Postcolonial Colonialism

Visiting Kashmir, one of the most common slogans and graffiti in its towns and villages is “Go India, Go Back.”Footnote ⁷ This demand enfolds within it an earlier slogan “Go Back Simon, Go Back” echoing demands of the Indian anticolonial movement against the British government’s Simon Commission (1928), as if the words “Go India, Go Back” first begs India to go back to the lessons of its own colonial history as a precondition to hearing the Kashmiri demand. The demand for self-determination requires India to not just literally step out and demilitarize the region, but also to take a step back, reflect upon its actions by defamiliarizing the region. Kashmir’s cry for freedom disrupts the progress narratives of decolonization by intertwining different eras and temporal sequences into the present: the demand for independence was no longer India’s past, but continues to haunt its present.

A recognition of occlusions and blind spots in the earlier formations of postcolonial studies has led to reorientations in the field that now, more proactively, responds to emerging social and political configurations.Footnote ⁸ One such occlusion, as Ann Stoler suggests, is evident in the ironical reception of Edward Said’s work: “the crucial role Orientalism played in launching (post)colonial studies and the failure of The Question of Palestine to animate an appraisal of Israeli state policies as understood in colonial terms.”Footnote ⁹ Why was a wall of partition built between Said’s historical and cultural works and his current history of colonization and US empire? Why did a study of the US Supreme Court’s Insular Cases, still relevant in the post-9/11 “war on terror,” not become central to postcolonial studies?Footnote ¹⁰ Why the selective treatment of certain forms of colonialisms and the elision of atypical colonialisms such as of Tibet, Kashmir, Palestine, Baluchistan, Guantánamo, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, Crimea? Why did only British-India become the anchor of South Asian postcolonial criticism, circumventing the charges of political occupation and demands for autonomy made in its own border states as somehow beyond its scholarly ambit, leaving it to security studies and international relations?Footnote ¹¹

Such disavowal is evident right from the Bandung Conference, which refused to recognize non-European colonialism as falling in its purview. When Sir John Kotelawala requested China to not support local Ceylonese Communists, and they declined to oblige, Ceylon threatened to table a proposal on non-Western and Communist imperialism (of nations like Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Poland, etc.), Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and others (allies of United States) supported this proposal condemning “all types of colonialism, including international doctrines resorting to the methods of force, infiltration and subversion.” But most other nations believed that bringing up these other forms of colonialism would only lead to disruptions and disharmony in the conference. The situation was salvaged by classifying countries of eastern Europe as noncolonial and outside the field of the conference’s consideration. Jawaharlal Nehru argued that these nations were recognized as sovereign and independent by the United Nations, and if the conference chose to relegate them to the status of colonies, it was challenging the basis of recognition of the United Nations.Footnote ¹²

Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, eschewing the celebratory mode of discourse around national independence, presciently noted the dead ends of anticolonial nationalism leading to the creation of newly independent countries that would then get sucked back into the world market and fall prey to necolonialism.Footnote ¹³ National independence is merely the formal transfer of power from the Western colonizer to his agent, the national bourgeoisie, which, now in alliance, perpetuates Western imperial interests in these regions. The bourgeois appropriation of decolonization leads to an unending circle of violence leading to a condition where, as Robert Young puts it, “colonialism and postcolonialism operate together in a structure whereby the former produces the latter which in turn produces more of the former.”Footnote ¹⁴ Fanon reserves decolonization for the New Humanism, which will emerge from the “cleansing force” of the revolutionary violence that will blast a way out of this fortressed Manichaean regime of perpetual domination. For Partha Chatterjee, anticolonial nationalism is stuck in a “blocked dialectic” between nationalism and colonialism because the discourse of nationalist thinking is part of the post-Enlightenment discourse that is indissolubly tied to colonial domination. Indian nationalism therefore established and sought the nationalization of the colonial state without attempting a substantive transformation of its class configurations and institutional, pedagogical, and juridical structures.Footnote ¹⁵ Kashmir is the symptom of this circular impasse of postcolonial colonialism.Footnote ¹⁶

Colonial Constitutionalism

Decolonization is often symbolically marked by the process of creating national constitutions. Constitutions are instruments for legitimizing the nation-state. They are, theoretically, products of popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty is based on a politics of inclusions and exclusions, insiders and outsiders, friends and enemies.Footnote ¹⁷ In reality, the revolutionary foundations of popular sovereignty as the constituent power that generates constitutions is rarely visible in postcolonial states.

