kapadia in his analysis of Index an activist artistic responses to post 9/11 detentions argues that the attention to the visual in projects that engage with disappearance and superpanopticon (Kapadia 2008 208 Index , to render the disappeared (materially a reading of Ali. 208 - Political Emotions ed. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, Ann Reynolds (2010)184. 179 poetry, sound, tactility, affect, pain, heat, cold, blood and skin are recurring Memory is of central importance to identities formed in trauma: contemporary visual and aural turns in representations of unspeakable trauma recognize that a memory image is not visual or aural but multi - sensory and embodied (Marks 146). Laura Marks in The Skin of the Film (2000), develops the term haptic visuality;. M arks proposes a way of understanding how intercultural cinema represents cultural experiences that might not always be available to vision: through a of haptic visuality, where vision functions as a sense of touch (Marks22). Locating certain types of femin ist, queer, intercultural film - un - recordable memory of the senses (5). One of the ways cinema embodies cultural memory is by awakening memories of touch 209 . Thus embodied, tactile memory and ways of seeing and experiencing the world are one such site. The cro ssing over of sense - perceptions and sensory memory (where sight or hearing become perceived as touch), I would say, are urgent ways to access the corporeality of elusive, spectralized death - is incarnated in a longing to touch Kashmir, confirming thus its materiality, its tangibility in the face of various erasures . 209 For example, she analyzes how in Her Sweetness Lingers (1994) by Shani Mootoo, the love poem the film - maker reads on the soundtrack richly, sensuously evokes erotic desire for her lover while the camera like the words tentatively circles around the lover standing in a garden of vivid colors. The intimate camera shots, the buzzing - 186). 180 comes into effect with startling political i ice in dry plains/to will the distant mountains to glass./ The city from where no news can come/is - 5).Thus the touch of jeweled ice (late r revealed to be ruby - red blood encrusted snow) like a talisman allows the wearer a haptic vision an ability to see through touch. This heightened vision is needed not only to cut through the granite of the Himalayas, but more impossibly, through the sen se - ordering technologies of necropower. Through this transensorial view, Srinagar - which is under curfew and all information from it is heavily censored - f vision but also echoes the language of necropower which renders death invisible but employs precise, measured ways of producing it 210 . is running/away to I sea - 8). Zero Bridge was an iconic bridge across the River Jhelum which was dismantled in 2012. It is significant that according to one version, the bridge was originally called Zorr Bridge (Zorr is Deaf in Kashmiri) - said to be so named be cause it was constructed by a contractor who was deaf. In the 1990s, the bridge was closed to traffic as paramilitary bunkers were constructed on either side. The name assumes a cruel appositeness as it invokes the scene of a massacre in the early 1990s wh ere those attending the funeral procession of Moulvi Farooq (assassinated by gunmen in 1990) were fired upon by the Indian an entirely oppositional register 210 Such as the new pressure pump guns unleashed in Srinagar streets in 2010 which fires highly damaging pellets that penetrate the body and damage vital organs but hardly leave any external marks (Kak 35). 181 in Statists counter - insurgency discourse and practice in Kashmir. The transfer of meaning to a different topos here is important for counter - discourse to emerge. The shadow appears to be able to mime the nothingness that the regime seeks to impose - 11). This returns us to the bifurca r (1993) has called this poem directs us to that. In the cell, Ri zwan, and through him the poetic persona, witness a naked (15)! The shadow, the nakedness and youth of the boy, the scream are all marked by a common denominator: t hey are ordinarily rendered invisible, inaudible by the commandement. Hence no news, no images of this vulnerability are allowed to escape 211 . However, using the haptic vision, 16). The synesthetic tactility Ali offers. It also points to how new readings need to be invented to interpret how bodily gestures, cultural habitus develop under conditi ons of fear and terror to take on new meaning. It is significant here that the poet - persona is sheened in moonlight in emptied Srinagar; the light of the moon materializes and affirms his paranormal bodily presence in Srinagar, a 211 See for example discussion of the Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings from Kashmir (p.22,23, 238 - 40). 182 cityscape where Rizwan and he can meet only under paranormal circumstances. In these exceptional circumstances (made necessary incidentally by a state of exception called by the State), the poet does not have any assurance to give. The poet (or his persona) recognizes the shadow a s Rizwan someone, perhaps a lover, missing in multiple sense of the term; in his absence a full citizen/human with protection and security from the nation - state, but also as a geab gomut either buried in mass graves 212 each tically disrupts the terror - making practices of the State. dream - image or memory becomes a surrogate projection reconstituting Rizwan and also Kashmir. It represents a way of imagining and substantiating alternate possibilities: As Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings from Kashmir (2013) writes, occupation. Each day brings pain. Each new pain is worse than before. Gradually, one forgets the immediacy and feltness of such pain. In essence, one could say, forgetting and telling are similar if violence dismembers life - worlds, amnesia and memorialization re - 212 See for example Angana P. Chatterji, P. Imroz et al Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked and Mass Graves in Indian - a dministered Kashmir, A Preliminary Report and Justice in Indian - administered Kashmir, 2009. 183 members that torn - apart world of course as a different, transmogrified fleeting home for life to continue to exist. (53) ws this feltness and immediacy to be a part of the re - constituted Kashmiri imaginary. anew in the context of these modern political formations of violence. Ramazani says that in elegi usually speak, and when they do, ghosts provide surrogate - perspectives for the poet. For the ruin (131). The ethical imperative of letting gho sts speak is urgent as has been often attested. Ali enriches poetic conventions such as prosopopeia: (actively personification of the dead) a move (Ramazan i 229). However given the death - worlds inhabited by Kashmiris, where death becomes not an external limit to life but an everyday condition of living in a state of exception, this destabilization perhaps gains a particular edge. Rizwan guides him through th e material traces of other spectralized deaths blood on the road, the shoes of mourners who ran, or died in the firing. Grieving Rizwan becomes a grief for all the missing. Even in death, however, the Kashmiri body continues to be a battleground for mean ing - making, indeed communicating through touch, temperature, skin and blood. The touch of Rizwan or other unburied Kashmiris, cold with ruby - red - blood - encrusted ice, is later revealed - erability. In the transmutation of senses and surfaces, a new sensory emerges: the blood - encrusted snow which films clings to all these surfaces: the jeweled drops of bloodied ice and the hyperocular lenses that are 184 fashioned out of these. Thus the penetrability and vulnerability of bodies in the face of necropolitical violence becomes at the same time the very means of perceiving them. es of Rizwan and the naked screaming boy reappear. News of Rizwan being killed is affirmed. The naked sixteen year old boy, meanwhile, bears indelible webs - 14)? Necropolitical formations seek to reduce inspiring fear in these power regimes and a consequent application of a forensic gaze to slice ordering regime. Ronak Kapadia suggests th Gopinath 184). Film and audiovisual theory, we have seen, offers us frameworks of representation that help reconfi gure the sensory systems imposed by necropower. They also help audio - visual - rhythmic - kinesthetic - performative scope. In Ali, song, music and other acoustic and vocalic projections assume political significance. Ali builds on how vocalic bodies (fantasies, projections, surrogates that can inaugurate new ways of being a body) circulate as transformative interfaces of violence, space, memory and grief in spaces of death. Ali also reader 213 . What does it mean to bring trans - sensorial imagination to our reading of poetry? What 214 ? 213 Apart from Islamic inheritances, Hinduism and Sufism, western modernist influences (Eliot), East Europ ean post - poetry of occupation and siege (Mendelstam and Zbigniew Herbert) embed the landscape. Ali harnesses East 185 Voice, argues Connor, allows space to be measured and substantiated (34). Voice is the accomplice of space; it begins to give rise to space in its arising. Rising song evokes and carves s transmitted, forge space, sensation, memory and grief in ways that escape the commandement of necropower. However, to inhabit the space they cave out requires us to perform an attentive, resonant, anxious, self - transformative listening. To listen is to s ethical encounter it allows with late modernity. This encounter may allow us to detect the barely audible frequenci es, rhythms, and movements of Kashmiri (and postcolonial) trauma. - - as if from ashes - ascend/ into the cold where the heart must defend/ it wings of terror and even - 5). The dream stages a phantasmatic return home to Srinagar as in nearby Char - e - Sharif, the sacred shrine/tomb 215 of Nooru ddin Rishi, one militants who had sought refuge there. The responsibility for starting the fire is disputed between the Indian Army and the militants. European voices and images mourning the losses of other cities and cultures under siege , linking St Petersburg, Warsaw, Sarajevo with Srinagar The interlocutor is encouraged to listen for resonances /repetitions like the reappearance of the Sarajevo rose (imprint on urban concrete of mortar shelling) on ash filigreed roses on weeping chinar tre runes the ruins of 214 Drawing on visual trans - sensoriality, Lisa Coulthard develops the term haptic aurality to conceptualize an attentive, resonant, anxious, self - rd with maps for a philosophical, epistemological, and sensorial listening. According to Nancy, more than hearing and beyond pure understanding, the act of listening Nancy 2007, 5). 