DefinePK

Abstract

The developing critical scholarship concerning Kashmir challenges traditional state-centric narratives and offers innovative perspectives on the region's past, present, and future. The stories are seen to be fueled by bare life, where life is laid bare to death within a space of exception. Mbembe’s examination challenges the politics of death and the concept of the lifeless body, suggesting that sovereign power does not primarily rely on abandonment. The understandings of Kashmir and its violence in representations of its literature call for deeper engagement with internal contestations within Kashmiri society regarding rights of life and death. The constant threat and surveillance prevailed in the valley transformed the space not only into a heterotopia but normalizes death and the presence of living dead. Rather navigating and challenging the oppressive forces highlights the interplay of necropolis. Necropolitics operates as a persistent manifestation of violence and terror within the text, positioning Kashmir’s conflict zone in a peculiar liminality, perpetually suspended between life and death. The stories encapsulate the essence of what this liminal space of Kashmir signifies within the current political discourse. The existence of Kashmiri Muslims is not merely neglected to its most fundamental state but is continually under looming threat of death.