Saadat Hasan Manto’s “Naya Qanun” (“New Constitution”) is a satirical short-story that pokes holes into the promises of constitutionalism.Footnote ¹⁸ Set in the walled city of Lahore, a horse-cart driver named Mangu overhears his passengers, two businessmen he picked up at the High Court, talking about a new constitution that is about to be implemented, which will make Indians free to be Indian in their own country. Thrilled by this prospect, he impatiently waits for this auspicious occasion to come. And when it came, “The new constitution…appeared to him as something bright and full of promise.” He compares it to the “splendid brass and gilt fittings he had purchased a couple of years ago [for his tonga].” He celebrated the law by decorating his cart with flowers. The same day Mangu is insulted by a rude Englishman, but instead of succumbing to it, he gives back a memorable thrashing, reminding him that “Those days are gone, friends, when they ruled the roost. There is a new constitution now, fellows, a new constitution.” When the police arrive, Mangu is the one to be beaten up and arrested. “All along the way, and even inside the station, he kept screaming, ‘New Constitution, new constitution!’ but nobody paid any attention to him. ‘New constitution, new constitution! What rubbish are you talking? It’s same old constitution.’ And he was locked up.” Aamir Mufti notes how the promise of dignity arising from constitutional citizenship is shown to be illusionary given the differing relationship of the subaltern and bourgeois nationalist to colonial political reform.Footnote ¹⁹ But another interesting aspect here is the fetishization of constitutions. Manto shows us that constitutions are as much mythical texts and fables with an epic quality, an aura around them. The horse-cart is like Krishna’s chariot in the Mahabharata. The role of the bourgeois nationalist rhetoric is to create and sustain this aura. Mangu falls under its spell and imagines the constitution (metaphorically and metonymically) as a shiny object, glittering and glowing; he genuinely believed in the emancipatory promise, that this object would somehow grant him the dignity and status that he never had. But the promises of constitutionalism are always deferred.

The global order today comprises broadly of only three existing legal systems in the world: Napoleonic (Civil Code), British (Common Law), and Sharia law.Footnote ²⁰ Most other legal arrangements have been driven under. Article 372(1) of the Indian constitution provides that “[A]ll laws in force in the territory of India immediately before the commencement of the Constitution shall continue in force therein until altered or repealed or amended by a competent Legislature or other competent authority.” In other words, legal history is a narrative of continuity from British-India to independent India.Footnote ²¹ “There is no warrant for holding that at the stroke of midnight of 25 January 1950, all our pre-existing political institutions ceased to exist and in the next moment arose a new set of institutions completely unrelated to the past … It [the Constitution] did not seek to destroy the past institutions; it raised an edifice on what existed before.”Footnote ²²

Not surprisingly, the Indian constitutional moment leaves the violence of partition unmentioned. But just because the violence remains unmentioned does not mean that it has had no impact on the constitution. A close reading of the text and the constituent assembly debates shows how partition influences key decisions concerning: (a) citizenship, (b) political safeguards for religious minorities, and (c) the creation of a strong central government.Footnote ²³ As Uday Mehta notes, “The invocation of crisis, strife, impending disunity, sectarian divisions, and the prospect of mayhem are ubiquitous in the reflections of the Indian Constituent Assembly Debates.”Footnote ²⁴ Anarchy and civil war forms the general Hobbesian anxiety that this constitutional moment is enveloped in. The haunting presence of partition has imprinted the Indian constitution with a “paranoid imagination” for national integration. It dealt with these anxieties of a splintering state through grandiose and dramatic assertions of ancient unity. My argument here is that a thick notion of national unity can be inferred from the Indian constitution, and this has a direct implication on how such constitutionalism conceives of any challenge to its legitimacy. The thicker the notion of national unity, the greater the degree of fragility. Every form of regionalism and linguistic activism in the 1950s and 1960s was termed as communal. It is not surprising then that the very first amendment to the Indian constitution immediately after independence was of broadening the restrictions on free speech. When the Supreme Court held that banning religious and communist magazines was a violation of free speech, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s government moved to amend Article 19 of the constitution, allowing for restrictions on free speech in the interest of “sovereignty and integrity of the State.”Footnote ²⁵ What is this “integrity of the state” that no speech can violate? At play is a conflation of “national integrity” and “national integration.” As Glanville Austin notes, the post-independence leadership was really talking about national integration when referring to national integrity, not recognizing that the former is an unnecessary condition for the latter.Footnote ²⁶

