In Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

“Most Present of Absences” in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown A Deconstructive Reading of Proper Names, Political and Military Terms, and Narration

Word count: 25,109

Suparna Arora Student number: 01707814

Supervisor(s): Prof. Dr. Stef Craps

A dissertation submitted to Ghent University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics and Literature

Academic year: 2018 – 2019

Acknowledgements

To my parents, for always encouraging me to learn and supporting me unconditionally. To my sister, for conversations, thinking, love abound. To my grandparents, the most present of absences, whose lives I wish I could remember, and whose lives flicker amidst what I have read and written. A special thank you to Fien, without whom I would not have a PDF to upload at all. To Elliot, my personified Routledge companion to literature since 2013, and the only other person who could be bothered (bribed) to proofread this. And to Professor Stef Craps, for helping me find my way to this project from my initial urge to write about Partition trauma, and for taking a great deal of time out to discuss the topic with me and to edit this in its many stages of development.

Table of Contents 1 Introduction ...... 5 2 A Brief History of Partition and Kashmir ...... 8 2.1 Making the Case for Post-1947 ...... 8 2.2 On Kashmir ...... 13 2.3 Kashmir in Discourses of Nationhood ...... 17 3 Theoretical Framework ...... 22 3.1 Narrative Structure: Perspective and Temporality ...... 22 3.2 Derrida and Deconstruction ...... 25 3.3 Trauma Theory and Narrative (Im)possibilities ...... 29 4 Proper Names and Absences: Kashmira/India and Her Mothers ...... 31 4.1 “India” ...... 31 4.2 The Absences of Kashmir and the Kashmiri Mother ...... 33 4.3 The Deaths of Boonyi ...... 37 5 A Deconstructivist Approach to Political and Military Terms ...... 40 5.1 Hindus, Muslims, and “Kashmiriyat” ...... 40 5.2 “Integrity”, “integral”, and “integer” ...... 44 5.3 “Freedom” ...... 46 6 Narrative (Im)possibilities: Who Speaks and Who Can Speak? ...... 49 6.1 “Crackdown” and “ethnic cleansing” ...... 49 6.2 The Fate of Pachigam ...... 53 7 Conclusion: Kashmiris, the “Most Present of Absences” Now ...... 59 8 Works Cited ...... 64

Word count: 25,109

1 Introduction “Yet what did such maps and news about territory mean to those who had never known any place but their own home?” (Khan 125) The year of 1947 marked a major turning point in the history of the subcontinent. Undivided India under British rule comprised most of the subcontinent, including the princely states with which the British government established treaties of cooperation. The demand for independence did not culminate in a stable exchange of power but instead marked the beginning of a chaotic period amidst which two modern postcolonial states emerged. A Muslim homeland carved out of two disjointed ends of the subcontinent, Pakistan grew into an Islamic state, contrary to the ‘plural’ vision of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League’s leader and the country’s first governor general (Khan 155). More than one million people were killed in the prolonged period preceding and following the announcement of independence and Partition, while an estimated fifteen million people migrated across hastily drawn borders seeking safety in nascent postcolonial states that had attained their long- awaited independence, but had few or no institutional structures to support the immense humanitarian support that was necessary for the unplanned and unexpected exodus and violence that followed the announcement of a new boundary that would cut through the subcontinent. A post-Partition novel set primarily in Indian-administered Kashmir, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown singles out the contested territory between India and Pakistan as a space of significance. Disguised as a tale of love and vengeance centring around the characters of Shalimar and Boonyi, the novel transforms into a “magical realist crash-course on the history of Kashmir since Partition”, as summarised cleverly by Theo Tait (2). Their inter-religious marriage in a small village situated in Kashmir starts to fall apart, parallel to the growing animosity between religious groups in the aftermath of the Partition that begins to undo the religious coalescence of Kashmiriyat, of Kashmiriness. Boonyi’s extramarital affair with Max Ophuls, the American ambassador to New Delhi, and the birth of their daughter Kashmira/India, sets off a series of vengeful murders by Shalimar, a clown who transforms into an assassin. The plot moves forward in time from the Partition onwards, incorporating multiple events from Kashmir’s complex sociopolitical history that affect the characters of the novel in myriad ways and their distinct experiences through nuanced changes in perspective. This thesis analyses the significance of three examples of the “most present of absences” in the text, specifically in the case of proper names, military and political terms, and narration.