215 five to six hundred years old 186 The a scent into space is accompanied by the strains of a recording of the famous ghazal and thumri 216 singer Begum Akhtar playing in - flight. It is a song of grief with the haunting - hat one must emotions (terror, pity) unleashed by necropower. As the notes rise and fill the commercial/nationalized space of the aeroplane, they carve out and subs tantiate a radical territory, forged through mourning. In Acoustic Territories (2010), Brendan LaBelle acknowledges that the inception of airwave communication inaugurated fantasies of alterity, radical ambiguity, and paranoia, but also made possible unpre cedented solidarities and and sky, and charging the air with a radical ambiguity, the transmission tower sets the scene for alien communications, utopian fantasy, an interlinking of minds, and a general unease and paranoia as to what may come speeding through the radio, the phone lines, the television, the broadband, to locate itself within the home. Thus transmission towers vacillate within the imagination to lend support to the fantasy of communicational technology to extend the limits of the body, whether individual or political, social or aesthetic. (LaBelle 231). Above all, it continues to foster and transmit fantasies of radical individual, political, social or aesthetic transformation. The radically transformative airspace of the song in flight provides a repository for an imperiled Kashmiri memory, grief, and homeland. The necropolitical regime frames, commands and seeks to contain these affective spaces. H owever, the song rises (phenomenologically and 216 light songs influenced by Urdu - Persian poetry and sung in Hindi 187 the nationalized airwaves and airspace into an interface of imperiled Kashmiri bodies, vulnerabilities and desir once again, the sockets, films and fluids of the body become transensorial surfaces to scre en trauma. I wish to analyze this cryptic and densely allusive lyric to explore how acoustic/haptic bodies and spaces become the stage for performing an open - ended and radical grief. The strains - sensorial memories of her sudden death in 1974, and - 4). The pilot interrupts the in - flight song recording, to announce the news of Char - e - cigarette smoke, the dream - - - 3).What Michael Chion calls phantom sounds in film vocabulary, i.e. sound that the image decimation of Kashmir i - ness. The grief of Kashmir, the intense longing for self - determination, intense in their absence (in nationalized spaces such as flight paths from New Delhi to Srinagar, or nationalized airwaves, or print media), can only be expressed through substitutio n, mediation, and fracture. Their presence via a haunting absence, however, radically disrupts the engineering and nationalization of soundscapes. Second, by transposing the grief of losing Begum Akhtar with the burning down of li inaugurates an open - ended, unresolved practice of grief. In death - haunted milieus, past losses are constantly, relentlessly added on to current losses; grief can 188 never be laid to rest, as the systems producing grief are relentless and permanent. Thus, i nstead psychoanalytical terms a reinvestment of affect or a total assimilation of the other), we have here an elegiac stance, where, by constantly transposing gr ief objects, mourning is presented as interminable, irreconcilable and unassimilable. The burning mausoleum here becomes a means to detect the sensorial emotions and memories inscribed in ritual performance and practice of Sufi cultures which comprise an important part of historicized Kashmiri - ness. Chrar - e - patron saint, the 14th century Sufi mystic Sheikh Nooruddin Noorani, had been at the center of imagining a new political and cultural horizon for Kashmiris. Azaadi rallies took place in March 1990 at the shrine and a collective oath to struggle for self - determination was taken. Chrar - e - Sharif was transformed to a resistive site (Junaid 178) by tying threads asking for intervention on behalf of azaadi (as many Kashmiri Muslims did), and by making it the rallying point of esires to be transferred from the oppressive topos of Indian nation - statist significations to one outside its reach. Werbner and Basu have shown that for the citizens of postcolonial societies, a morally grounded charisma (embedded in Sufi Pirs or Saints) often acts as opposition and dissent to a biopolitical authority of the modern State (15). In the context of Kashmir, I would emphasize, that dissent takes on particularly urgent significance. To return to the poem, Begum Akhtar dissolves surreally into Lal Ded the first mystic Sufi poet of the Kashmir valley, a woman of contested religious affiliation; and finally into Lal - whose faith also blurred sec tarian borders. Akhtar, - 189 if briefly; the spirit of Noor - ud - - e - - reflexively and cautiously here and in other parts of my dissertation. Werbner and Basu complicate facile theories of syncreticism in Embodying Charisma : Modernity, Locality and Performance of Emotion in Sufi Cult Thus, the space substantiated by song becomes a surrogate memorial/shrine to this syncretistic Kashmiriness as well as to the charge of resistance and self - determination that the shine had accrued in the context of popular Kashm iri political movements. . Lal Ded and Noor - ud - Rishi were both figures who crossed the Hindu - Muslim boundary. As Dominque Sila - Khan has argued in Crossing the Threshold (2004), studies of the sub - continent reveal that in movements such as the Rishi movemen t in Kashmir or other medieval movements in Bengal and Punjab, there have been alliances, sharing, and borrowing (44) between Islamic and Hindu communities which permitted the smooth passage of ideas, practices, and habits in all directions (50). Begum Akh tar (a secular Muslim singer/courtesan), as we have seen becomes a conduit to Lal Ded (female Kashmiri mystic) who in turn conjures Noor - ud - din Rishi also known as Nund Rishi (Rishi being the Hindu term for sage/religious mystic). A continuity may be found through them between the secular Indo - Muslim auralities evoked by the ghazal and the thumri and the sacral Sufi songs and rituals of the past that continue to be performed a continuity that certainly complicates Kashmiri Pandit/Muslim binaries. Chrar - e - 190 Muslim and Brahmin Kashmiri have equivalent claims and membership rights in these soci al and ethical regimes. Through the figure of Noor - ud - din Rishi, the poem also goes on to make an emphatic critique of contemporary Kashmiri visions of imagined communities which foreclose this equivalence Through his inclusive praxis, the figure of the Su fi mystic calls attention to the exclusions and erasures performed (violently) by some Kashmiri desires. (Noor - ud - din Rishi - e - of Indian nation - statist imaginar ies as well as homogenous Kashmiri Muslim ones that fail to for Kashmir that suffuse the poem are, themselves, also subject to interrogation. Walter Ong in Ora lity & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), claims sound is evanescent, it is , stabilization, in quite this way (Ong 31 - 32). Thus song, incantation, poetry share in common this evanescence. What we do not listen to in time is thus lost, and this moment of going out of existence is what interlocutors of Kashmir can internalize throu gh the multi - sensorial evocations that Ali offers us. The vocalic bodies and territories carved out through evanescent sound, thus are also vulnerable to evanescence, and yet, they vivify with urgency, the need to vivify the struggle between contesting emo tional and sensory regimes. In the next section, I will return to the question I had begun my chapter with: What does it mean to mourn under conditions of permanent war? In an earlier section, I have discussed d also its desires to shift death (and rituals and mourning around it) to something secret and stealthy. In the biopolitical regime of corpse - 191 Kashmiri Muslim cannot be grieved since he cannot die because he was never fully alive 217 . In her acute analysis of the Israeli context, Meira Weiss in Chosen Body: The Politics of the Body in Israeli Society demonstrates how social paradigms and political identities are articulated through the body. Processes of bereavement and commemoration of the fallen soldier, strictures on how to grieve, bury, and commemorate nation - e linked to central projections and fantasies of national strength and regeneration (66). Especially in the wake of fidayeen violence, these practices help re - member the ruptured/splattered Israeli body politic. In the Kashmiri Shiite context, public per formances of mourning the Karbala add an especially flagrant and layered context to the politicization of grief. Moreover, as we have seen, the Sufi practice of commemorating and visiting mausoleums and shrines of saints provides another conduit for channe ling outrage and grief. Corpses and relics (sacred and secular) become fetishes of a desire for self - determination, and mourning opens up a crucial political vein in Kashmir. Grief, care, and commemoration of death re - ith values and ideologies of the insurgent community, thus disrupting the inscriptions of the State (or non - State actors). It severely damages and threatens the project of corpse - making /nation - state engineering that mark postcolonial modernity, and turns the corpse into a screen for projecting collective imaginings beyond the nation - State. Embodied Charisma to put together a reading. In their Introduction, the authors ask us to look at the power of ritual as derivi ng not from belief as a set of abstracted ideas but from ritual as a complex set of transformative, embodied, negotiated ethical and aesthetic practices, and the experiences which their enactment generates 217 those it kills in Iraq and Afghanistan. 