To be clear, national integration at the time of national independence is not internally linked to colonization in any direct way. I am merely noting that national independence requires a process of national consolidation, and the urge to colonialism is internal to this desire for national consolidation. Footnote ²⁷ This urge for national consolidation is latent in Article 1(3)(c) of the Indian constitution: “The territory of India shall comprise: (a) the territories of the States; (b) the Union territories specified in the First Schedule; and (c) such other territories as may be acquired” (emphasis added).

Salman Rushdie in Shalimar the Clown parodies the constitution’s usage of “national integrity”:Footnote ²⁸ “The key to understanding this position was the word ‘integral’ and its associated concepts. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honoured and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honour and was not to be tolerated.…Kashmir was an integral part of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral.…When truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that was to be given precedence.”

Within this paranoid imagination, partition appears as a castration-anxiety in the Hindu nationalist masculinity, leading to the fetishization of Kashmir.Footnote ²⁹ In other words, Kashmir becomes an imagined object necessary for India’s self-coherence and preservation of identity threatened by partition-as-castration. Occupation over Kashmir is not just a project of economic exploitation and racial/religious domination (although it very importantly is that), but also an existential one.Footnote ³⁰ Consider Article 1(1) of the Indian constitution: “Name and territory of the Union: (i) India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.” The constitution, by way of a speech-act, names the nation India as well as Bharat: one modern, and the other ancient. Kashmir, within this Euro-Indic rhetoric of precoloniality is imagined as part of a Bharat prior to “Islamic invasions.” In this constitutive nominalism, the nation is simultaneously the midnight’s children as well as the progeny of the ancient king Bharata.

Originally, independent North American natives were considered rough equivalents of independent nations, and the settlers entered into treaties with them as “foreign” nations. Gradually, they got reduced to “domestic dependent nations” (Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 1831), and this paved the way to what then became the federal government’s direct governing power over Native Americans. Kashmir, similarly (with all obvious differences that I don’t need to highlight) entered into the (conditional) accession treaty with India. Gradually, India dissolved the autonomous status of the region (through a mix of force, such as the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah and presidential notifications) and reduced them to a “dependent Other.” I make this analogy to bring out the idea that the India-Kashmir relation instantiates what Zygmunt Bauman calls the anthropophagic and the anthropoemic.Footnote ³¹ Anthropophagy is about “annihilating the strangers by devouring them and then metabolically transforming them into a tissue indistinguishable from one’s own. Such assimilation is meant to smother cultural or linguistic distinction.”Footnote ³² The anthropophagic can be read into Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rhetoric on Kashmir: “Na Goli Se, Na Gaali Se, Kashmir Ki Samsya Suljhegi Gale Lagane Se” [Neither guns, nor insults, the Kashmir problem can be solved only by embracing the Kashmiri]. In practice, the embrace turns out to be a suffocating hold of enforced immobility. Anthropophagy also happens through gradual encroachments and property accumulation via financial instruments and debt recovery laws that allow banks to recover debt by taking possession of secured assets like land and buildings in Kashmir and selling it to foreign entities.Footnote ³³ But the Indian state also deploys the anthropoemic, meaning “vomiting the strangers, banishing them from the limits of the orderly world and barring them from all communication with those inside.” Those who demand a plebiscite are charged with treason and banished, classified as “Islamic terrorists.”Footnote ³⁴ Anthropophagy forms a constellation with the banal, biopower, governmentality, discursive production of legible subjects, while the anthropoemic slides into exceptional politics, emergency, sovereign violence, suspension of law. Both coexist together in Kashmir.Footnote ³⁵

Reading for Jurisdiction: Typologies of Crisis

In the previous section, I argued that jurisdictional conditions in Kashmir must be read as the anthropophagy and anthropoemics in Indian constitutional politics. In this section I suggest how these jurisdictional conditions can be read for in literary works. One effective way of reading a text for its jurisdictional conditions is to read for spatiality and through contextualized explorations of relevant chronotopes. Why read jurisdiction spatially? Jurisdiction literally means “speaking the law,” the diction of law (Jus + Dicere). It names, orders, declares, by sovereign fiat. Carl Schmitt argues that the necessary condition for the very possibility of law is land appropriation by delimiting the earth, marking out territories, enclosures, boundaries, and visible divisions.Footnote ³⁶ What Kant calls the “supreme proprietorship of the soil is the main condition for law.”Footnote ³⁷ Legal titles precede legality. Jurisdiction is architectural. For Arendt, “[l]aws are like the wall around the city necessary for political action.” The Greek word for law, Nomos, is derived from Nemein, meaning “to divide” and “to pasture.”Footnote ³⁸ Every constitution begins with this primeval act of marking the soil. A plot of land is the basis for law. But plot has a wide semantic range that includes a measured area of land; ground plan or building charts; a secret plan to accomplish a scheme like a conspiracy; and finally, as a series of events and actions set in time forming a narrative.Footnote ³⁹ Even plot-as-narrative evokes ideas of boundedness and demarcation as in the Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end.Footnote ⁴⁰ A “colony” is also derived from the Latin colonus, farmer, and the verb colere, farming. Ontologically, the colony exists by virtue of its dependence as a subset to another commanding polity.Footnote ⁴¹ For Ann Stoler, the colony as a political concept, regardless of its intent, location, designated population, “are artefacts of deliberate and concerted design.”Footnote ⁴² So we read for the plot-of-law as jurisdiction, into the plot of novel, as narrative. The two “plots,” placed on each other, refract representations of jurisdiction. Literary representations of jurisdictional crises in Kashmir literature, for heuristic purposes, can be broadly typologized as follows: prohibition; displacement and condensation; speech and aphasia; heroism, love, and family romance; waiting; and finally, the typology of global literary friendships.

A recurrent typology of crisis is the figure of the wall as absolute blockage, as a prohibition from progressing forward. Agha Shahid Ali in the poem A Pastoral writes:

Kashmir is gated, locked, and guarded by soldiers who hold the key not unlike Kafka’s parable, Before the Law: that to actually get to law, one has to first pass through its architecture, the gate, its building, and a door manned by a doorkeeper. Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother is a novel about Haleema, whose son Irfan is a victim of “enforced disappearance.” She is haunted by nightmares of her son running away until he disappears into a shady grove of poplars across the road while she chases after him with muted screams, until “a high, barbwire-topped wall comes up between Haleema and Imran. She tries to climb the wall, but she slips and tumbles down, hitting the ground.”Footnote ⁴³ The dream of hitting the wall, unable to move forward, is not a dream of wish-fulfillment but a dream of traumatic neurosis that shakes the dreamer up into waking life. The state puts up concrete walls as well as what Sarah Ahmed calls “atmospheric walls”: these are the walls that appear to some but not to others. For some these are atmospheric, light, windy, white, and for others they are concrete, hard, dark. A wall is a technique: a way of stopping something progressing without appearing to stop them.Footnote ⁴⁴ Such chronotopes of prohibition produce what Rebecca Comay calls “stasis”, which in its political register, is a “hardening or rigidity that can precipitate upheaval precisely because in its obduracy, its one-sidedness, its refusal to adapt to circumstances, to go with the flow, it exposes the rigid armature sustaining the status quo, provoking violent counter-reactions and thus forcing latent antagonisms to the surface. We are in a state when our confinement, our stuckness, becomes explosive.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Peter Brooks, following Barthes and Todorov, theorizes narrative plot as a movement, a libidinal drive, an energy moving from beginning to end.Footnote ⁴⁶ Our relationship with the novel is dynamic, goal oriented; as we turn page by page, it is structured as moving forward. Narrative is metaphorical; it unifies and brings together actions into relation with one another, combining to form a “common plot,” rejecting the unassimilable actions, moving toward totalization. The beginning of the plot is a promise for final coherence—that the chain of metonymies will deliver a metaphorical union. The Kashmir novel, with barriers and barricades, does not have this flow of meaning toward a discernible end. It presents us therefore with the second recurrent typology: that of the heavily saturated middle, the “dilatory space,” as the space of postponement, error, blockage, which is ultimately a problem of identity, of statelessness, the “right to have rights.” One reason for these breaks in narrative mobility is because chronotopes representing jurisdictional conditions produce “affective conditions” rather than linguistically expressive feelings and emotions. Affective conditions, as we know, are prepersonal, non-individualistic, and atmospheric moods that defy narration and language.Footnote ⁴⁷ Here too, chrontopes such as barricades and bunkers, through “encounters” (and not dialogues between characters) produce affects of stuckness, constipated sluggishness, and nauseous constrictions. So, the reading for chronotopes of jurisdiction requires a reading not in dialogues and speech, but in observing encounters between objects. These encounters bring about an affective push-back against the libidinal mobility that is otherwise structural in a narrative.

