1 For a political history of the conflict, see Raghavan, Srinath, War and Peace in Modern India (New Delhi, India: Orient Blackswan, 2013)Google Scholar ; from the perspective of Pakistani archives, Alastair Lamb, Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1846–1990 (Oxford: see Oxford University Press, 1992); for an excellent study on Kashmiri identity and history, Zutshi, Chitralekha, Languages of Belonging, Islam, Regional Identity and the Making of Kashmir (Delhi, India: Permanent Black, 2004)Google Scholar ; on insurgency in Kashmir between 1988–2003, see Staniland, Paul, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014)Google Scholar ; on the historical Hindu control of Kashmir state administration, eee Rai, Mridu, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects (Delhi, India: Permanent Black, 2004)Google Scholar ; for a cultural study, Kabir, Ananya, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; for literary criticism, Hogan, Patrick Colm, Imagining Kashmir (Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

2 Koselleck, Reinhart, “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67.2 (2006): 357–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Also see the interview with Giogio Agamben, “The Endless Crisis as an Instrument of Power” (June 4, 2013). Accessed March 18, 2018. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1318-the-endless-crisis-as-an-instrument-of-power-in-conversation-with-giorgio-agamben.

3 On the usage of “problem-space.” see Scott, David, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) 4–5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

4 The rise of the Kashmir Anglophone novel can be traced back to the early 1990s, a transitional moment in South Asia as well as globally. These novels are products of the Kashmiri insurgency that broke out in the late-1980s, concomitant with the fall of the Soviet Union and the turn to neoliberalism that led to a larger global market for human-rights literature. A lot of the contemporary Kashmir Anglophone novels are written by Kashmiris who experienced the insurgency in their adolescence and write novels that are immersed in those experiences. They have strong political positions and often denounce human rights violations publicly in solidarity with writers from Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and so on. Basharat Peer, Shahnaz Bashir, and Mirza Waheed are a few of the authors dealt with in this paper. The earliest Kashmir English novel was Lalla Rookh (1817) by Thomas Moore, an Orientalist work of romance set in an idyllic Kashmir. This is different from later novels such as Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rummer Godden (1953) about a destitute young English widow who settles in a small Kashmiri village during the time of independence when anxieties of partition spill into her life; the 1948 novel The Rage of Vulture was written by Allan Moorehead, who was actually there during partition and reported from Kashmir and the Northwest frontier province. His novel is about a small British community in Srinagar, apprehending the invasions from the west yet reluctant to be evacuated. Two years later, H. E. Bates (who had never visited Kashmir) wrote the Scarlet Sword (1950) about the nuns and priests in an isolated Catholic mission in Kashmir coping amid the upheaval caused by the “tribal invasion” during the partition. Typical to this genre is the representation of Kashmir in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, of Kashmir as a pastoral, with it’s cool climate as a respite from and in contrast to the scorching heat of India’s plains. Mulk Raj Anand’s Death of a Hero is an interesting novella with an Indian nationalist tone that portrays a Kashmiri Muslim supporting the Indian nation over Pakistan. Very few Kashmir Anglophone novels were written between the 1950s and the early 1990s.

5 Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1935) 4.

6 To clarify my usage of these categories: Jurisdiction is narrower legal-political usage. Jurisdictional conditions is the background conditions of the Kashmir novel that figures these “chronotopes” that represent Jurisdiction. And jurisdictional crisis is the literary effects/affects produced by this refraction of jurisdiction and jurisdictional conditions.

7 Jean Dreze, “The New Abnormal in Kashmir,” The Hindu, November 16, 2016. Accessed June 16, 2018. http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/The-new-abnormal-in-Kashmir/article16695599.ece.

8 Lazarus, Neil, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12 Google Scholar . In commenting on certain dominant formations of postcolonial studies, especially of Homi Bhabha, Neil Lazarus has pointed out: “Postcolonial criticism” is constitutively anti-Marxist, departing not only from more orthodox Marxist scholarship but even from the “traditions of the sociology of underdevelopment or ‘dependency theory,’ it disavows nationalism as such and refuses an antagonistic or struggle-based model of politics in favour of one that emphasizes ‘cultural difference,’ ‘ambivalence’ and ‘the more complex cultural and political boundaries that exist on the cusp’ of what ‘modern’ philosophy had imagined as the determinate categories of social reality. This disavowal of nationalism and disenchantment with the nation is one of the reasons for postcolonial studies” indifference to postcolonial era colonialisms.

