Beyond Bare Life

Mainstream Indian literary representations of Kashmir have seldom accorded Kashmiris the status of fully realized human subjects – individuals endowed with desires, ambitions, responsibilities, and human rights. Instead, these portrayals overwhelmingly reduce Kashmiri lives to symbols of conflict, displacement, and political unrest – to victims of necropolitics. While reflective of the region’s historical and ongoing crises, such narratives often eclipse the everyday lived realities and emotional interiority of Kashmiri people. Nida and Saira Tak address these critical representational lacunae by examining how select literary texts resist such reductive depictions and foreground Kashmiri subjectivity in its multifaceted, human complexity. Focusing on Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies and Shahnaz Bashir’s The Half Mother , Nida and Tak undertake a close textual analysis to explore how these works reframe the Kashmiri individual as a rights-bearing subject. These narratives neither deny the conditions of militarization and conflict nor are they limited by them; rather, they emphasize affective personhood – emotional resonance, daily routines, familial ties, and ethical agency. Nida and Tak argue that these literary interventions offer a counter-discourse to dominant state, media, and literary representations, contributing to a more ethically and politically responsible understanding of personhood.