This leads to the dilatory space of the saturated middleness that is pervasive in The Half Mother, in Haleema’s waiting for her son Irfan, a victim of enforced disappearance, to return. Article 2 of the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance defines the crime: “enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” The crime (and of novels based on it) has two components, both of which are in contradiction: on one hand, there is the abduction, a disappearance, the void in the text; and on the other, is a willful refusal to acknowledge the disappearance. There is a negation, followed by a concealment of the negation, leading to the paradoxical stuckness of Haleema: she knows as well as doesn’t know where her son is. The state embodies a contradictory avowal as well as concealment of this abduction. The victim of the novel of enforced disappearance is therefore a void, a neither/nor. The novel is engulfed in this mood where the reader knows and, yet, doesn’t know where Irfan is. Stuckness operates as a stickiness. The crime is visible as a stain. He is present in the novel only as an absence, and his absence charges the typological middleness of the plot. The crime of enforced disappearance is spatialized as a “search” for the absent victim, in the labyrinths, pathways, corridors of police stations, government offices, and human rights organizations. Traversing this space is experienced as fatigue.

Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator is set in a Gujjar village in Indian Kashmir, among a nomadic culture that practices seasonal migrations, producing characters like the shepherd, Azad Range Wah-Wah, who blurs the contested borderlands of LOC.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Waheed’s Book of Gold Leaves, papier-mache boxes take on a powerful chronotope.Footnote ⁴⁹ The protagonist, Faiz, is a papier-mache artist who sells his work to foreign tourists at cheap prices. But the latent history of papier-mache art makes itself present to him at a time of crisis and conflict when he realizes that his art represents a cartography not of Indian tourism and Western tourists, but a more subversive one: “When Kashmir, Kashgar, Samarkhand, Tashkent, Bukhara, Baghdad, Khorasan and Shiraz were tied by both verse and colour. When school of artists from the central mountains created workshops in the heart of Srinagar and made its shrines sing.”

For Mikhail Bakhtin, the bildungsroman presents “an image of a man growing in national historical time.” In postcolonial literature, the nationalist novel often used plots of heterosexual romance, family union, and erotic drive for sexual communion as a national allegory.Footnote ⁵⁰ In the Kashmir novel, heterosexual romantic union that is necessary to institute the family as the edifice of the nation ultimately fails. Lovers are left waiting. In The Book of Gold Leaves, the chronotope of jurisdiction becomes the Himalayan mountains, snows, and like Kalidasa’s Megadhoota, the clouds, that divide and separate lovers. To be clear, in the romance genre, it is not literally the mountains and the clouds that are representations of jurisdictions (as borders); rather, it is the yearning and separation as feelings that are a representation of the jurisdictional conditions. It is that lacuna experienced in an unconsummated love that is the representation of jurisdictional conditions (this can be observed in Mirza Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves as well as Roy’s Ministry of Utmost Happiness). Romantic love requires an autonomy of choice that is unavailable in the Kashmir novel because its jurisdictional conditions don’t permit this developmental logic. The erasure of family is central in The Half Mother, where Haleema’s marriage “ended in a whimper” when she catches her husband cheating. Her father is killed by the armed forces, and her son is abducted. In Danesh Rana’s Red Maize, the protagonist Kausar Jan is the mother of three sons—one son is killed, another becomes a Jihadi militant, and the third joins the Indian armed forces. She is of course an allegory of Kashmir, and the allegory is spatialized as India and Pakistan internally tearing the mother. The disintegration of the family is shattering. This shattering is the price paid for the “integrity” of India, and these novels find no way of reassembling these shattered families.