9 Stoler, Ann Laura, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) 37–67 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

10 The Insular Cases (beginning 1901) asked one of the most pressing constitutional questions relevant to postcolonial studies: whether the Constitution would “follow the flag” to the new US territorial possessions of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Gaum, and the Phillipines, at the end of the 19th century during America’s age of imperialism. The US Supreme Court, reading the Territory Clause of Article IV, invented a distinction between “incorporated” and “unincorporated” territories, where the latter were deemed not “suitable” for being incorporated as states in the union. The constitutional rights did not “follow the flag” to protect persons of Latino, Asia, or Pacific Islander race/ethnicity because of their “different” cultural heritages, which makes the American constitution rights “unsuitable” for them. Dorr v. United States (1904) refers to “territory peopled by savages.” These cases have to be read along with Plessy v. Ferguson, a case of “internal colonialism” that upheld segregation and apartheid laws.

11 Zutshi, Chitralekha, “Whither Kashmir Studies: A Review,” Modern Asian Studies 46.4 (2012): 1033–1048 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

12 Kahin, George McTuman, Asian-African Conference: Bandung, Indonesia, 1955 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1956)Google Scholar ; McMahon, Robert, Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 11–79.Google Scholar

13 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 2005 Google Scholar .

14 Young, Robert J. C., “Preface to the Anniversary Edition,” Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), xix CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

15 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar .

16 The background of the conflict is well known but complex and contested. Prior to independence, Jammu & Kashmir (J&K) was a Muslim majority princely state ruled by a Hindu, Maharaja Hari Singh. At the time of independence, princely states were allowed to choose, bearing in mind the choice of their people, whether they wanted to accede to India or Pakistan. But during partition (1947), an invasion by Pashtun tribesmen backed by Pakistan escalated into a war between India and Pakistan. The maharaja requested help from India in quelling the Pashtun attacks, and it was in these circumstances that the Instrument of Accession was signed. This accession was seen as provisional, pending determinations of a plebiscite. The India-Pakistan war reached the United Nations, where a resolution (February 1948) was passed calling for: (a) an immediate ceasefire; (b) a truce agreement; and (c) an agreement for a plebiscite in “fair and equitable conditions whereby such free expression will be assured.” Although both parties formally agreed, the ceasefire remained incomplete, “fair and equitable conditions” for free expression rarely realized, and as a result a plebiscite never happened. In January 1950, the Constitution of India came into effect. Article 370 of the constitution accorded “autonomous status” to the region, except in matters relating to defense, foreign affairs and communications. State elections were called in 1950, and the National Conference (NC) led by Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah formed the ruling party of the Indian-administered J&K. Sheikh Abdullah was a secularist and staunchly anti-Pakistan, but flirted with the idea of an independent Kashmir while also negotiating greater autonomy for Kashmir within India. This was in conflict with the Hindu right-wing demanding Kashmir’s complete merger with India. Fearing Abdullah’s demand for independence from the Delhi, in 1953 India removed him from power and placed him under house arrest. Throughout the period that followed, Indian central government manipulated and managed local politics in the region. The National Constituent Assembly for J&K ratified the state’s accession to India, with Section 3 stating that “the State of Jammu and Kashmir shall be an integral part of India.” Several presidential notifications were passed under Article 370 that further weakened the state’s regional autonomy. Even though the politics and morality of this legal integration is suspect, the Indian Supreme Court has unquestioningly upheld its legitimacy. Thus, it is through constitutional law that J&K’s autonomy was consistently eroded. After the Indo-Pak war of 1971, Sheikh Abdullah was allowed to enter local politics again on the condition that he would end his opposition with Delhi. He was succeeded by his son, Farooq Abdullah (1982), who, with support from Indira Gandhi’s government, violently silenced all dissident voices and is widely believed to have rigged the 1987 state elections to ensure NC wins the elections and continue its alliance with Delhi. It is under these circumstances that insurgency broke out in 1987 (backed by Pakistan), directly challenging Indian sovereignty. The J&K Liberation Front led the pro-independence wing while Hizbul Mujahideen led the pro-Pakistan factions. The 1990s saw intense battles, human rights violations, political marginalization, and massive visible sits of open warfare.

17 Mouffe, Chantal, “Citizenship and Political Identity,” October: The Identity in Question 61.30 (1992): 28–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; “since to construct a ‘we’ it is necessary to distinguish it from a ‘them,’ and since all forms of consensus are based on acts of exclusion, the condition of possibility of the political community is at the same time the condition of impossibility of its full realization.”

18 Manto, Saadat Hasan, “New Constitution,” Bitter Fruit, ed. and trans. Khalid Hasan (Delhi, India: Penguin, 2008), 206 Google Scholar .

19 Mufti, Aamir R., Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2007), 192 Google Scholar .

20 See Young, “Preface to the Anniversary Edition.”

21 Even so, subaltern movements, grassroots activism, and social action litigation have been successful in transforming and democratizing the constitution, making possible larger socio-economic transformations. See Rohit De, “Beyond the Social Contract,” in Seminar: Special Issue on 60 Years of the Indian Constitution, November 2010. Accessed May 25, 2018. http://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_rohit_de.htm; De, Rohit, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , forthcoming.