The tripartite analysis focuses on how the novel interrogates the nature of language, and rhetorically performs the anxiety about language before, during, and after conflict. The historical overview examines how and why the tensions between the two countries are concentrated and exacerbated in the region of Kashmir specifically, exploring the significance of the region to concepts of nationhood and identity for the Indian state. Taking Yasmin Khan’s analysis of the Partition and the aftermath as its focal reading, the historical overview evaluates the anxiety towards language during the Partition years, the retrospective accumulation of meaning for the terms “Pakistan”, “swaraj” [independence/self-rule], and “Partition”, and the unanticipated ways in which the people of the subcontinent were, and still are, affected. Stemming from this concern with language, the theoretical framework examines theories of language and signification according to structuralism and poststructuralism, elaborating on Derrida’s concepts of “différance”, “trace”, “supplement”, as well as his theory regarding proper names. Furthermore, the section also sketches the narrative structure of the novel, focusing on how the narrator focalises through different characters in the text. The theoretical framework additionally summarises relevant aspects of trauma theory, especially about the narration of trauma. Titled after its male protagonist Shalimar, the novel encloses the narratives of its myriad characters between introductory and concluding chapters named instead after a female character, doubly named “India” and “Kashmira” by her two mothers. The literary analysis begins with Kashmira/India, who is marginalised to the edges of the text, contained within these two introductory and concluding chapters, and absent from the central chunk of the novel. The thesis evaluates the significance of the two names ascribed to this character by her two biological and adoptive mothers in light of Derrida’s discussion of proper names. The following chapter extends the analysis of absences within names as perceivably present to an evaluation of the novel’s emphasis on the failure of political and military terms to incorporate their own consequences and the lived realities of people affected by the terms themselves, contending that the text challenges the singularity of hegemonic institutional narratives of nationhood and memory. The final chapter evaluates the tension between the possibility and the impossibility of narration, focusing on the role of the third-person focalising narrator in the depiction of trauma in the novel. This thesis attempts to fill an absence itself amidst current research on the novel. Pei-Chen Liao’s analysis proves that the novel lends itself to a deconstructive reading but focuses on the depiction of Shalimar as a terrorist and the uncanny as a tool for analysing the violence and animosity between familiar groups, referring to them as “intimate enemies or strangers to

ourselves” (41). Liao remarks that 9/11 “exists in the novel without really existing”, an interplay of absence and presence that this thesis takes up with other focal points of interest. Robert Eaglestone focuses on the depiction of terror and the terrorist in his comparison of contemporary novels, analysing the inadequacies and limitations of their attempt to “recapture or rephrase terror in distinctly Western terms - blaming it on evil, illness, or on universal desires” (368). His analysis of the depiction of the limitations of language is briefly addressed in Chapter 6, although the issue informs the aims of both Chapters 5 and 6. Similarly, Anne- Laure Fortin-Tournès and Yumna Siddiqi discuss the representation of trauma in the novel, with a close reading of passages which this thesis attempts to revaluate or substantiate. In addition, Robert Spencer evaluates The Satanic Verses similarly as a post-9/11 text that grapples with the “war-on terror” and the political implications of such fiction. Similarly, Daniel O’Gorman studies Shalimar the Clown as a fiction of the “war on terror”, focusing on interconnectedness and globalisation in the novel. Furthermore, Midnight’s Children has been analysed extensively for Rushdie’s use of magical realism to depict historical events, a technique employed at various points in Shalimar the Clown and discussed specifically in relation to the portrayal of Pachigam. Drawing upon elements of these analyses, this thesis focuses on three specific “most present of absences” as mentioned above.

2 A Brief History of Partition and Kashmir This historical overview examines the history of the Partition of undivided India to establish an understanding of the fragile sociopolitical situation between India and Pakistan, and more importantly in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, one of the princely states that underwent a complex belated partition itself in the aftermath of the events of 1947. The focus narrows down to Indian-administered Kashmir, one of the primary settings of Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. This chapter additionally evaluates the ambiguity and the inadequacy of a number of terms to describe the events of 1947, and proposes “post-1947” as a more appropriate term to encompass the multiple and varied implications on the lived realities of people in the region. After a brief overview of the current situation in the valley, the concluding section evaluates how the region figures in discourses of Indian nationhood and identity.

2.1 Making the Case for Post-1947 Instead of the terms “post-independence”, “post-partition”, or “post-colonial” as identifiers for the period that followed 1947 and the consequences of the processes of freedom, separation, and decolonisation that these terms imply, this thesis proposes that “post- 1947” is a more appropriate term. This is to emphasise two distinct features that are undermined by the use of the prefix “post” with “independence” or “partition”, and the range of meanings, consequences, and experiences that the terms “independence” and “partition” were expected but failed to imply. Firstly, in her introduction to The Great Partition, Yasmin Khan draws attention to three key terms that represented major movements or ideas - “Pakistan”, “swaraj”, and “Partition”. These terms gained varying degrees of momentum in the years leading up to 1947, but only gained “concrete meanings” retrospectively, as the consequences were realised and understood in the period that followed. The All-India Muslim League, the major Muslim- majority political party, championed the demand for Pakistan as a separate homeland for Muslims. Khan underlines the disparity between definitions of “Pakistan”, which encompassed meanings as polarising as “anti-freedom for many non-Muslims and a utopian future for many Muslims”, and were far from the final result (68). She emphasises that its emergence and popularity was perhaps the result of the “politicisation of religion” and the hardening of religious identities in the decades leading up to 1947, offering the introduction of separate electorates for different religious communities in 1909 as a decisive early legal factor

