The friend I would die for: subversive homosocial imaginaries in South Asian conflict literature

This paper critically reads the portrayals of male intimacy in a selection of contemporary South Asian conflict literature – Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator (Waheed 2011), Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs (2016), and Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) – through the critical concepts of homosociality and homosocial desire. The analysis delineates how the narrative portrayals of civilian, militant, and military men and their relationships with other men incorporate forms of love, intimacy, and desire that are marginal or even antithetical to normative masculine and homosocial enactment. The analysis maps the incongruent trajectories of homosociality in contexts of violence in South Asia, showcasing how subversive male intimacies are provoked through situational, structural, and hierarchical settings produced and abetted by patriarchy. This paper proposes that forms of homosocial intimacy provoked in contexts of conflict and violence are not in service of patriarchy but in resistance and that they challenge homosocial arrangements in the sub-continent which are founded on politics of use.