Chasing the Shadows: A study of The Half Mother

Abstract

The three decade old armed conflict in Kashmir has claimed thousands of lives, left hundreds homeless and rendered numerous youth missing. The vacillation of the Kashmir issue has raised a furore and frenzy among the people and it has been registered and documented in various literary and non-literary genres. The narratives about the state of conflict and its impact on the populace are tendentious, written from extrinsic and probative positions that fall in the ambit of mainstream narratives. Lately, the indigenous writers from Kashmir have registered the grim accounts of the impact of insurgency and militancy in the state and the unabated military action. The native writers have a firsthand account of the events of the turmoil. One such writer Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother is a doleful story of Haleema, the protagonist who is an epitome of valiance and courage. It is a woeful tale of a grief stricken mother who loses her only son to the enforced disappearance at the hands of the armed forces In this paper, I aim to highlight the importance of the native Kashmiri writers in bringing out the honest and truthful accounts of the impact of militancy on the contemporary Kashmiri literature.