In The Half Mother, Haleema says about her son Irfan, “He had grown up too soon.” In The Curfewed Night, Basharat Peer writes, “It was January 1990. I was thirteen. The war of my adolescence had started. Today I fail to remember the beginnings.”Footnote ⁵¹ A beginning exists only if an end is to come, but if the beginning is forgotten, there is no end. If childhood is lost, maturity and developmental process is hindered. The hero doesn’t emerge because the nation doesn’t emerge; the protagonist is stunted. When read in this context, the mundane scene of a young Basharat Peer waiting for his father to return home from work takes on a Homeric-epic proportion of Nostos (homecoming), but it never becomes an epic because no hero is ever produced: “The journey from his [Peer’s father] office in Srinagar to our village, once a lovely two-hour ride, had become a risky life threatening affair. Almost every time he came home, it took him around five hours. On a lucky day, his bus would be stopped only every fifteen minutes, and at each military check post, stand in a queue, holding an identity card and anything else they carried. After a body search, Father would walk half a mile from the check post and wait in another queue for the bus to arrive.” Space is not pre-existing and empty, but relational. Space is the relation between check posts, the queue and the identity card, in relation to the distance from home and the office. Here the route is delayed, slowed, convoluted, broken. Space is the humiliation in the gaps between bodies lined up in a queue with identity cards. A once-lovely two-hour ride had become a life-threatening affair. Space is not a being but a becoming. As it stretches, space is, as Derrida would put it, spacing. It is a process.Footnote ⁵² Law is coterminous with space, and space (as the relationship between objects) is the jurisdictional (as the diction of law) entrenched in this juridico-politics of forced integration, atmospheric pulls, and vigorous extraction impressed affectively in the flesh.

I want to briefly focus on a narrative technique used by Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother to bring forth this charging of objects with jurisdictional crisis. Haleema’s father is murdered by the armed forces, and her son is picked up by them, kept in illegal detention, never to return. She is a half mother because she doesn’t know if her son is alive or dead. Two narrative devices can be inferred from The Half Mother: condensation and displacement. Condensation in narrative is metaphorical. It is the art of compression. Multiple images get compressed into a single element that stands for the whole. When Haleema’s father is killed by three bullets pumped into him, his dead body becomes an image of condensation. His body is draped in green satin dotted with golden Arabic calligraphy, placed in a coffin facing the Kaaba in Mecca, and as the Imam begins his public funeral prayers, a rumble of mourning emanates in the entire Kashmir valley. The dead body in mourning becomes compressed and condensed as an icon for all of Kashmir in crisis.

A few weeks later, when Haleema’s seventeen-year-old son is picked up by the army, the rest of the novel is marked by a displacement. The night her son disappeared, and she was alone and awake all night, “She could hear her house and all its things creaking in the silence of the night. A tight-lidden tin drum in the kitchen…a drop of water fell from the bathroom tap and plopped on a half-filled bucket, a cat skittled an old, dented aluminum pitcher…the mice began to scurry in the wooden ceiling…” For Freud, in displacement, thoughts get displaced into multiple, irrelevant images.Footnote ⁵³ Associative paths connect the trivial with the momentous. Meaning becomes atmospheric; it spreads, dissipates, from lawscapes to landscapes. Haleema that night could smell the stale breath in the room. Irfan’s absence charges up the room with a presence, an odor. Disappearance of a son, waiting for his return, is a stuckness, but notice its performance when she totters across the room, when her hair is loose, her dupatta is wound carelessly, she is tired, worn out. Pale, dry like a corpse. Speech becomes a begging, petitioning, calling out for coherence. Meaning refuses to be condensed. The performance of stuckness is in gritting of her teeth. As Haleema faces a police officer with her complaint, the “phlegm in her throat knots her voice.” To be tied down is to be knotted. Like a detective she goes looking for clues, from place to place displaced. In waiting, temporality is a chronotope, and to quote Bakhtin, “Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot, and history.”Footnote ⁵⁴ She starts to use inhalers to breathe because of the blockages in her throat and nose. Aphasia is spatialized as blockages and barriers in speech, the detours on the road are homology with anatomical distress. The militarized immobility in the streets become fatigue, sluggishness, constipation, clogging in the body. The broader link is between partition leading to paranoid national integrity, and integrity being confused with forced integration. Jurisdiction is law’s ontological link to spaces, and as the diction of law, it causes the stutter in Haleema’s speech, the phlegm that knots her throat. Her inhaler therefore becomes an object that is charged with this politics of forced assimilation. This is the typology of aphasia as spatialized homology. Aphasia, as failure of communication, is the failure of community and impossibility of future communion. National integration is premised on the setting up, ordering, and maintenance of a vast network of infrastructures like railways, irrigation projects, ports, canals, telegraph, and postal services. But Agha Shahid Ali calls Kashmir the Country without a Post Office.