(34). The resultant boundary was unexpected even for political leaders, as corroborated by Ayesha Jalal’s discussion of how Jinnah himself had indeed “envisaged a ‘Pakistan’ based on undivided Punjab and Bengal”, the two states with intermixed religious populations that were partitioned in the creation of Pakistan and India as two separate states (Jalal 1). Pakistan’s statehood remained vulnerable even after the Partition, evident in its second partition that led to the formation of Bangladesh as a separate independent state in 1971. Khan attributes the “[p]rofound confusion”, both about precise boundaries and the meanings of “Pakistan” and “swaraj”, as the “cause of the mass movement of people” and the “ethnic violence that followed”, arguing that the “resulting movement of people was so large that it changed the very nature of the newly independent states of Pakistan and India and altered the entire meaning of Partition” (100). She reveals the comparatively limited use of the word “Partition”, which came a “very poor third” in comparison to “swaraj” and “Pakistan”, emphasising that “[t]he idea of partitioning ancient homelands was barely contemplated or understood” (86). The simultaneous demand for “swaraj” and “Pakistan” warped into the “Partition” that was delivered as part of the independence deal. The term that would eventually become the primary signifier of the creation of two distinct states was thus ironically overlooked, further demonstrating the delay in the development of their meanings and the consequent plaguing incomprehension and unpredictability about the future. Furthermore, the primary consequences of mass migration and ethnic violence were neither intended nor anticipated but are in hindsight considered inherent to the meaning of “Partition”. As a result of the "politicisation of religion”, Khan explains that growing communalist sentiments led to a number of riots before Partition was even announced, which in turn heightened anxieties about belonging and religious differences. She identifies the formation of armed militia groups that came into being in 1946 as a manifestation of “exclusive, rigid, right-wing ideologies”, and further elaborates on the deadly riots that followed the failure of the Indian Union Plan (51). Proposed in 1946, this plan granted autonomy to provinces as well as the ability to form blocs within the union, but mandated that provinces would nonetheless continue being part of a centralised Indian Union. The plan was rejected after mixed reception and misunderstandings in its interpretation owing to its ambiguity, further fuelling anxieties about an uncertain future. Khan explains that the violence that followed its failure grew “stranger and less manageable”, and that the killings became more “brutal, sadistic and grisly” (61-2). Citing riots in Bengal, Bihar, and Punjab, Khan analyses that the nature of violence continued to escalate such that it was no longer “haphazard, frantic killing but, at its worst, routine, timetabled and systemic ethnic

cleansing”, and conclusively took on a “new ferocity, intensity and callousness” after the announcement of Partition (128-31). She references the disturbing report of a Red Cross mission in December 1947, according to which the crisis was “so enormous” that it was simply beyond their preventive or reparative capacity (169). The border that determined the fate of the subcontinent was the work of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who was asked to finalise the demarcation of boundaries within five weeks despite being unfamiliar with the land and the communities that would be partitioned as a result. Even after the borderlines were finalised, no public announcement was made until after the two countries celebrated their respective independence days on 14 and 15 August. Khan insists that the deliberate delay in the announcement is incriminatory evidence against the British of their disavowal of responsibility. She substantiates that the public announcement of the Radcliffe line coincided with the departure of the first regiment of British troops, in spite of warnings that “widespread bloodshed and violence was likely”, thus making it “difficult to avoid the damning conclusion that, in the minds of British policy- makers, the duty to protect the lives of South Asians had already ended” (103, 125). Freedom was thus celebrated by people incognisant of which side of the border their homes would fall under and of the boundaries that would dictate the nature of the statehood and the national identities they were celebrating. The commemoration of independence also occurred uncannily before the mass migration and violence that in hindsight became definitive aspects of the Partition that accompanied independence. While independence was celebrated by Pakistan and India on 14 and 15 August respectively that year, it was in reality an extended period of nation-building and nation- splintering, which required the division, creation, and consolidation of institutional structures (Khan 118). Khan appropriately identifies the period that followed as a “deeply ambiguous, transitional position between empire and nationhood that threatened the very existence of the new states themselves”, insisting that the transfer of power was not “straightforward” (206). For further nuance, independence in fact composed of two simultaneous processes of separation, namely partition and decolonisation, as two states were carved out of one, and both were severed from the coloniser. These processes of separation continued well after 1947 as the countries evolved into modern nation-states and established their presence in the global post-war world order. The use of the prefix “post” in conjunction with “independence” and “Partition” is thus misleading, as it limits the experience of both to a specific moment in the past, undermining the extended lived experience of this historical rupture. Stef Craps argues that the “traumas

sustained by the formerly colonised and enslaved are collective in nature and impossible to locate in an event that took place at a singular, historically specific moment in time” (63). In addition to the traumas of colonisation, the traumas sustained by the populations of the subcontinent following the independence and Partition into two (and later three) postcolonial states cannot be isolated or limited to a momentary occurrence as they were accompanied by migration, long-term displacement, and extended periods of violence. Khan also warns that an attempt to define Partition in such a way, as “a massive but contained historical event […] underestimates the scale of disruption of 1947 and the dangers of the crisis” during the years that followed (206). Craps further cites Victoria Burrows’ challenge to the use of “post”, to the suggestion that colonialism and its consequences can be confined to the past, in support of his argument against the Eurocentric and therefore exclusionary tendencies of trauma theory: Only those who can ignore ‘the belated scar[s]’ – both metaphorical and literal – inscribed on the lives of millions who live the consequences of colonialism can retreat, in the words of Robert Young, into the ‘safety of its politics of the past.’ (Burrows 21) The people of the subcontinent still similarly “live the consequences” of Partition and independence, and in distinct ways. Sanjib Barvah, for example, indicates that in the case of Assam, “the meaning of partition has been unfolding slowly over decades through a tortuous process” in the form of citizenship status problems in the borderland region that continue today (81). The “undefined question of citizenship” posed after the announcement of independence and Partition remains a source of ambiguity and anxiety for borderland populations. The Radcliffe line created divisions in intermixed religious communities and cut through organic systems of mutual dependence in areas that had developed over centuries of cohabitation. The border was not experienced uniformly across the line. Two other essays in Urvashi Butalia’s collection about the effects of Partition, in addition to Barvah’s essay quoted above, examine the transition of land and community from being frontiers to borderlands in a crucial attempt to nuance the tendency of Partition histories to singularly emphasise the consequence of mass migration. Rita Kothari draws attention to the paradoxical simultaneity of how the Partition caused and “arrested” movement, in that it not only led to migration but also led to disabled movement across lands and communities that had not previously been subject to such restrictions, with the specific example of the Banni community in Sindh (44). Siddiq Wahid further distinguishes frontiers from borderlands, elaborating that the transition from one to the other alters the relationships within a