192 Rooms Are Never Finished (2002), Muharram and its mourning rituals, affective expressions and practices taken on new meanings through reiteration and grafting; personal bereavement, political bereavement, become amalgamated with Zaina of The Day of Ashura contexts to stage political protests, harnessing the political charge of the losses of Karbala 218 . Kashmir, in particular has a history of channeling Muharram for performing political grief. Crackdowns, curfews, and protests during Muharram are a common feature. Th (1,3). (The necropolitical commandement goes through the morning schedule for making death:/ lause by clause, - 4). atoot ang . The mourners enact a very important performative maneuver; they use their vulnerability and penetrability to displace the anatomizing empowering origin site 219 218 See for example the Muharram protests of December 1978 s regime(http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2080036_2080037_2080043,00.html) or the recent police clash with protestors in Srinagar in November 2012 (http://ibnlive.in.com/news/police - clash - with - protesters - in - srinagar - during - muharra m - procession/307038 - 3 - 245.html.) 219 The starvation of the flesh in the Hunger Strike of 1981 was the inverting and bitter interiorization of the power of the state. Hunger striking to the death used the body of the prisoner to recodify and to transfer stat e power from 193 redirec t and internalize the forensic gaze of the State onto their own bodies, opening it up for s creening but not in the same clinical and biopolitical register of the state. While bleeding for Hussein, they also bleed. So what is performed and screened for us m ost visibly is the re - bodies), the blood that reddens and spatters the streets is a visual affirmation of the Kashmiri broadcasting - 7) is a Moreover, through incorporating this political act in what is primarily a bereavement ritual, the mourners create channel s to publically mobilize grief . Finally, through situating their mourning - - making topos. Sacred ritual as we have discussed, sho uld be seen as transformative, embodied, negotiated ethical and aesthetic practices, and in this citation, the experience their enactment generates also take on politically charged significance. Every year the Muharram procession repeats all these accumula ted meanings, taking on, in addition, the grief of new political losses; it thus becomes an iterative channel to perform grief and dissent rupturing the spectralizing and dehumanizing regimes. In 1992, the AFSPA, and the brutal militarization of Kashmir we re its immediate matter. In 2014, there will be new losses to mourn in addition to the old. one topos to another. Subsequent sacralization of the dead hunger striker completed the process of purification and commemorated the subverting transfer of power from the state to the insurgent community with elaborate funeral processions and mortuary displays (237). Feldman, Allen. Formations of Violence : The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, 1991. 194 Conclusion Arundhati Roy in an article in The Guardian 220 had noted that 2013 and 2014 were going to be very significant years for South Asia. Elections were duly held in India, in Pakistan and in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The US had planned to complete the withdrawal of its troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, however it has decided to deploy a slower withdrawal and seriously destabilized Pakistan will spill into Kashmir, as it has done before, remains urge nt. Keeping the Kashmiri body in the foreground and creating channels through which the material and collective traumas can be broadcast is, thus, of vital importance. lost object go. The insistent, protracted clinging on to the lost object becomes very often a strategy of resistance and negotiation in states of permanent or slo w violence as diverse as work on spirit possessions and avenging ghosts as coping and commemorative mechanisms in Das et all edited Remaking a World). In the biop olitical regime of corpse - making, as we have the Kashmiri cultural i maginary to recognize these spectral others and uncanny presences. We through the senses (Taussig); hence the sensorial becomes an important site of counter - dis course. composed in response to the violence in the early 1990s, offer a highly compressed, lyrical and 220 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/afzal - guru - dangerous - political - fallout 195 diffusely phantasmagoric access to the sensorial. They offer a reading of injury and grief against their grains to reveal the phantasmatic and affective fac es of the violent Indian State. 196 CHAPTER 4 Post - Part ition Traumas: History and Memory in Githa Hariharan The past and the present are not entirely separat e entities cumulative, multi - layered collage of past residues continually deposited through the cultural equivalent of the geological process of sedimentation. Eviatar Zerubavel 221 Between the homogenisation wrought by globalisation on the one hand and cultural nationalism on the other, we are witnessing more violent religious and ethnic conflict, more conservatism, more censorship. In short, shrinking spaces in which to think, read, write, and express ourselves artistic ally. In times of such siege, all significant art becomes offensive, striking against, opposing, revealing, resisting. Githa Hariharan 222 Introduction: Intercrossed Memories The partition of the Indian sub - continent has led to a rupturing and rewriting of histories, memories, places, and affect - worlds 223 . The post - partition landscape of the region remains cratered with conflicts. What used to be rich, intercrossed life - worlds i n South Asia are being flattened and shrunk to fit nation - statist frames. Contemporary political and psychological imperatives are making official distances between Kolkata and Karachi or Benaras and Bikrampur (near Dhaka) vaster, more insurmountable. My f irst two chapters dealt with post - 221 Eviatar Zerubavel , Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past , 2003. 222 Githa Hariharan, IACLALS Conference, Jawaharlal Nehru University. New Delhi. 23 January 2003. Keynote Address. 223 . 197 partition creative productions that mined the composite affect - worlds and geographies of the fragmented region to envision a deeply connected South Asia. They addressed the trauma of the partition through mobilizing shared cultural sites; this included performative forms such as Sufi lyric, or affective sensoria rooted in the vernacular and intimate ( via situated emotions like viraha - the longing of separation or ishq - desire ) or in melancholic spatio - temporalities like - border feminist citizenship of South Asia challenging nation - statist construct s of love, intimacy, trust, and belonging. gets repeated and amplified across borders, cross - national expressive worlds become the site of mnemonic contestations. W - state accept as worthy of remembering i.e. as public - Quayson 224 ) collectivities or individuals. The re - writing of the Indian nation - state as Hindutvavaad i gained political and cultural prominence; the 1990s marked the destruction of the Babri Majid (1992), the Bombay Riots (1992) and a growing vulnerability of the ex - centric citi zen, in particular the Indian Muslim. The situation has, since then, worsened. A combination of global exigencies and a collective frustration with the centrist Congress has seen the Right - wing BJP come to power at the center twice (in 1998 - 2004 and recent ly in May 2014). The last BJP - led While many judicial cases are ongoing, and many fact - finding commissions, central and state 224 rated from the perspective of the ex - - 3). He wants a greater engagement with the off - to find a referential locus for narrativizing South African traumas. 198 e regime of impunity 225 Baxi 226 ) prevalent in Gujarat and by extension in the nation. . The current times, then, constitute a particular ly critical crucible for the testing of palimpsestic identities and inclusive citizenships. Wayward trajectories of remembering which - diasporic Indian writer in E In Times of Siege (2003) and Fugitive Histories (2009) while exploring what it means to be a witness to the multiple wounds of post - are nationalisms of Hindutva. In her at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2003 , which forms the epigraph to this chapt er, Hariharan speaks sation with Mohan Ramamoorthy printed in his review of Fugitive Histories for The Indian Express in 2009 227 , Hariharan avers that both In Times of Siege (2003) and Fugitive Histories textured non - Brahmanical histories and the insidious flattening of public and private spaces of majoritarian mandate. 225 Duschinski, Haley. "Reproducing Regimes of Impunity: Fake Encounters and the Informalization of Violence in Kashmir Valley." Cultural Studies. 24.1 (2010): 110 - 132. 226 Seminar (2002), Upendra Baxi ous - up strategies and operations. W hat actually happened ought never to be allowed to 227 Ramamoorthy, Mohan. 199 - diasporic) Indian writing in English n eeds some attention. Writing about the postcolonial Indian novel in English, Josna Rege (1997) notes that post - (1981), the landscape of the novel changed to incorporate a fluid, labile interrelationship between the nation (pub lic) and the individual (private) 228 . Instead of the dichotomous investments charted by earlier novels of the 40s and 60s, the new topoi mapped the mediations, exchanges and mutabilities of the binary. They did so to map uncharted traumas and affective histo framework for reading trauma in postcolonial India, undilut ed by universalizing templates. Postcolonial Trauma textured interdisciplinary field that seek to sit uate trauma off center from European/Holocaustian paradigms. Trauma Studies has been brought to book for the little attention that non - European contexts have received until recently. Michael Rothberg in his Preface to The Future of Trauma Theory 229 Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) borrows from hermeneutic for linking events of extreme violence, structures of subjective and collective rticular time and space (ibid). 