A country without a post office is a country with letters without nations stamped on them. But what happens to a letter without a stamp? If the homes of Kashmir are buried or empty, who will receive this archive of doomed and dead letters? If the muezzin has died, “the city is robbed of every call” where can one find faith? Who will deliver the letters? Who will tear open the envelopes to find the “shrine of words”? Letters without writers, readers, stamps, and addresses are interceded by the poet: “I read them, letters of lovers, the mad ones, / And mine to him from whom no answers came.”

Returning to the question of law, what happens when this literary subject of stuckness—the subject stuck in the dilatory space of waiting—is transposed into the legal trial? When such a transposition happens, we get the trial of Afzal Guru and S. A. R. Geelani. Accused in the parliamentary attack case of 2001, they were both arrested under anti-terrorism laws.Footnote ⁵⁵ On the basis of confessional statements of questionable authenticity,Footnote ⁵⁶ Afzal Guru was hung to death in 2013, and although the charges against Geelani have been dropped, he continues to live under the law’s persecutory shadows. These are victims of illegal detention, custodial torture, lack of full legal representation, coerced confessions, media trials, followed by the death penalty. Just days after S. A. R. Geelani was released from detention, he was shot outside his lawyer’s residence but not killed. When the literary representations of stuckness are transposed back into the law, it is the immobility in this figure of S. A. R. Geelani and the death of Afzal Guru that we find.

Conclusion: Typology of Literary Friendships

I want to conclude with the typology of global literary friendships by invoking Agha Shahid Ali’s poem Blessed Word: A Prologue:Footnote ⁵⁷

A poem tenaciously lingers between sound and sense. Let us begin with enjambments that these lines present us with. Enjambment implies continuity, and in the act of reading, they perform a sense of unruliness.Footnote ⁵⁸ In French, enjambment is crossing over a border, a straddling of lines. Eve Sedgwick finds in enjambment a “heroic bravado,” a gut- or groin-level resistance or impedance.Footnote ⁵⁹ In these poetic enjambments is a vision of movement through global cross-border literary friendships that Kashmir poetry offers as a typology of escape. Here, Shahid moves from John Keats in Hyperion: “There was a listening fear in her regard/As if calamity had but begun” to Osip Mandelstam, “We shall meet again…in Mandelstam’s velvet dark, in the black velvet Void.” Mandelstam made a promise to his friend, in a poem written in 1920, “We shall meet again, in Petersburg,” but was exiled to Siberia by Stalin, where he died clenching Dante’s poetry.Footnote ⁶⁰ Shahid has written some of the most beautiful Dantean canzones in modern English poetry. These literary friendships, between Dante, Keats, Mandelstam, and Shahid Ali, cross jurisdictions by making counter-promises to one another, a promise to meet again in the black velvet void, remind us of Nehru’s betrayal of his promise for a plebiscite in Kashmir. We need to remind ourselves that a jurisdiction is not just ontological, as territory, land, Bhumi. But also, as diction, it is a promise for a messianic justice to come.

Shahid in the same poem writes:

Here is Kashmir, in mad signification, a meaningless utterance that refuses to reach a referent. What do I call Kashmir, how do I call it, will Kashmir respond to my call in this void? We hear only Kashmir, as sound, as vocal, as evocation, sound without sense, but in this mad signification is an invocation, an invocation of a friend, who lived in Amherst where Shahid Ali was writing these lines. The friend is Emily Dickinson, who used “Kashmir” sixteen times in her oeuvre, the place as well as the textile, Cashmere.Footnote ⁶¹ Text and textile have origins in the Latin texere, meaning “to weave.” Interweaving enables the power of parataxis, charged with a history that short-circuits space and time, bringing forth connections through shorthand, a circumventing through the palimpsest of friendships.