community from being “interdependent, interactive, dialogic” to “competitive, confrontational and suspicious” (21). Kothari and Wahid both scrutinise the impact of Partition on localised communities that not only suffered the social and cultural shock of being severed from cohabitants of the same area, but also faced the economic repercussions of disrupted trade and exchange routes. The paradoxical way in which the new boundary could both cause and arrest movement indicates the variation in lived experiences of the Partition. Nonetheless, both consequences demonstrate the inherent artifice of a border that cuts across communities that have organically become intertwined over years of engagement and interaction. Khan also recognises in her conclusion that one of the “follies of empire” is that it “ruptures community evolution […] and forces violent state formation” (210). She explains the shortcomings of attempts to predict the consequences of Partition as they were realised in the period that followed the announcement of the boundary line, writing that “[g]iven the language of impermanency surrounding the creation of Partition and the limited way in which the emergent nationalisms related to territory, the monumental permanence of these borders is paradoxical, and has had contemporary consequences barely imaginable to the political protagonists in 1947” (197). Owing to their simultaneous occurrence, Tarun K. Saint insists on the “duality of the experience of independence-partition” (186). However, this hyphenated term still falls short of encompassing the multifaceted reality that accompanied this turning point, which included but was not limited to migration, violence, the destruction of communities and the formation of refugee colonies, the experience of anxiety and guilt, and the establishment of borders and border control where previously none existed. Furthermore, while the independence days of the two countries are celebrated vehemently with a special focus on displays of military prowess, there is in contrast no institutional or official commemorative day or monument for the Partition and its consequences for the people on the subcontinent. The first museum dedicated to the Partition opened only in 2017, a staggering 70 years after the event, and has been engaged in extensive efforts to collect oral testimonies from the remaining survivors in order to build an archive similar to the Yale Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. The lack of active commemorative activity until recently suggests that the countries and their people are still in the midst of the process of coming to terms with the events of 1947 and its consequences. The experiences of independence and Partition cannot be labelled dual due to the distinctive ways in which they are remembered and the significant imbalance in how regularly they are remembered.

Therefore, as Khan suggests, the terms “Pakistan”, “swaraj”, and “Partition” did not have constricted definitions before 1947 nor did they gain meaning in the immediate period that followed. Instead, they have continually evolved since. Khan concludes that Partition was not “the end point […] of a great national struggle”, but occurred rather in the period after the announcement of the line (206). The belatedness underlying the development of meanings ascertains that independence and Partition were not momentary occurrences limited to the days on which they were announced or celebrated, nor were they mere historical events marked by distinct dates in 1947. They are better understood as extended periods and colossal processes of immense change, the consequences of which include, but are not limited to, decolonisation, nation-splintering and nation-building, mass migration, and ethnic violence. The use of the prefix “post” in tandem with “independence” and “Partition” is redundant not only in light of the lengthy period of migration and violence, but also with regard to borderland groups, as it is unfaithful to the reality it is supposed to imply, falsely reduces independence and Partition to singular events in time, and denies the dynamic, complex, and long-term nature of these processes of change, and the multiplicity in experiences of the events of 1947. The events of 1947 continue to affect the social, political, and economic situation of the subcontinent. Furthermore, 1947 is not the year that demarcates the limits of their occurrence but is the year that marks the beginning of these processes of changes, an extraordinary rupture in the history of the subcontinent. This thesis thus uses “post-1947” instead of the hybrid “independence-partition” proposed by Saint and the more commonly used “post-independence” or “post-partition”. An additional point of concern is that the thesis employs “Partition” for the specific historical event implying the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and “partition” for the concept and for the splitting of the states of Bengal, Punjab, and Kashmir.