228 - Rushdie National N 229 200 Stef Craps, one of the most trenchant critics of the Eurocentric model argues in Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2013) that PTSD is a European and monocultu ral construct. Not only are clinical practices of therapy developed within specific cultural structures unhelpful in many postcolonial contexts, but the hierarchy of knowledge systems often ensures that local modes of making sense of pain and loss are evac uated. Rothberg (2014), however, cautions us that pluralizing and vernacularizing trauma is not enough; ultimately, counterforms and theories to replace or add to older ones a need to be developed (xii). While new directions in trauma studies offer many fr ameworks for situating loss in cultural and historical specificity, Rothberg argues that the dislocations of history, culture sand subjects brought on by trauma make such grounding open to limitations (xii). Ignoring the effects of dislocations on history, culture and psyches would be grossly counterintuitive. This is why I argue that the partition of 1947 and its ongoing tearing of the social and individual fabric is a productive site to study how bodies, memories, culture, and selves are alienated by the ruptures. subjectivities to examine encrusted effects of trauma. The disruption of affect - worlds, the new clusters of meaning added on to existing tropes (such as betrayal, viraha ,i shq ) and the rituals and gestures (mourning Muharram in Kashmir or have been discussed in previous chapters. As Ananya Kabir (2014) reminds its structures and foundations - cannot be and modernity being a global phenomenon, the unco while reframing trauma (Buelens, Durrant and Eaglestone 72 - 3). This addresses the simplified 201 West/non - West binary that criticisms of trauma studies often find hard to texturize. At the same time, she notes that the lan guage and social matrix through which the unconscious is expressed, the systems, rituals and gestures deployed to relate it to lived experience vary greatly. Veena Das (1997) has similarly argued that reading narratives of pain and trauma is contingent on the relationship between pain and language specific to a culture. Rothberg suggests that one way to create a paradigm for trauma studies minus the universalizing impulse is to attend to how traumas connect and overlap across contexts Buelens, Durrant and E aglestone (xv) and, even, to recognize that there may be many forms of suffering in the same social space (xvii). the Indian middle class 230 a widely heterogeneo us constituency invested in multiple mediations of modernity and the pre - modern - provides a rich field to track the various counterforms and frameworks of addressing pain, loss, and grief found in post - colonial works. For example, in In Times of Siege , I - historical haunting is complicated by mooring trauma in culture, body, and the public. More importantly, I will follow how hauntingly complex affective sen soria of familiar seasonal states allows a healing of trauma. In my discussion of Fugitive Histories , I will - Gujarat ry and trauma within material and affective reading trauma in postcolonial India, undiluted by universalizing templates. 230 In her interviews, Githa Hariharan has often referred to the middle class as her audience. http://www.githahariharan.com/downloads/selected_interviews.pdf 202 Hariharan in more than one interview has sa id that the everyday worlds she crafted in these two novels address and engender the middle class citizen / reader 231 . Acutely aware of the according to her , an important participant in the multiple publics called into being in response to the demolition of the Babri Masjid, or the carnage in Gujarat. English and English literate publics are a major battleground for the nation - rdinances on removing English from Civil Service Exams reveal. However, it is important to remember that there are many contesting markers of modernity in contemporary India (and Hindutvaadi ideologies while reinforcing tradition, also align themselves wit h some of them globalization, capitalism) strategically. While the middle class is one constituency among others pushed and overestimated. Partha Chatterjee 232 such conform to those principles. This domain is limited to a small number of citizens i.e. the elite. - literate, novel reading middle - class elite is firmly located within this domain. Her work should be read as part of a pedagogic and creative address summoning imaginaries and imaginations that attest to pluralist ways of being. My introduction noted that the cross - national expressive routes and the affect - clusters 231 Githa Hariharan refers more than once to the number of people jolted out of their safe , cushioned existence by the excesses of fundamentalism and compelled to speak up 232 Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy , Partha Chatterjee, 2011. 203 Huyssen (2003) 233 explores the solely through the framework of pain, loss and suffering would be limiting it considerably. In the context of the sub - cont - State shores itself these difficult pasts. Huyssen formulates a framework to understand memory mediated by the material and the affective: he suggests that the archive may not be the appropriate metaphor in our times to think through memory. Since modern understandings of mem died in the social (28). Huyssen, Ananya Kabir, Veena Das and others thus narrativize the relationship between memory and trauma via the embodied and the affective, placing both trauma and memory in the collec tive. its lived relationship to the present. Her writing helps us draw connections between memory, the narratives we use to remember, and a specific set of embodied gestu res/affects/beliefs she as embodied has significant implications for studying trauma interdisciplinarily in the 233 World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time , Jill Bennet and Rosanne Kennedy, 2003. 204 (2007) 234 , under the Hindutva regime where contested physical sites (she gives the examples of Babri Masjid and a 17 th Century Sufi tomb in Ahmedabad) have been effaced visibly and ted site where memories are erased or retold or new memories invented, the ongoing, real target of the disputing exercise is that large and amorphous thing imperativ e to learn to read pasts whose relief has morphed or disappeared - in other words to re - member deeply. In an interview with Arnab Chakladar on Another Subcontinent 235 , Hariharan specific way all of us -- and I am sure this is not exclusively Indian -- carry cultural baggage that is not compatible, on the surface , [my italics] with wha t we believe or have become. For example, Carnatic music is very much a part of my life -- I grew up listening to it, learnt it for years. Carnatic music is tied to its kritis , and as an adult you may not necessarily agree with what those words are saying, the world of [religious] belief and design they point to. But all the same, another interview with Joel Kuorrti 236 , she says, if she hears the Kalyani Raag or Moh anam Raag - rifies that the amorphous things called culture thus address affective repositories of cultural memory. Her postulate offers us a way to read 234 (2007) in Journal of Postcolonial Writing , 43:2, 125 - 132, DOI: 10.1080/17449850701430432. 235 Another Subcontinent: South Asian Society and Culture , 236 by Joel Kuorrti in New Delhi on 3 February 2000 . 205 South Asian topograp hies of individual and collective memory; this braiding of body, affect and memory opens up a rich and nuanced framework to study contemporary sectarian violence in India. Memory and Affect in In Times of Siege This text explores how complex pasts indiv idual and collective, can be made 237 of Shiv Murthy a middle - aged professor of history in an Open University in New Delhi who is caught up in a large political/ideological storm when the Itiha s Suraksha Manch (History Protection Brigade) of the right - wing Hindutva block demands that a lesson he has written on the medieval social reformer and mystic Basava be revised or recanted. He is accused of distorting history to malign Hinduism, Hindu sain ts and the glorious medieval Hindu kingdom centered in the city of Kalyana. culled from various sources proposed that Basava, rather than a divine saint was a radical social reformer. Through the Veerashaiva (Warriors of Shiva ) movement, Basava galvanized the oppressed castes and social groups in Kalyana into a the influence of a number of reform philosophies including that of Persian Sufi mystics on charge has been sanitized and sanctified to fit the requirements of Hindu divinity. In the novel, s, but also his burdened response to the 237 - 206 returning to celestial realms. Shiv, however, weaves a narrative - wing ideologues as a treasonous act against the Hindu nation - state. vachanas ) titled The Lord of the Meeting Rivers (1984), by K.V. Zvelebil. Zvelebil in a postscript on the life of Basava mentions how his biography has many sources: vachanas he composed , inscriptions, edicts, folk trad itions, hagiographies etc. Basava is thus a composite historical figure, many realization that there was a gaping abyss between him and the children of the lower castes (140). The creative potential of trauma is, thus, allud ed to here. As a young boy ritually entering Brahmanical manhood, he revolted against the practice of wearing the sacred thread. In his adulthood, he began to preach a social reform movement rejecting social inequality of caste, class and sex. He spurred a social and political crisis as large numbers of men and women from the lower rungs of society farmers, weavers, fishermen and even some Brahmins - joined his movement in droves. At least two cases of unrest are in historical records: a washerman and an untouchable invoked fear and social turmoil as they publically refused to observe lower caste behavior. A marriage between a Brahmin woman and a low caste cobbler was the final crisis which led to brutally repressive measures by the regime and an equally v iolent uprising by 207 ruins in the midst of terrible chaos. The Veershaiva end as enshrined in diverse narratives remai ned shrouded in mystery (Zvelebil 139 - 148). The diegetic and non - diegetic details of the life and affect - worlds of Basava raise crucial constituted in the very act of memory.One strand of the novel multiple publics that accrue around the contentious site of making public memory. Some of these viol ate the nation - statist address to imagine more radical spaces. The public discursivity and open - ended forms of address of some of these spaces bear much in common with the oral, vachanas novel is then invested in producing Shiv as an insurrectionary political subject via the address of what Rothberg 238 - take place between diverse places and times dur It is understood through a parallel narrative strand that Shiv will neither recant nor resign, but will take a stand (in alliance with various publics) to contest the siege on the multiplicity and cross - fertiliz ation of memory. Eviatar Zerubavel theorizes in Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past the past and the present are not entirely separate entities - layered collage of past residues continually deposited through the cultural equivalent of the geological process of sedimentation (37). Thus the process of organizing memory is haunted by the cultural regime. of classification that helps articulate 238 Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization , Michael Rot hberg 2009. 