‘No Bodies’

Abstract

This essay examines the political implications of acts of violence committed against Kashmiri civilians by the Indian military, who target human flesh and body parts instead of the whole body. My argument is premised on the contemporary shock and awe thanatopolitical strategies of the Indian state that aim to traumatize the civilian through horroristic violence, to the extent that they offer no opposition. Drawing upon the notions of ‘horrorism’ and ‘pulverization of the human’, I will discuss the ways in which the violence inflicted on Kashmiri bodies not only erases their uniqueness and individuality, but also leaves them unrecognizable as human bodies, so that they fail to elicit any empathy in spectators. In so doing, this essay examines strategies of violence designed to immobilize and paralyze not only Kashmiri civilians, but also spectators of such horrific incidents. Using Feroz Rather’s The Night of Broken Glass and Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator, two novels that desanitize the war in Kashmir by showing bodily injuries in their raw state, I engage the aesthetics of flesh and its political implications. I discuss the ways in which both narratives deploy tropes of immediate and excessive violence, disturbing violations of the human body, not only to challenge mainstream political narratives about the Muslim world, in particular Kashmir, but also to reorient the reader’s ideas about what this war means to Kashmiris. I show how both novels leave room for an unthought-of-sphere for something (the pulverized Kashmiri body) that is silenced and deliberately made invisible. In so doing, both novels aim to encourage in the reader what Jill Bennett calls ‘empathic vision’ by challenging the politics of invisibility surrounding these bodies by making them visible in their fictional narratives.