2.2 On Kashmir Similar to the borderland populations mentioned above, Kashmiris continue to “live the consequences” of the events of 1947. The state transitioned from being a frontier to a borderland, fractured due to the force exerted on the territory by the two nations. As a princely state, Jammu and Kashmir was not under the direct rule of the British government and was granted a certain degree of autonomy. The transition from colony to nation-state endangered the state, straddling the border between the two new nations, as its autonomous status allowed it to choose whether it would accede to India or Pakistan while both nations laid claim on it. This was further complicated by the conflicting religions of its ruler and its

majority population. A number of historical factors have led to sociopolitical complications in the valley, and this section focuses on historical events of particular relevance in relation to the literary text in focus, as they are entwined into the lives of fictional characters in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. To briefly summarise the pre-Partition history of the region, Mridu Rai explains that the English East India Company created the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the 19th century by merging the regions of Kashmir, Jammu, Ladakh, Gilgit, and Baltistan to serve their own “geopolitical objectives”, emphasising that there was at this point “little in common - ethnically, linguistically or in terms of religious composition” between them (Rai 2). The British, seeking to avoid responsibility of the defence of “the volatile border with Afghanistan and mountainous areas such as Kashmir and Ladakh”, instated the previous “raja” of Jammu, Gulab Singh of the Sikh kingdom, as the “maharaja” of Jammu and Kashmir (Rai 3). Antía Mato Bouzas elaborates that the state thus evolved before the Partition into a “frontier” as part of which “[d]ifferent territories were amalgamated around the political control of the Dogra maharaja in the Kashmir valley, a Hindu prince ruling over a Muslim majority population” (143). During the Dogra rule, Kashmiri Muslims were excluded from “power-sharing arrangements” which initiated tensions amidst the community of Kashmir, resulting in Hindu- Muslim riots in 1931 (Rai 4). The period immediately following the announcement of Partition was especially fraught for the state. Hari Singh, the ruler at the time, hesitated in making the choice between India and Pakistan, which led to the Poonch rebellion against the maharaja and Pakistan’s backing of the “tribal invasion” of Kashmir. Singh therefore sought support from Nehru’s government, who made it conditional on the accession of the state. The accession document was signed on October 26, over two months after Partition and independence were finalised, and evolved into the first war over Kashmir between the two nascent postcolonial states. The military forces of India and Pakistan engaged in war at the border state, culminating in an internal partition of the state in 1948 that belatedly imitated the Partition of undivided India in the preceding year. The UN’s intervention in 1949 led to the Karachi Agreement, which instituted a ceasefire line, “rechristened the Line of Control (LoC) in 1972)” after the countries fought again in 1965, and accordingly demarcated the territory that would be controlled by the two states (Rai 6). In 1971, the third war between the two nations led to the separation of East and West Pakistan, and the formation of Bangladesh. The fourth war between India and Pakistan was as recent as 1999 and also concerned Kashmir (Rai 6).

India and Pakistan continue to harbour deep animosities against each other, integrated into their respective post-1947 institutional narratives of nationhood. Not only is this apparent in their incessant competing claim over Kashmir, but also in the terminology used by the two sides in naming the fractured parts of the once autonomous princely state. Pakistan uses the terms “India-occupied Kashmir” or “Indian-administered Kashmir” to refer to Kashmir in India. Alternately, the part of the state that falls under its jurisdiction is referred to as “Azad Kashmir” [Free Kashmir], while the Indian side refers to it as “Pakistan-occupied Kashmir”. The complications and limitations in describing the state of Kashmir, in both senses of the word “state”, are thus already evident in the existence of alternative names. The ambiguity of language in relation to Kashmir is reminiscent of Khan’s evaluation of the problematic variations in the meanings of “Pakistan”, “swaraj”, and “Partition” before 1947. In conclusion to yet another debate on terminology, this thesis focuses solely on the situation in “Indian- administered Kashmir” and refers to it as Kashmir. One of the main sources of complications in Kashmir rooted in the Partition period is the unfulfilled condition that the accession document signed would have to be ratified by the Kashmiri population through a plebiscite of some sort (Rai 7). On the other hand, the Indian government cites the signing of the accession document as indisputable proof of Kashmir’s status and remains uncompromising about the indivisibility of India. The “statutory autonomy” granted as part of the accession document that “restricted New Delhi’s jurisdiction over Kashmir to matters of foreign affairs, defense, currency and communications” was inserted into India’s constitution as Article 370. However, Rai outlines that this autonomy has been “unremittingly abraded” since 1953 through a series of presidential orders that extended the Indian government’s control (7). Kashmiris have since voiced varying demands for “azaadi”/“aazadi” [freedom] but remained divided amidst them. Ananya Jahanara Kabir identifies that in “the two distinct pronunciations, depending on whether they are speaking Koshur or Urdu, the fluctuating sound of ‘aazadi’ mirrors its fluctuating sense”, as it can “signal complete independence - political freedom from both India and Pakistan, or freedom from India in order to integrate into the nation-state of Pakistan; or greater federal autonomy within the Indian Union (Article 370)”. She furthermore contends that it means the “interiorisation of sovereignty as democracy, and democracy as individual freedom”, while on the “collective level, aazadi indicates a yearning for a confident, well-defined Kashmiri identity, or kashmiriyat (Kashmiriness)” (10). Since 1947, Kashmir has been suspended between Pakistan and India, as both still assert a resolute claim on its entirety despite only controlling partitioned sections of it. Khan and Rai