208 - called homogenous worlds of ces. Hariharan has often remarked that her craft lies in etching out political questions via private affective worlds. While writers like Ananya Kabir closely ground memory in place, Hariharan in In Times of Siege offers grounding through the erotic. Wayward desire is mapped . This allows us to see Harih aran, and other Indo - Deshpande, Manju Kapoor and others, occupy a unique non - diasporic feminist vantage through s with Meena (a away visiting their daughter in Seattle), is depicted as challenging heteronormative channels. As Arnab Chakladar points out ( Another Subcontinent ) , Shiv moves towards a more nurturing, feminized role as the narrative progresses towards his growing political involvement (helping Meena wash and brush her hair, preparing food, doing household chores he had never attempted before). Their roles - his nur turing and hesitant, hers abrasive and outspoken - invert many of the conventional gendered norms associated with the domestic and the political. The erotic fascination Shiv feels for Meena and their growing intimacy is what ultimately propels him towards active political participation. In her Introduction to Intimacy (2000), Lauren 209 occupying the space of convention, it is a kind of wild thing that is not organized like? Berlant elaborates that since there are (usually) no stable pathways in culture to cultivate its wayward plots (5), unconventional intimac y drives us to reevaluate the hegemonic conditions that inscribe affect on minds and bodies, and indeed to the redirection of established pathways social and leased inspire the temporalities. We may use these analyses of w ayward intimacies to read Hariharan. Rather than consolidating on the public vs. private divide central to homogenous nationalist imaginaries she erotic. This c with the fear of living with danger, choice, commitment. Fear of his new life, a small room crowded with strangers. With thugs, bare knives glinting in the dark. He must take h old of it all, claim his life as his own (177). all, Shiv has been in an on - again off - again sexual relationship with a colleague for many years. The locus for gene - her feminism and strong political impulses. Their erotic encounter which comes towards the end of the novel offers itself to rich analysis. Instead of the inviting, pliable sexual object o f male fantasy, Meena 210 marks her presence through detachment, distance, unreadable silences and hisses. My reading of their brief erotic encounter will elaborate on how the narrative interrupts the penetrative male gaze repeatedly. The narrative stages seve - and touching - mosquito es in the sultry room. This representation is important for a feminist reading that places the encounter outside heteronormative formulae. In the scene not only does Meena refuse to passively reflect back male desires of conquest and control, she also nego tiates from Shiv a - doubt and fear, encounter (and the promise extracted) is l together. There is no law, no government , no ghost that can tell them how they should cultivate it, when they sh energies as land outside the reach of [particular] laws, governments is a fantasy (the state has far - reaching capillaries as we have seen in other chapters and can shape als o by its absence); it is one, however, that allows Shiv to secede from socially, politically and imaginatively limited - erest of living collectivities. The novel then traces how map to read cross - fertilizing histories. The affective energies ignited in Shiv by his desire for 211 inclusive political community he had once dared to imagine. Only when Shiv has been able to - member has renewed his political participation as an insurrectionary citizen, and practice, then lies at the core of the novel. In Times of Siege offers sev eral models of what it is to remember and what resources we use to remember. The Hindu nationalists, for instance past - er other hand, like his father struggles with hypermnesia ). As part of his inherited hypermnesia, Shiv is haunted by unassimilable memories of his father who disappeared on June 7 1962. His father had been a on he suffered from harboring memories of political futures stubbornly incommensurate with the routine erasures of Mourning the Na tion generation, mourns not j ust the loss of shared life - worlds, but also of the future. Sarkar contends In the novel as mentioned, the erotic and political energies roused, offer a transhistorical /cross - fold into one another. As 212 transhistorical glossary allows him to extra ct and read multiple spectral scripts. I term this disappeared: thus June 7, 1 168 becomes the medieval counterpart to June 7, 1962 (108). He - or his father standing behind him as he is drawn closer to Meena and the political imperative she holds out, Shiv recognizes that Meena (180), he looks in the mirror as he shaves his deep imaging, Shiv scripts unstable narrative trajectories for his lost father; perhaps he had a s script, his father has amnesia (188). In another, more poignant script, as we have seen, his father suffers not from amnesia but hypermnesia(189) from an excessive memory that confronts even proleptic losses. In Specters of Marx (1994), Jaques Derrida 213 s father address the proleptic losses of [im]possible collectivities. Yet, these collectivities are once again invoked through remembrance. October 2000, June 1962 and June ltiple specters, then, becomes imperative to a transhistorical memorialization and collectivization of South Asia. - historical haunti ng is complicated by mooring trauma in returned again and again t (1917), contains the well - known and by now well - disputed stance that mourning and melancholia are two distinctive psychic states. Mourning until the loss is metab olized and the ego can then move on to newer investments. Melancholia, of protracted mourning. Recent theorists have contested such neat separations: Caryl Flinn (2004) 239 untainted by ambivalence or the unconscious? How can it leave ego - boundaries undisturbed, given how they are imbricated in all sorts of desires, attachments, contradic tions, and 239 The New German Cinema: Music, History and the Matter of Style , Caryl Flinn, 2004. 214 with qualifying remarks that mourning and melancholia are but two ways of dealing with loss: psychoanalytical theory of introjection: they argue that in cases of melancholia, in place of introjection (expansion of the self to assimilate the lost object) there is an incorporation of the loss. Incorporation involves sealing the lost object inside the self by secreting it in a tomb/crypt such that the cryptic enclave remains extra (trans. 1986), Derrida writes that the more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it excludes it (Rand/Derrida). The entombed return, inevitably as the uncanny; as psychic and somatic symptoms. Abraham and introjection. Derrida sums it up thus: safe insid e me (Rand/Abraham and Torok xvi). effects on individual psyches, but also as eff ects on the fabric of collectivities. Torok and In Times of Siege 215 material. but of multiple other subjects. Crucially in Hariharan, transhistorical grief originates in a sense of alienation from hegemonic Statist (postcolonial India or medieval K alyana) investments. It follows, then, that the routes of transmission are not limited to bloodlines, but are channeled via investments in the larger collective. As Shiv becomes increasingly aware of the expressive, affective and political charges of his t rauma, he begins to find ways of publically making it his own and truly walking in the Abraham places the the phantasmatic transmission of trauma allows that loss enclosed in singular crypts [to become] tran sferable and [have] a ripple effect. By this analysis, individual melancholia, motivated by a particular wound, can produce a collective cultural sense As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, Hariharan harnesses the f oundational tenets of trauma studies while also creating frameworks to understand grief embedded in South pathologization or medicalization of loss. The text, instead, em beds him within rich affect - unexpected way. His last whole memory o f June 7 1962 was the sky growing abruptly dark in the middle of the day. Most readers with experience of pre - monsoon thunderstorms in South Asia 216 darkening in April f ollowed by a strange dust - filmed glow; the ferocity of the showers; and the suddenness of their departures. Quite unlike the steadiness of monsoon rains, pre - monsoon storms evoke fear because of how violently they transform the familiar. Complex affect - wor lds cluster around them because of the way in which they heighten and change the local sensoria (smell, light, sounds, depth, perception etc.). Thus they have strong enough claims on cultural memory, belonging and affect to merit region - specific names enta ngled with local life - worlds. In West Bengal, for example, they are called kaal - baishakhi i.e. the bane of the month of Baisakh. In some other regions they are called mango - showers because they augur the ripening of mangoes. The haunting, emotively comp lex sensorium of the pre - monsoon storm provides Shiv with the reserves to confront his memories. With the sudden darkening of an October afternoon, because of its o ut - of - timeness. The storm provides him with a transformative space: the storm xperience draws out memories of a similar affective event: Shiv is able to retrieve from that day in his reaction. His childish grief. What he remembers inste child, Shiv had (belatedly) projected the shock to and shattering of his self onto the rhythms of the familial seasonal world. This time, with the deep memory he has learned, Shiv surrenders himself with wild aba around him. In this chaos, are evocations of a deep ecological memory of the sub - continent embodied in its biota. Though Shiv is at first resistant, he learns to read in the patterns of thi s 217 the screeching peacocks change the pitch of their cries fro (192). Thus, it is not in language but in the semi - discursive rhythms of the sensual world and its repetitive patterns of surrender and liberation, that he finds peace. In d isappearance cut off from the Symbolic, are reclaimed through the cryptonymy of the storm. Significantly though, Shiv has still not filled the discursive gaps in his memory of his father; they narrative closure and in Euro - American trajectories of healing, Hariharan chooses to gesture towards unraveling and surr ender. The lyrical, fragmented voice narrating this brief section interrupts the discursive continuities of the novel. Ananya Kabir has urged an understanding of subcontinental traumas through the lyrical and diffuse reservoirs of song, dance, ritual and p lace 240 . Hariharan provides a textured framework that helps us situate memory and trauma within dislocated spaces, histories and selves. Exploring the socially and politically creative energies of mourning and melancholia i.e. 240 Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings . 5.2 (2005): 28 - 42. Print. 