Absence, Loss and Memory

Representation of Trauma in Contemporary Literature of Kashmir

Abstract

Devastating wars, horrific conflicts and environmental calamities arenothing new and so is the human suffering. Consequently, and naturally, the representations of human sufferings have been an engagement with literature and other forms of art since the antiquity. However, the word 'trauma' is comparatively a new term and gained impetus particularly after the second world war. The word ‘trauma’ was used in the physical sense earlier also but the extension in its connotation from physical to the psychological came only after the advent of industrialization in the late nineteenth century Europe. Furthermore, both the World Wars escalated the neurological and psychic disorders and hence accelerated the studies focused on traumatised soldiers cementing an invariable connection between trauma and warfare. Thus it may be said that the nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe was swept by a swingeing wave in the neurological and psychical studies. During this time the leading psychologist Freud turned to history and literature to describe the traumatic experience in his important works Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Moses and Monotheism (published posthumously in 1939).Later the influential workof Cathy Caruth laid strong foundations of Literary Trauma theory formallywith a close study of Freud in  Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996), where she drew upon the intersections between  literature and psychological theory. Simultaneously, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Geoffrey Hartman and Dominick LaCapra,  further extended the literary trauma theory as a mode of cultural engagement and since the 1990s theory has grown significantly. However, as Stef Craps contends in The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (2015) that along with its immense popularity the theory has been conspicuously Eurocentric and “if the trauma theory is to redeem its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement, the sufferings of those belonging to non-Western or minority cultures must be given due recognition” (46).

In an attempt to further the cross cultural perspective on trauma theory, this paper shall look through and beyond the western theoretical framework into the individual and collective trauma in the fiction writings from Kashmir. It will observe the response and representation oftrauma in Kashmir's diverse cultural and social scenario through its fiction writings.The motive of this paper is to address a cultural inquiry into trauma through literature and thus also extend the engagement with the pluralisation and diversification of  literary trauma studies.Through the close reading of two selected works of fiction from Kashmir namely, Siddhartha Gigoo's  The Garden of Solitude (2011), which deals with poignant tale of Kashmiri Pandit family's exodusfrom Kashmir and Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator (2011) which paintsa grim tale of a teenager growing up in Kashmir, the individual narratives will be closely and comparatively studied to bring out the representation of psychological renderings of individual and collective trauma in the paper.