both assert that the region has been a victim of Pakistan-backed, Pakistan-trained or Pakistan- armed militants, some of whom support integration with Pakistan while others seek independence from both nations. On the other hand, certain Indian government laws have been used to assert control over the Kashmiri population, namely the Public Safety Act (PSA) and the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA). As per Rai’s overview, PSA allows the state to detain people for up to a year without a charge or a trial simply “in the name of keeping public order”, and those arrested are often “denied access to their family, friends, or legal counsel for long periods” (15). Meanwhile, AFSPA was extended to Jammu and Kashmir in September 1990, and “[i]n areas designated ‘disturbed’ according to broad criteria […] permits the armed forces to shoot to kill, search, and arrest – all without a warrant – ensuring their immunity from prosecution” (Rai 15). A recent article in The Economist considers the Indian military’s “raft of special laws”, some of which are “holdovers from emergency rules the British imposed during the second world war”, to suggest that the “near- impunity” granted to soldiers in “parts of the country that are deemed to be troubled” are reminiscent of the Raj, indicating that the hierarchy of social structures at present is essentially neocolonial (“Colonialism bequeathed a sense of entitlement to South Asia’s soldiers”). The hostility towards the Indian government has thus risen immensely in the post- 1947 period. Khan summarises the different culpable forces that contribute to continued tensions between the two countries, which fluctuate and regularly escalate to a threatening degree, often as a result of disagreements about Kashmir, and often most adversely threaten Kashmir: New grievances and conflicts have arisen because of the growth of militancy, Pakistan’s backing for violent atrocities carried out in Kashmir and beyond, Indian human rights abuses in the Kashmir valley, not to forget the complications caused by the creation of Bangladesh after the war of 1971, the acquisition of nuclear weaponry, and the complex interplay of national and regional identities in all three countries. (Khan 209) Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal and Suchismita identify further that it is now “no longer just the gun of the soldiers on the two sides; it is also militants, counter insurgents, surrendered militants and a confusing network of their informers and agents to deal with” (Jamwal and Suchismita 76). The complex interaction between these different groups was exemplified as recently as 2019. The armies engaged in border skirmishes in response to the attack on an Indian army convoy in Pulwama (Kashmir) by Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e- Mohammed, which killed 46 troops. The Indian government retaliated with an air strike on a

training camp in Balakot (Pakistan) and the air forces of the two countries consequently engaged in an aerial “dogfight”, as a result of which an Indian plane was shot down and its pilot captured. This was the first encounter of its kind since the 1971 war, and the threat of war and further escalation was markedly worrisome as both are now nuclear states (“India Pakistan: Kashmir fighting sees Indian aircraft downed” 1). The international community condemned the attack and urged the national leaders to exercise restraint in military response. The tensions between the two countries continue and are often concentrated in the region of Kashmir, leaving the valley in a state of anxiety and volatility.

2.3 Kashmir in Discourses of Nationhood Bouzas identifies that the region of Kashmir is of critical importance in the “ongoing discourses of nation-building related to the formation of particular national identities”. She elaborates that the territory is central to the respective Indian and Pakistani “claims of achieving a ‘secular’ and ‘Muslim’ state to articulate a national identity” (141). Kashmir today remains the only Muslim-majority state in India, while Pakistan controls only half of the state that the letter “K” in its proposed name symbolised. Khan poetically elucidates that in the post-1947 phenomenon of identity-building as two distinct states, “[l]ike a distorted fairground mirror, India and Pakistan became warped, frightening, oppositional images of one another” (104). Such a description of the relationship resonates with the language of psychoanalysis, with apparent connotations of the Lacanian self-image that underpins postcolonial and feminist discussions of the process of identification in relation to an “Other”. Ranjana Khanna considers this "category of the ‘Other’” in her proposal for a new transnational feminism, specifically in relation to feminist and postcolonial studies. She summarises that Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Edward Said’s Orientalism, foundational to the respective theoretical frameworks, position the woman and the “Orient” as the “Other”. She further expounds that “[t]he relationship of the Self to the Other are as much philosophical as political questions” (108). This is evident in the narratives of nation-building that Pakistan and India have engaged in, and informs Khan’s analysis of the same. Khan substantiates that “Indian and Pakistani ideas of nationhood were carved out diametrically, in definition against each other” (9, emphasis added). The countries have engaged in an intense process of “othering” through which “the ‘other’ state necessarily became an object of comparison, a counterpoint, and was, to a greater or lesser extent, vilified in the process” (Khan 208).