218 Freudian introjection i.e. integration of the lost object into the psychic substance. However, the novel moves beyond Freudian schemes of forgetting attachments through metabolizing losses. the contested memories of the subcontinent Shiv inherits; it refers equally to the immersive, embodied - y, the novel opens up affective frameworks for how memory and memorialization can function as an inclusive binds for a collective fabric. Both these frameworks of knowing and seeing the past deeply provide a unique perspective on affect - mediated memory an d trauma in post - colonial Indian life - worlds. Hariharan makes a crucial intervention in trauma studies by proposing a model for transhistorical memory via a triangulation of the political, mnemonic and the sensual/erotic. Finally, by allowing individual gr ief to be connected via those triangulations to multi - directional publics, she continues the work of addressing and engendering composite South Asian collectivities. By way of concluding the section of the chapter on In Times of Siege , we need to return to routine and insidious sectarian violence. Texts such as In Times of Siege, or Fugitive Histories collective mourning and melancholia. In Fugitive Histories , as my argument will show, Hariharan goes much further in developing a sensorium of trauma that collectivizes and embodies South Asian wounds. 219 Affect and Witness ing in Fugitive Histories I write a monthly column for the Telegraph and while filing some clippings recently I was struck by just how many of the pieces, quite unconsciously, are about this question of how one remembers the past -- be it the Berlin Wall or Ayodhya. How do you remember? How do you use what you remember? Githa Hariharan, Interview 241 . The imagination, [Sara] finds has its limits. She can feed it general knowledge, what she has read otage, and what she herself has heard so recently from those whom they interviewed in Ahmedabad. But her imagination fails to harness all this information so she can share the final critical moment, see that the woman who is no longer the girl she once kne w but a screaming red mouth, mere meat for the red mouth of fire. Githa Hariharan 242 . In Times of Siege may be also read as an oblique way of narrating Gujarat 2002 through Fugitive Histories confronts Gujarat face to face. Written as an anguished response to the violence in Gujarat in 2002, it is, like, In Times of Siege also on what narratives, representations and e mbodiments of memory, in particular traumatic memory, do 243 . 241 Another Subcontinent: South Asian Society and Culture . n.p, n.d. Web. 22 July 2014. 242 Fugitive Histories p.192 243 In Empathic Vision : Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (2005), Jill Benne tt posits art as a kind of visual language of trauma and the experiences of conflict and loss and explores what art does (2) 220 opening up an exploration of the ethics and politics of transacting 244 with the trauma of others that migh 245 rape culture 246 t of Kashmir. - proofed air - i.e. the corporeal and visceral aspects of the violence - they ensured th of law and rights discourse, a model to link the absence of socio - a figure of minority (Mufti) we have encountered in previous chapters in relational contexts. While human rights and social action groups struggled to prese rve the testimonies of the violated (Baxi 333), and there was extraordinary mobilization of citizen action in the weeks following, to deploy solidarity, relief and rehabilitation, mental health etc., (Baxi 333) the state sponsorship of the violence meant t 244 Bennett her claims that affective responses to much of contemporary art are not born of emotional identification ther they emerge from a direct engagement with sensation as it is registered in the artwork (7). 245 Upendra Baxi 246 legal scholar Upendra Baxi yokes : Notes on Kannabiran edited The Violence of Normal Times (2005). 221 an interior state of the traumatized subject, but a political force that haunts the collective . She way. [ FH ] presents a mosaic of lives that collide in unhappy ways, but also in ways that produce love, passion and tenderness. After all, shr (Hariharan, Telling Others Stories 247 ). Creative works, Hariharan posits, can directly intervene into these shrunken private spaces in ways that testimonial narratives, juridical and rights discourse and p ositivist accounts of history cannot. On 27 February 2002, the Sabarmati Express carrying returning kar sevaks (activists of the Viswa Hindu parishad VHP) from a political ceremony in Ayodhya to consecrate a Ram lished Babri Masjid, was stoned and fifty - eight passengers burned to death in a coach the mob set on fire. The regime in Gujarat declared retaliation on all Muslims and a bloodthirsty cycle of events began. Narendra Modi, then the Chief Minister of Gujarat t o the collection of articles and reports collected in Gujarat: The Making of a Tragedy (2002), this stance of holding all Muslims of India as disloyal citizens and willing agents of Pakistan (7) was a well - proven BJP stance. Provocative statements were mad e in the Parliament, in the media, and in various rallies next day 248 by various figures including Modi and in the next seventy two hours, a pogrom of previously unprecedented violence was unleashed with the involvement and 247 Telling Other 248 Varadarajan quotes: I want to assure the people that Gujarat shall not tolerate any such incident. the culprits will get full punishment for their sins. not only this, we will set an example that nobody , not even in his dreams, thinks of committing a heinous crime like this (8). Broadcast (in Gujarati) on Ahmedabad Doordarshan, 28 February 2002. 222 support of party workers, hired go categorizing Muslims by address and religion, gas cylinders and other weapons, and Army and when troops arrived on March 1st, the absence of local cooperation meant that they 249 recurring feature in the landscape of post - Partition India, it is unilaterally agreed that the events in Gujarat were far more violent than any precedent. Although we may never know the full extent of the damage, official estimates (conservative by many margins) recognize that hundreds of Muslims had been killed, hundreds of thousands displaced and there was large - scale raping, mutilating, and burning of women 250 . Evidence of police collusion abounds; having placed Muslims under curfew, they gave free run of the roads to the VHP and Bajrang Dal mobs 251 (Sundar/Vardarajan 99). In several cases including Naroda Pati ya, scene of the most gruesome violence, survivor accounts narrate how they were caught between police who threatened to open fire on them, and a violent murderous mob 252 st and journalist Teesta Setalvad 253 177 - 213) writes of taunts our side) (177) and multiple instances of police firing on Muslims. 249 See Sujan Dutta, Where had all the Soldiers G one? Telegraph, 2 March, 2002. 250 Official estimates of Muslim deaths in 2002 were 500, unofficial exceed 2000. (Engineer 210,Varadarajan 9) 251 A License to Kill: Patterns of Violence in Gujarat, Nandini Sundar (75 - 134).See also Vinay Menon, Curfew ties vic tims, frees killers, Hindustan Times, March 2, 2002 where he draws attention to logistical delays such as in transportation that rendered troops ineffective for a long period when the violence was at its most intense. 252 See also Human Rights Watch p. 26. 253 Setalvad has filed many lawsuits against agents of the Gujarat state government, including PM Narendra Modi. The Gujarat state police has filed a case against Setalvad and her husband for embezzlement of funds through their NGO Sabrang Trust and the Gujar at government has ordered a probe in April 2015 into misuse of http://www.firstpost.com/india/guj - govt - seeks - probe - into - teesta - setalvads - ngo - for - alleged - misuse - of - ford - foundation - funds - 2196594.html ). 223 Compilations of articles, in terviews, investigative reports and other important material The Gujarat Carnage (2002) reveal that while sections of the English speaking and vernacular media and civil rights activists paid a significan t role in response to Gujarat 254 , in statist and official discourse, and consequently in their material rehabilitative drive, there were enormous elisions, if not direct support of the violence. We have seen in earlier chapters that many Partition historians in the 1980s and 90s were driven to return to the events of 1947 by this culture of impunity evidenced during the anti - Sikh pogrom of 1984, the Mumbai riots of 1992 and other acts of minoritization and violence. In my Introduction I have outlined why I ha ve chosen to include Gujarat within my scope of an ongoing Partition 255 . Githa Hariharan first responded to Gujarat 2002 through In Times of Siege (2003) and then more directly , Fugitive Histories (2009), but while drawing on proliferating legal - rights - tes timonial discourses, she mobilized the creative space of fiction to make penetrating insights into the field of trauma and its un(representability).While Holocaust - derived ethical models such 254 The central and Gujarat government accused the national media, in particular English - speaking media of bias, The Truth Hurts: Gujarat and the Role of the Media (Varadarjan 271 - 304)rather than the clash of two communities they purported the violence to be, focus was on pogrom, carnage (272). However, evidence (eye - witness accounts, journalism) analy zed shows that the violence was mostly due to the regime of impunity granted to right wing Hindu activists (see also Engineer 206 - 7). The Central government however held that the media inflamed the violence (by showing visuals of the carnage) and insisted instead of evacuating violence and communal particularities from official discourse, thus leading to the abstraction Baxi criticized earlier. A long - standing tradition is that during riots, particularizing . See Rajdeep Sardesai article in The Indian Express 7 March 2002 compiled in Vardaaran (275 - 279). 255 us [of ethnocidal of the anti - Sikh pogrom in 1984 under the Indian National Congress government. It is interesting that artist Nilima Sheikh, living in Ahmedabad during the 2002 violence, had to stall her work on urgency after 2002, thus linking Gujarat and Kashmir in the same radius. 224 256 (recast by Bennett) are theoretically productive when read alongside Hariharan, she also provides ways to further postcolonial explorations of trauma, where the exigencies of South Asia shape the relationship between individual and collective traumas, and their socio - political cognates. My chapter will analyze how these different ways of interpreting trauma are configured in Fugitive Histories . has been at the c rux of Trauma and Literary Studies until recently. However, like many of the ial and collective realms, opens it up to a postcolonial analysis. My chapter will examine sections of the ll allow me to draw conclusions on the Ali. One of the key themes in this novel is the crisis in witnessing and representation of trauma, and Hariharan focuses 257 through the character of Asad, a painter. Through Asad, an atheist leftist intellectual drawing his ideological lineages from Nehruvian Socialism and Marxism, we find also a nuanced exploration o f the seventeen year old schoolgirl in Ahmedabad, locate a very important argument. While positing the collectivity and materiality of trauma, this section also emph asizes the importance of 256 Bennett(25) in Empathic Vision 2005 . 