22 State of Gujarat v. Fiddali Badruddin Mithibarewala & Ors, AIR 1964 SC 1043.

23 Gauba, Kanika, “Forgetting Partition: Constitutional Amnesia and Nationalism,” Economic and Political Weekly 51.39 (2016): 41–47 Google Scholar .

24 Mehta, Uday, “Indian Constitutionalism: Crisis, Unity and History,” The Oxford Handbook of The Indian Constitution, eds. Madhav Khosla, Sujit Choudhry, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta (Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2016), 38–54 Google Scholar .

25 Article 19 (1) All citizens shall have the right: (a) to freedom of speech and expression (a) Nothing in sub clause (a) of clause (1) shall affect the operation of any existing law, or prevent the State from making any law, in so far as such law imposes reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right conferred by the said sub clause in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence…(emphasis added).For relevant case law prior to amendment, see Romesh Thapar v. State of Madras, AIR 1950 SC 124; Brij Bhushan v. State of Bihar, AIR 1950 SC 129; Liang, Lawrence, “Reasonable Restrictions and Unreasonable Speech,” Sarai Reader 4 (2004): 434–439 Google Scholar .

26 Austin, Granville, “The Expected and the Unintended in Working a Democratic Constitution,” India’s Living Constitution: Ideas, Practices, Controversies, eds. Zoya Hasan, E. Sridharan, and R. Sudarshan (Delhi, India: Permanent Black, 4th Impression, 2013), 329 Google Scholar .

27 French colonialism in the early 19th century and Italian colonialism in early 20th century are instances of this link between national consolidation and imperialism in the European context. Tocqueville considered colonization of Algeria as being necessary to secure French national glory, which was shattered with the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. National glory was necessary, Tocqueville believed, for stability in liberal democratic institutions and ultimately, national consolidation. See Pitts, Jennifer, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 248 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Forgacs, David, Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and National Formation since 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar .

28 Shalimar the Clown (2005) can read as an instance of a “global novel.” Unlike Midnight’s Children, read as a postcolonial novel, in Shalimar, Rushdie scales the Kashmir conflict to a world event. See Ganguly, Debjani, This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 110–131 Google Scholar . My italics.

29 See Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in Miscellaneous Papers, 1888–1938, vol. of Collected Papers (London, Hogarth and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1924–1950), 198–204; in the context of political and racial imaginaries of fetishism also see Eng, David, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

30 As per the general typology of colonialism, (a) colonies are established either for the purpose of permanent settlement (Australia, North America, South Africa, Israel); or (b) as administered colonies often for economic exploitation, without any significant settlement (British India, British-Tanzania); (c) or as “maritime enclaves,” which are the islands, harbors, and strategic points that were occupied for the purpose of global military and naval operations (Hong Kong, Singapore, Hawaii, Guantanamo); and (d) “internal colonization,” which involves patterns of exploitation and domination of disenfranchised groups within a metropolitan country. (British domination of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; in the United States the subjects of internal colonization are usually the racial minorities and Native Americans). All these models involve some notion of exogenous domination over indigenous agency, but in varying forms, effects, and modalities of operation.In Kashmir, there is an exogenous entity (India) that implants itself on an indigenous entity (Kashmir). All the important decisions that affect the lives of the indigenous entity are made and implemented by the exogenous, which is convinced of its own superiority and its ordained mandate to rule over the other. But Kashmir-India relation also has some commonalities with settler colonialism. Ultimately, the settler aims at becoming the “indigenous.” India is not interested in expulsion of the Kashmiri but is interested in a radical assimilation of the latter into the former. Such nationalist assimilation is meant to silence the demand for self-determination, but coercively imputing an Indian identity on it. What is crucially different here from other forms of colonialism is partition’s overbearing presence in defining an Indian national identity; regarding the secession of Kashmir as a repetition of partition that will break down some essential characteristic of India. This is of course, ultimately, rhetorical manipulations of realpolitiks.

31 Bauman, Zygmunt, “Making and Unmaking of Strangers,” Thesis Eleven 43.1 (1995): 1–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; anthropophagy and anthropoemics are also conceptualized by Veracini in the context of settler colonialism, see Veracini, Lorenzo, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

32 Indian Express, August 15, 2017. Accessed June 16, 2018. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/na-goli-se-na-gaali-se-embrace-kashmir-says-pm-narendra-modi-in-independence-day-speech-4797241/.

33 See State Bank of India v. Santosh Gupta & Ors, Supreme Court of India, SLP No. 30884–30885 of 2015, where the Supreme Court of India overturned the J&K High Court judgment in order to uphold the Securitization and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act, 2002. The judgment needs to be read also for its rhetorical anxiety over the J&K High Court judgment that held the SARFAESI Act to be inapplicable in Kashmir for violating the J&K constitution.

