Crises in Literature: Exploring Environment, Memory, and Trauma in Select Kashmiri Fiction

Abstract

The world’s most ecologically diverse areas are increasingly threatened by conflicts. A major study on biodiverse regions in the world, conducted by the prestigious journal, Conservation Biology, identified thirty-four ecologically diverse areas which are also conflict zones. One of the thirty-four areas is the region of Kashmir. Sheltering a rich biodiverse environment, Kashmir is home to a four-decade conflict over its territorial ownership. This four-decade conflict has led to intense hardships for the residents of the state; the ongoing conflict has also greatly affected the rich beauty of the region. Military camps in forest areas, unceremonious dumping of arms and ammunition in protected ecological zones, uncontrolled cutting of trees has all impacted the soil fertility and agronomic production of the State. Since the beginning of militancy in 1989, Kashmir has lost over 59 SQ miles out of 7810 SQ miles of forest cover, stripping the land of old forested areas. Andrew Hoskins, in his pathbreaking essay, “Memory Ecologies”, writes about the significance of paying attention to the particular environment in which the actions of forgetting and remembering occur. The ‘ecologies’ in which memories develop therefore become immensely important as does traumatic events around the individual impacting those memories.

The present paper wishes to explore the interphase between environment, memory and trauma through a study of two Kashmiri novels, Gul Gulshan Gulfam by Pran Kishore and Life in the Clock Tower Valley by Shakoor Rather. Kishore and Rather depict, in their novels, the conflict ridden valley at different junctures of time; Kishore sets his novel at the very beginning of militancy in the 1990s while Rather portrays the war torn Kashmir of 2008. What is universally depicted in both novels, however, is the damaging impact of the trauma of militancy and occupation on the ecological environment of Kashmir, which, in turn, negatively impacts the memories of its residents. The beautiful valley has changed drastically in the last four decades and Kishore and Rather show how the ugliness in the external environment directly parallels the bitterness and terror within the residents of the valley. The present paper will attempt to show how memory is a connecting bridge between the past and the future; the characters in both Rather’s and Kishore’s novels depict the movement of memory through different ‘ecologies’, traversing Kashmir’s beautiful past, its wounded present and its uncertain future. The paper will explore the interlinked nature of memory and environment by focusing on questions of identity and trauma, for which, it will use the theoretical tools of Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub (Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History) and Andrew Hoskins (“Memory Ecologies”).