Necropolitical Kashmir: mediating decolonization through postcolonial literature and posthuman knowledge

“Necropolitical Kashmir” examines how new Anglophone literature (post-2000), emerging from Kashmir— the epicenter of an armed separatist movement in India—mediate decolonization. The thesis focuses on two literary texts: The Collaborator (Penguin 2011) by Mirza Waheed and the graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (Fourth Estate 2015) by Malik Sajad. My aim in this thesis is to expand the gamut of postcolonial scholarship by studying texts that portray civil strife, militarization, insurgency, trauma, human rights violations, and death in the conflict zone of Kashmir. My literary analysis of the works is informed by two main inquiries. How do postcolonial writers blend ethics, aesthetics, and politics in dissenting to necropolitics and neocolonialism? How does contemporary postcolonial literature and theory interface with posthumanism and posthuman knowledge? In a broader sense, my thesis intends to foreground new English literature from Kashmir about state oppression within the English literary canon. Herein, my polemic against neocolonialism is twofold: (a) against state violence and necropolitics such as the militarized siege of Kashmir by the Indian state; (b) against canonization's epistemic violence that leaves pertinent postcolonial works like Munnu stranded on the periphery of the English canon. This thesis is a humble attempt to redress these issues by elucidating that writers like Mirza Waheed and Malik Sajad from Kashmir are heralding a new generation of Anglophone Indian writers by expanding the oeuvre of postcolonial writing as exemplified by the works of Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy. The novelty of such contemporary works as The Collaborator and Munnu is their blend of bold political voice that tackles postcolonial issues like border disputes and state-sponsored violence, alongside subtly depicting the vicissitudes of post-independence India.M.A.Includes bibliographical reference