34 The 1990s and early 2000s saw an insurgent cross border–funded militant civil war. Since 2002, this turned into Kashmiri local civil resistance, which continued to be met by armed forces, leading back to forms of jihadi terrorism and the more recent visibility of ISIS flags in the region.

35 Staniland suggests that the political approach of integration and the military approach of counter-insurgency are contradictory. I am, however, arguing that political assimilation and military exclusion are overlapping strategies of occupation in the current government. It isn’t one or the other, but both. See Paul Staniland, “Kashmir Since 2003: Counterinsurgency and the Paradox of ‘Normalcy,’ ” Asian Survey 53.5 (2013): 936: “To this end, the central government has pursued two simultaneous approaches, one military and the other political, in its strategy for maintaining control of Kashmir. These two approaches …often conflict with one another ….This creates a fundamental paradox at the heart of Indian policy.”

36 Schmitt, Carl, Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2006)Google Scholar .

37 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone, 2010) 44.

38 Ibid., 45.

39 The conception of narrative plot relies primarily on Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar .

40 Ibid.

41 Stoler, Ann Laura, “Colony,” in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, eds. J. M. Bernstein, Adi Ophir, and Ann Laura Stoler (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018) 48 Google Scholar .

42 Ibid., 53.

43 Bashir, Shahnaz, The Half Mother (Gurgaon, India: Hachette India, 2014) 98, 99 Google Scholar .

44 Sarah Ahmed, “Atmospheric Walls,” in Feminist Killjoys. Accessed March 2018. https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/09/15/atmospheric-walls/. I am grateful to Smaran Dayal for referring me to this work. See generally Vrasti, Wandra and Dayal, Smaran, “Cityzenship: Rightful Presence and the Urban Commons,” Citizenship Studies 20.8 (2016): 994–1011 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

45 Comay, Rebecca, “Resistance and RepetitionL Freud and Hegel,” Research in Phenomenology 45 (2015), 240 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Also see Apter, Emily, Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic (New York: Verso, 2018), 113–138 Google Scholar .

46 See generally, Brooks, Reading for the Plot.

47 See generally, Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; on the recent turn to affect in law and literature, see Olson, Greta, “The Turn to Passion: Has Law and Literature become Law and Affect?” Law and Literature 28.3 (2016): 335–353 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

48 Waheed, Mirza, The Collaborator (Gurgaon, India: Penguin, 2011)Google Scholar .

49 Waheed, Mirza, The Book of Gold Leaves (London: Penguin, 2016)Google Scholar ; on papier-mache art in the context of Kashmir, Kabir, Ananya, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

50 See Sommer, Doris, “Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar .

51 Peer, Basharat, The Curfewed Night (Gurgaon: Random House, 2008), 15 Google Scholar .

52 Derrida, Jacques, Positions, trans. A. Bass (London: Athlone Press, 1972)Google Scholar , as cited in Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (New York: Routledge, 2015), 40 Google Scholar .

53 For a short version of Freud’s characterization of condensation and displacement, see Freud, Sigmund, On Dreams, trans. M. D. Eder (New York: Dover, 2001), 14–26 Google Scholar ; on reading it in narratology, Peter Brooks, Reading for Plot.

54 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.

55 N.C.R. of Delhi v. Najot Sandhu & Ors., AIR 2005 SC 3820.

56 See Arundhati Roy, “The Hanging of Afzal Guru is a Stain on India’s Democracy, The Guardian,” The Guardian, February 10, 2013. Accessed June 15, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/10/hanging-afzal-guru-india-democracy. Also see Amnesty International, New Execution Points to Worrying and Regressive Trend, February 9, 2013. Accessed June 15, 2018. https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2013/02/india-new-execution-points-worrying-and-regressive-trend/. Also see Frontline, Why Afzal Guru Matters, May 17, 2013. Accessed June 15, 2018. https://www.frontline.in/politics/why-afzal-guru-matters/article4650453.ece.

57 Ali, Agha Shahid, The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (New Delhi, India: Penguin, 2009): 171–174 Google Scholar .

58 See Agamben, Giorgio, The End of the Poem, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar .

59 Sedgwick, Eve, “A Poem Is Being Written,” Representations 17 (1987): 108 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

60 On Mandelstam and Dante in the context of Soviet law, see Dimock, Wai Chee, “Time against Territoriality, in The Place of Law ,” eds. Austin Sarat, Lawrence Douglas, and Martha Merril Umphrey (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 21–42 Google Scholar ; on Agha Shahid Ali in the broader context of transnationalism in modern poetry, see Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 96–116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar , where these transnationalism conversations happen in the register of elegy, grief, love, and anger as creating affective ties across boundaries of space and culture.

61 See generally, Ali, Kazim, ed., Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .