Narrative Ideology and Repercussions: Representation of the Kashmir Conflict in Modern Literature

Abstract

The research aims to explore the Kashmir conflict that has fractured the lives of the Kashmiri people. In the current times, the Kashmir conflict has been remarkably engaging literate circles all over the world. The conflict has been in the news worldwide for the last three decades because it may cause modern-day warfare betweenIndia, Pakistan, and China. Hence, people all over the world want to know about the situation in the region. The historical, sociological, and moral approaches by Wilbur Stewart Scott are used to grasp the context of the selected novelsThe Collaborator (2012) and Book of Gold Leaves (2015). Mirza Waheed, as an eyewitness, sketched the novels on the sufferings of Kashmiris, engaging daily with a god of death because of the conflictual situation. This situation has been routined since the invasion and occupation of the land by the three nuclear armament-holding neighbors, India, Pakistan, and China, immediately after the emancipation of the first two from their British colonial masters in 1947. The political scenario of Jammu and Kashmir became murkier in 1988 and onwards when India intensified its military operations to quell the armed resistance movement for “Azadi” (freedom) of land. The modern Kashmiri literature roots out the sentiment of freedom; India gave impunity to any draconian tactics in the name of rules that justified any inhuman treatment of custodial killing, torture, rape, etc. As a result, more than three lac women are dead, approximately 10000 are missing, and thousands are languishing in jails.