257 On the affect of shame within her model of empathic vision, Bennett writes that shame cannot it self be an objective , except insofar as it promotes a form of seeing oneself seeing (90). Mobilizing Edouard Claparede , she posits that visual and performance art evokes the possibility of both artist and viewer of being a spectator of gs (Bennett 23). 22 5 and the group of women in her refugee colony, we find ways to reconcile this need for psychologization with the failure of narrative mode ls of healing in conditions of state - sponsored violence, where the socio - political sketches, the text gestures to a spectatorship or witnessing inflected with sensorial and embodied entanglements with the Other , how stories/address of the Other constitute the sub ject in other words, with ethics. It is the ethical aspects of historicizing and memorializing that make Fugitive Histories such a crucial intervention into the violence scarred post - Partition South Asian terrain. Fugitive Histories dominant organization of senses. For instance, Asad, an artist and non - believing Muslim, i s - believing Hindu wife Mala the traumas of the survivors in Ahmedabad that official discourse evacuates (143). More often - sensorial in that it is also grounded in the somatic, in tactility (ha ptic), in other words, in an affective relationship to, and Scherr wri tes that Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Malek Alloula and other critics of a dominant visual culture stress that a politics of seeing is a reflection of the larger socio - political - economic 226 landscape of a given culture which teaches us to interpret the visua Jennifer Rodaway Relational Sense (1997) cautions us that sight is concerned with appearances. On its own, it gives us access only to surfaces; thus, vision (even outside states of permanent war) depends on the information prov ided by other senses and the memory to assist in the interpretation of visual images or surfaces (12). While theorists of cinema like Laura Marks, Hamid Naficy, and others discuss a haptic visuality embraced by certain forms of exilic, feminist or trauma c inema, Jill Bennett develops a framework to cast art as a kind of visual language of trauma and the experiences of conflict and loss (2).Art is cast as a mode of embodied perception( Bennett 10), and responses to trauma art are cast as a transactive experi ence rather 258 (7). concern with the ethics The Indian Express , 2009 259 ). Fugitive Histories estion, then, Habitations of Modernity (2002) terms a social intervention through narrative (supplementing social intervention through law or abstract theory) (110), where the reforming 258 - reflexivity, often claims and appropriates trauma of another. By rend ering the witnessing relationship empathic and transactive, the Other remains irreducible while also transforming the witness and the collective. 259 Mohan Ramamoorthy . 227 that Rammohun [Roy] or [Ishwarchandra] Vidyasagar felt when personally confronted by the horrors of - 104). Levinasian ethics 260 proves the link between Bennett, Chakrabarty (and indeed Hariharan) by the act of confronting, of facing the particular ( Chakrabarty 105 ) , a confrontation we can mobilize to supplement the universalist fixed gaze of the law (105). While Chakrabarty focuses on the discursive (narrative) aspects of this face - to face - encounter and Bennett privileges the non - Fugitive Histories allows an engagement with both, thus inviting a challenging of boundaries of discursive vs. material or cognitive vs. embodied. Fugitive Histories has multiple threads and my reading will draw mainly from three of in his s s of depression manifest themselves in an artistic crisis, and later, in a diagnosis of arrthymia. Mala watches him helplessly. A crucial part of this narrative involves Mala coming face to face with the paintings Asad had been working on in response to th e Gujarat pogrom. Filled at first with fear, even revulsion, she gradually gets to the point where she recognizes that the artistic works, including 260 For an extended analysis of Levinasian ethics, the face a nd vulnerability, see Judith Butler Precarious Life (2004). Butler addresses her theory of grief as formative of political community through levinasian ethics : how others make moral claims upon us , ones that we are not free to refuse (Butler 131). To r means to be awake to what is precarious in another life (Butler 134). 228 one unfinished/unbegun one, needs her (an empathetic audience) to feel it (220) although it remains inscrut able and irreducible. of Gujarat violence in Ahmedabad as part of a two member team from an NGO making a documentary film. Much of her work involves documenting/recor ding testimonies. She grows closer to Yasmin, finds herself confronting a crisis of the ethical witness (192)and in the end, ies of a childhood friend, Laila, who was burned to narrative leaves her on the brink of an epiphany: Asad had always been the one teaching her to stered through the new embodied relationship Sara discovers with the expanse of water she has been or deep memory which works through sensorial imprinting 261 . Sara senses the sea by immersing up close or being a part of it . (215). It is thus a haptic, affective, immersive experience. In this move re invited into political community and responsibility founded on affective histories of citizenship as gestured to by Chakrabarty (2002) (103). These histories, far from positivist and empirical, are fugitive and relational. 261 (25). 229 The third important strand, f ollows Yasmin and her parents, as they struggle with their diminished lives in post - flashbacks and nightmares of a violent assault that stopped just short of rape; she is also beleaguered by the memory of Akbar, her missing elder brother and an aspiring medical student. from home to school and back every day. Through her perceptions and immersion in t he space of the city, an affcetive map of the city is created. Her trauma is registered through ruptures of memory, proprioception, sense of space, navigation and other forms of embodied perception. This is mirrored in her failure in the State exams in the subjects of history and geography significantly. At the close of the narrative, Yasmin passes her exam finally, and receives an offer from Sara to stay with her and go to college in Mumbai. One of the key moments in the text occurs when Yasmin recognize s that her parents and nights through the continuous motion and routine of her sewing. Her Abba keeps staring at the lines on his palms, he has withdrawn himself so much that his world has shrunk to the size of his notebook , smoke - stained, battered, and full of painstakingly drawn diagrams. She had salvaged it from their burning house. This book is her secret and through it she has a bit of Akbar all to herself. The neat penciled drawings and labels fill her with a sense of - 230 the soothing, long names on the diagrams. Parietal lobe of the cerebrum 262 . Corpus callosum. medulla oblongata . She finds that chanting these names fills her with mysterious comfort, maybe because .The parietal lobe of the cerebrum integrates sensory information including spatial sense and navigation, sense of touch and the trauma. Fascinated by order (like the ordering of time and the paring/diminishing of space) then, for her it is the sense of design and neatness of the body where the violent breaching of boundaries, leaking and seepage is confounded by this heterotopic space of orderliness. (Foucault). Heter real place, heterotopias are something like counter - sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are and prisons as heterotopias. 263 Parts of the body Yasmi n has never actually seen evoke the other the parts she has seen in the orgy of mutilating violence, in the severance of reproductive organs, fetuses, limbs and he death - recesses, surfaces and senses are reorganized into political zones by torturing /disciplinary 262 R esponsible, among various modalitie s, for spatial sense and navigation (See proprioception), the main sensory receptive area for the sense of touch (See somatosensation) in the somatosensory cortex which is just posterior to the central sulcus in the postcentral gyrus,[1] and the dorsal str eam of the visual system. The major sensory inputs from the skin (touch, temperature, and pain receptors) relay through the thalamus to parietal lobe. 263 the French by Jay Miskowiec 231 regimes. Aretxaga (1997) illuminates how the body recodes its cavitie via the example of the blanket men during the Dirty Protests in Northern Ireland, who used their grants the inner cavity and the organs a similar secret - making, tactility and vision. The soothing sounds on her tongue, the sounds in her ears, and this ordering of the insides of a body i n contradiction to the state - sponsored anatomization re - affixes her in relation to her senses and her affect - world 264 . metaphor of standing on the edge of new continen t emphasizes this place - making gesture. Until Foucault published his meditations on heterotopia, the word was a medical term attached to the displacement of a bodily organ from its normal po in Burrows 265 of the morgue hammer, a wooden stump or screw driver, bodies burnt like coal, crumble into gritty black tant sense of an organ missing within this episteme of displacements. Sometimes, Yasmin uses her hand like a mirror, runs it over herself to check that she is really there, all of her. But she still feels an emptiness where her hand in the pit of her stomach 266 264 For more on trauma, place, and affecr - - 75). 265 266 The stomach manifests many symptoms of stress. 