The Partition, and the respective experiences of the separation and the loss of territory in addition to the violence suffered by one community at the hands of the other, constitutes according to Freudian terminology a “screen memory”, used “to designate a memory that hides another, more distressing memory” (Craps 79). Sukeshi Kamra elaborates that the privileging of the memory of violence against Self over violence perpetrated by Self is a “breakdown of the given system of signification, their being subject, object, and instrument of violence at the same time” (168). Memory production is complicated by this breakdown of the “naturalised distinction of the categories of subject and object”, leading to one-dimensional projections of the other group as an antagonised “Other” without nuance and animosity between the countries (Kamra 168). In his analysis of the Holocaust as screen memory, A. Dirk Moses indicates that it is used to justify “terroristic political action in the form of pre- emptive strikes and anticipatory self-defence to forestall feared destruction”, which Craps relates to the Israeli violence against Palestinians (Moses 91, Craps 77). For India and Pakistan, this anticipatory self-defence not only affects their aggressive military stances towards each other, but has also caused heightened control in border regions like Kashmir, which were once frontiers, thus harming their economic, social, and political situation. Considering this oppositional quality in the Indian and Pakistani concepts of nationhood, it is intriguing to compare how the region of Kashmir is integrated into their respective nation-building narratives. Khan corroborates that the idea of partitioning undivided India was incompatible with the Hindu-majority Congress because its “nationalist imaginings of India, as part religious goddess, part mother figure, meant [the partition] was a debate about more than territory”, as the country was “[n]ot just cold cartography” but instead “embodied a real, warm, all-embracing mother figure” (93-4). The Indian claim for Kashmir is endorsed similarly by the Hindu-influenced imagination of the territory as Mother India (“Bharat Mata”), a “sacralised geo-body - an embodiment of a mother goddess - and of its parts as ‘atoot ang’ (unbreakable part)”, which is often cited as a pretext for the indivisibility of the Indian nation according to Rai, rendering the demand for Kashmir’s independence sacrilegious (14). Sankaran Krishna furthers the analysis of territory as body by considering the “cartographic anxiety” in Jawaharlal Nehru’s recollection of Partition, that “what was broken up which was of the highest importance was something very vital and that was the body of India” (Nehru 247). Krishna argues that this anxiety is a “facet of a larger postcolonial anxiety: of a society suspended forever in the space between the ‘former colony’ and ‘not-yet- nation’”, which is countered by the “discursive production of India as a bounded, sovereign

entity” (508). This anxiety is projected according to him “in the space of desire called Kashmir” (Krishna 510). Kabir situates the threatened loss of Kashmir within this line of thought, suggesting that “the popular anthropomorphising of the map of India embodies the loss of Jammu and Kashmir, positioned at the nation’s ‘head’, as its ultimate loss of face”, the fear of which “conceals and reveals” the “desire for the Kashmir Valley” (Kabir 13). Kashmir is thus crucial not only to the imagination of the Self but also in relation to the Other, rendered as a desired territory into a source of levering power against the Other. Kabir further posits that Kashmir is simultaneously and, perhaps more importantly, “an ‘othered’ space within the postcolonial nation that has inherited the burden of colonial discourse”, as a result of which “the Valley can indeed be seen as the conceded (postcolonial) other” (15). Alternately, the othering of Kashmir in India can also be evaluated as a response to the loss of territory during the Partition through the creation of Pakistan. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin discuss the distinctly Indian motivation to facilitate recovery programmes for abducted women because it had “actually lost one part of itself to the creation of a Muslim homeland” (Menon and Bhasin 123). The “creation-by-amputation” to achieve “nationhood” punctured the cartographical imagining of pre-Partition India as an indivisible figure (Krishna 509). Khanna distinguishes between the psychoanalytic terms “mourning” and “melancholia”, both of which are highlighted as “responses to a loss, of a person, or indeed of something as abstract as an ideal, a country, or of liberty”. She clarifies that in melancholia, “the lost object is swallowed whole” and “the subject is effectively stuck with the lost object, and therefore begins criticising it” (Khanna 21-2). The memory of loss in the Indian imagination is thus perhaps concentrated in this region, a region with a contested boundary that offers the possibility still of usurping the Other, the lost part of the Self, and becoming whole again. With its contested boundary however, the territory also functions according to Kabir as an “open wound” reminiscent of Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory (Kabir 9): The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country - a border culture. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. (Anzaldúa 3) The language of trauma permeates these descriptions, not only in diction with the reference to wound but also in their emphasis on the unchanging and continuous state of transition. The unhealed remnant of the Partition is a state for which it never ended. In his discussion of

postcolonial trauma, Craps refers to the inadequacy of “post-traumatic stress disorder” in the South African context, where the trauma is instead “continuous” due to the “high levels of violence” (48). The trauma is continual too for a state suspended in post-1947 national imaginings of India and Pakistan, geographically turned into a violent landscape in which their anxieties about identity and nationhood play out, rendered into a space that cannot overcome 1947, that is not yet post-1947 at all. In addition to the cartographic feminising of territory as Mother India, the honour code indicates how women and land are further intertwined in the imagination. Khan summarises that during the Partition especially, women became “vessels of honour” and “shell-like repositories” of the identities of the masculine entities of male family relations, the community, and the nation-state (133-4). Menon and Bhasin reassert in their analysis of violence against women during Partition that “[t]he most predictable form of violence experienced by women, as women, is when the women of one community are sexually assaulted by the men of the other, in an overt assertion of their identity and a simultaneous humiliation of the Other by ‘dishonouring’ their women” (41). Violence was thus used against women as a tool by men of a community to assert power over the men, the community, and the nation of the Other. They assert that women function as “objects in male constructions of their own honour”, and that “[w]omen’s sexuality symbolises ‘manhood’” (43). In their pioneering analysis of survivor accounts of Partition violence, they explain that the different kinds of sexual violations denoted “specific symbolic meanings and physical consequences, and all of them treat[ed] women’s bodies as territory to be conquered, claimed or marked by the assailant” (43). Khan adds that the women “who survived were often humiliated and grossly scarred”, and reduced to mere “symbols of terror” (134). Jamwal and Suchismita focus on the trauma of women in the borderland region of Kashmir, asserting that they have “faced a history of repression, not just in the last 20 years but more than 60 years” as their “victimisation started when the borders were carved out in 1947-48” (69). The Partition thus exacerbated the underlying “cartographic anxiety” in India’s and Pakistan’s narratives of nationhood, and remains evident in their unyielding and unrelenting desire for Kashmir. The Line of Control is indeed nothing more, a de facto border accepted neither by the two states nor internationally, rendering it a volatile space that fuels this “cartographic anxiety” as much as it is a reminder of the past failure to maintain cartographic integrity. While the territory as Mother India was feminised, women’s bodies also underwent an antithetical territorialisation, as a result of which they were subject to violence and control to counter threats against territory or reinforce the seizure of territory. The two countries thus

