Postcolonial disjuncture: Kashmir as the other in Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night

Abstract

Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night (2008) is a perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947. Peer compellingly ruminates on the gradual loss of the Kashmiris’ belongingness in the last few decades that eventually curtailed their sense of individual and collective selfhood. The present article aims to analyse how Peer’s memoir emerges as a crucial intervention in focusing on the othering of Kashmiris in postcolonial India. This article will examine how Peer’s personal story shapes his creative expression of homeland and uncovers the gradual stymieing of Kashmiri Muslim citizenship and identity under Indian statehood, perhaps most alarmingly manifested in the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. This article will look at how Peer’s narrative interrogates the predominating imaginations of Kashmir as the other in the pan-Indian psyche and engages with the inherent "ambivalence" of the nationalist discourse of India. Accordingly, the article will also study how Peer positions Kashmir as a "heterotopic space" that transcends any form of monolithic comprehension. In so doing, Peer’s memoir emerges as an alternative and autoethnographic chronicling of the Kashmir story undercutting the dominant assumptions, reinforced by the Indian nationalist project. Pertinently, the concepts of "ambivalence" and "heterotopia" are drawn from the theoretical perspectives of Homi Bhabha and Michael Foucault, respectively.

Violence and Resistance in Waheed’s The Book of Gold Leaves and Peer’s Curfewed Night

“…She writes that Indian military and paramilitary forces never hesitate killing innocent unarmed Kashmiri people as she writes that a sixteen years old boy was " [shot] to death by the Indian paramilitary forces" (p. 32), who was protesting against the oppressions of Indian government. Payel Pal (2021) has discussed Peer's memoir Curfewed Night and claims that this work is a "perspicacious commentary on the violence, exile and dispossession that have wrecked the lives of ordinary Kashmiris since 1947" (p. 1). She writes that Peer talks about the loss of belongingness of Kashmiri people in last few decades that eventually condensed the sense of individual and collective selfhood.…”