232 lly be intact, and haptic seeing (Bennett 10) multiple times to place trauma in a responsive, transactive context. photograph and his battered notebooks inside a transparent plastic bag. In the photograph, - shirt and red - motorbi ke announce his physical materiality and vitality. Akbar. She prefers the biology notebook which lets her imagine Akbar in more embodied, sensorial ways than the instant captured in the photograph. She can sense by tracing his diagrams have been dreaming as he drew those diagrams, wrote those long words in neat black - ink (168). Memory is thus trans - sensorial, imprinted with sensation and this re - membering through member/person. find the imprint of this trans - sensoriality. Yasmin wonders in the same scene described above, what it is like? There were the dead to be seen, there are still the wounded to be seen. And the missing acks and her ruptured relationship with place 267 , Hariharan wants to open a space for psychologization of 267 I will not have the time to develop these at length. The novel describes her walking though the ghettoized Muslim 233 Investigation by Medico Friends Circle, New Delhi, May 20 extremely hostile and insecure atmosphere at relief camps: Medical Officers at these camps consistently undermined the importance of dealing with psychological trauma. Any sign that people were returning to their routine wa s taken as proof that they were not traumatized. When a member of the medico team pointed out that disturbed appetite could be a sign of PTSD, an administrator o ff western checklists of symptoms that Summerfield critiqued while arguing that very often trauma experts follow paradigms that may not be applicable ((Summerfield 1455). Suffering arises from, and is resolved in, a social context, shaped by the meanings a nd understandings applied to events (1454). In this case, though, in a social context that denied suffering, denied meaning and denied subject imposed knowledge syste ms. However, in denying the pain, cognitive and affective responses of the survivors, the attitude documented shows how biomedical paradigms might sometimes, in postcolonial societies, allow an emergence of voice and subjectivity 268 that the paternalistic, ( here democidal) State cannot permit. Perhaps then, the medicalized heterotopic space Yasmin mobilizes earlier can be linked to this complex. Hariharan certainly does not suggest an divide the map int to identify the borders in between , borders that wall in some places, wall out some people. (147)It is through her perceptions of a makeshift camp - pretending filthy cloth and plastic will make a roof - nami ng itself Rahim (merciful) Park Housing Society, when what it offers is 268 tic Citizenship: 234 evacuation of the violence and exclusion in those knowledge systems, as the next section will illustrate. My argument is that Fugitive Histories offers us a model to view postcolonial trauma in more nuanced ways locating trauma as a transactive relationship more affective and sensorial than discursive. Here, I would like to poin t out that while arguing for the need for biomedical, psychologized spaces to recuperate and relieve survivors of violence, it also angles itself from what postcolonial critics of trauma like Stef Craps, Rebecca Saunders, and others consider a too narrow f ocus on individualization and psychologization of trauma. In the absence of rehabilitatory material programs and a socio - political context of addressing trauma, these remain incomplete. The privileging of narrative healing in Freud - inspired psychoanalysis is not survivors, testimonies, narratives etc. It is a well - researched response to the event. In parts, it directly borrows from the language of these testimonies. I will analyze at some length, a section and her colleague Nina. Yasm hat happened to them and their families and neighbors again and again. However, instead of relief, the narrative makes it clear there is only a sense of dissociation and disjunction that is emphatically linked to the absence of material conditions of relie f and reparation. The narrative highlights this with the may 235 added cont recording machine may trick them into believing that their words will be taken out of here to section of the narrative, there are allusions to actual testimonies and reports collected. for insta nce, mothers talk about pulling their children out of English - medium schools as the school partition work being Pakistani or terrorists or not good enough 269 (156). Their accounts repeat eyewitness records that crowds armed with weapons - swords, pipes, hockey sticks, soda - lemon bottles, sharp weapons, petrol bombs, gas cylinders - them in a frenzy of killing, raping, maiming, burn ing. They recount the violence against women, the raping, severing, maiming (159). They recount police complicity during and after the could do nothing but h and post - live woman (165), and this is taken up as a refrain by many around the room (166). However, Hariharan makes it very clear that verbalizing and recounting does not alw ays bring healing in (155). In yet another indictment of individuali zation and psychologization in the absence of 269 See 'Sisters under the Skin': Events of 2002 and Girls' Education in Ahmedabad Author(s): Suchitra Sheth and Nina Haeems Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 41, No. 17 (Apr. 29 - May 5, 2006), pp. 1708 - 1712 for 236 longer see which voice in the room belongs to which body or whether the voices have bodies at all. They are just voices, nothing else, because if they were really bodies, really people, This indictment of narrative is emphasized by the visceral, corporeal imagery Hariharan adopts to d - inflected by her observations of the oily stain on the cement floor, the dust trapped in a crevice that an ant is slowly measuring evoke other ways of sensing/ interpreting (viscosity, texture, depth, etc.) that destabilize or at least accent the discursive. between iving person felt the breaking know yet what that is. But in Yasmin, we can already see an embodied haptic seeing and both through her encounter with Yasmin and her confrontation of the entombed memories of her childhood friend Laila, offers yet another mode of witnessing trauma that privileges the sensory and haptic. In fact, it is traumatic 237 its most significant intervention. In the next sect sketches which the text describes in detail. are dog - eared, and dermal traces. The preoccupation with nakedness, and the epidermal, is reemphasized, when Mala f eels Broken Home, February 2002 , renders a home with its walls broken in, and jagged, exposed brickwork. A man with a knife sticking out of his back occupies (199). A second sketchbook sardonically titled Indian Freedom 1992 - 2002 faces reveal what may lurk just under the skin, twist human faces into masks, mock the normalcy of real faces.Another sketchbook contains a naked man kneelin g on the floor whose face looks his vitality, argumentativeness, his dazzling love of life (209). Asad in the days preceding his premature death, could no longe r distinguish between his but just as suddenly, the crisis restarts. He becomes secretive, almost ashamed of the painting (my word): he covers it, turns th e easel to the wall, sneaks in to look at the painting(213 - 4). This shame as I have outlined above is to quote Bennett, the shame of a spectator seeing himself 238 seeing , and plays a significant role in her model of empathic vision. This self - reflexive transa charcoal sketch: It depicts five men in a circle on the right holding various weapons (empty stick.)There is a sixth empty - (214) i.e. the artist as witness. Yet, it hapticity the narrative has been privileging. The words used evoke the touching together of layered surface, [the only] relief is from the to nal variation created by the rubbed and blotted pigment. The burnt sienna and madder [shades of red] spread like a stain texture , a scratchy surface . It only feels , it says nothing (220) (my italics). Yet, it is this absence of a discernible meaning or narrative that transmits a transactive when she touches it. If she rubs harder, she may find peopl some uncompromisingly silent. At the close of the novel, Mala is content to let the secret remain inaccessible; instead, she takes the palette knife and paintbrush to a pond in her compound. While the knife sinks, the brush rests against the underwater roots of the amaltas trees getting traumas, Fugitive Histories privileges an entanglement relationality that is affective. 239 Conclusion How do we reconcile this preeminence of non - discursive visuality in a discursive novel , lyrical and diffuse though it is? I would want to term Fugitive Histories a somatic and epidermal text. As it enacts its own epidermalization and fragmentation, there are a number of ways Hariharan draws attention to an overwhelming embedding of trauma - not in the interiority of the subject alone - but in the socio - political world. The epidermalization of trauma is linked with a haptic visualization; a mattering of sight as touch and feeling, is, as we have seen, a leitmotif in Fugitive Histories . This f the Hindutvavaadi State upon the Indian Muslim. Facing or confronting is additionally li nked to the ethical demands made on us by the other, the implications of which, are once again, grounded in the political world. Fugitive Histories then can be read productively alongside many Holocaust - derived epistemes (Levinas or Bennett). However, it l ocates a postcolonial episteme of trauma simultaneously. One way of making sense of this is to examine cover illustration 270 . It evokes the same texture and hapticity of skin in its rendering of a map of India. The conflation of place, sight and skin is a trope we have followed. The membranous surface is yellow, stained with blood that has thickened and pooled near the India - Pa kistan border. The border looks like surgical sutures on a still oozing wound. Two disembodied hands/arms emerge from the surface fleshly; you can see the shape of the bones and the sinews under the skin. The grip of the first is 270 The cover is done by Rosana Claudia Marchini(photograph), Gunjan Ahlawat(design) and Urmimala(illustration. 240 strong and muscular, whereas the second appears almost life - less its bones more jagged, its fingers almost skeletal. However, a crooked thumb registers a faint gesture of response. On the map, place - names are printed. Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai are in bold - as these are the cities linked in the novel through Mala, Yasmin and Sara. We may read into this faint gesture of the crooked thumb, something like the vulnerability or precarity of the Other that Levinas (albeit in a Life and Fate . Levinas describes families of political detainees traveling to Lubyanka in Moscow to hear news of their loved ones. Since a line forms at the coun ter, one can only see the backs particular way they craned their neck and their back, their raised shoulder blades like springs, which seemed to cry, sob, and scream (PP 167), he reads in them the ethical address of the o ther 271 . Thus the experience of Fugitive Histories , both in terms of its discursive narrative as postcolonial traumas a s entanglements with the Other. 271 Butler uses this excerpt to illustrate that 241 BIBLIOGRAPHY 242 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok. . Trans. Nicholas Rand; Foreword. Jacques Derrida. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive . New York: Zone Books, 1999. Print. Ahmad, Aijaz. In The Mirror of Urdu: Recompositions of Nation and Communit y 1947 - 65. Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993. Print. Ahsan, Aitzaz. The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan . 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