remain aggressively defensive towards each other and these tensions are concentrated in the borderland region over which both incessantly exert force. Kashmir in imaginations of postcolonial nationhood thus ranges from being the neocolonial space within the postcolonial, a memory of the Other and an Other within the Self, a “territory of desire”, a geographical “open wound” for a people caught in an unending transitional phase of Partition (Kabir 14).

3 Theoretical Framework This thesis focuses on the presence of absences in the text, evaluating the absences that structure the proper names “Kashmira” and “Pachigam”, key historical and political terms, and the narrative voice, to suggest that absences are used to signify presence in the novel. The thesis suggests that this dichotomous nature extends to the tension within narration in the text, contending that content and form counter both the possibility and the impossibility of narration in traumatic sections in the novel. The theoretical framework first evaluates the focalising narrator and simultaneously charts the narrative organisation of the novel, as its multilinear and multi-perspectival structure requires clarification. Consequently, Saussure’s theory of the sign is outlined before an overview of Derrida’s deconstruction of Western logocentrism, the metaphysics of presence, and his study of proper names. The section concludes with a discussion of select aspects of trauma theory and the narration of trauma.

3.1 Narrative Structure: Perspective and Temporality The structure of the text is a complex model of multiple perspectives and voices incorporated into a multilinear narrative. The novel refers to numerous historical events of significance as outlined in the historical overview. It tracks the sociopolitical situation in Kashmir since the pre-1947 period up to the turn of the century, considering the consequences of historical events for different groups in Kashmir through its range of characters and the inclusion of their distinct perspectives. The setting shifts between Los Angeles, Kashmir, and Strasbourg. This thesis focuses on the depiction of the fictional village of Pachigam in Kashmir, the space where the lives of all the characters converge. Rushdie employs a third-person narrator who incorporates the voices and perspectives of the characters. The term “focalisation”, coined by Gérard Genette, a key theorist of narratology, is a useful starting point to differentiate “between the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator—or, more simply, the question who sees? and the question who speaks” in relation to Rushdie’s novel (Genette 186). Burkhard Niederhoff defines the term as “a selection or restriction of narrative information in relation to the experience and knowledge of the narrator, the characters or other, more hypothetical entities in the storyworld” (115). Genette’s linguistic choice of preposition is significant, as his use of the French “sur” [on] clarifies a key aspect that differentiates focalisation from the narrator. As Niederhoff recapitulates, “while a story is told from a particular point of view, a narrative focuses on

something. This preposition indicates the selection of, or restriction to, amounts or kinds of information that are accessible under the norms of a particular focalization” (Niederhoff 116). The third-person narrator in Rushdie’s novel thus focalises through the characters to foreground their varied perspectives. Through slight stylistic and linguistic aberrations, he signals towards the character that acts as focaliser. Genette further distinguishes between varying degrees of focalisation, two of which are crucial for understanding the fluctuation of the third-person narrator’s omniscience and ability to focalise in Shalimar the Clown. The first term [zero focalization] corresponds to what English-language criticism calls narrative with omniscient narrator and Pouillon ‘vision from behind,’ and which Todorov symbolizes by the formula Narrator > Character (where the narrator knows more than the character, or more exactly, says more than any of the characters knows). In the second term [internal focalization], Narrator = Character (the narrator says only what a given character knows); this is narrative with ‘point of view’ after Lubbock, or with ‘restricted field’ after Blin; Pouillon calls it ‘vision with.’ In the third term [external focalization], Narrator < Character (the narrator says less than the character knows); this is the ‘objective’ or ‘behaviorist' narrative, what Pouillon calls ‘vision from without’. (Genette 188-89) Rushdie’s narrator fluctuates between the “zero focalisation” and “internal focalisation”, primarily focalising through certain characters, offering their perspective of events, and displaying an awareness that is limited to their level of knowledge. However, the moments of zero focalisation are especially important in moments of traumatic memory, which this thesis takes as its focal point in the final chapter. The novel is split into five sections or chapters that are named after the four primary characters. The narrator is inclined towards focalising through the character named in the title, but the chapters also integrate other major and minor characters as focalisers. The relationship between the primary character in focus and the other characters can be understood in terms of a symbolic allegory that is repeated in the novel: There was the earth and there were the planets. The earth was not a planet. The planets were the grabbers. They were called this because they could seize hold of the earth and bend its destiny to their will. The earth was never of their kind. The earth was the subject. The earth was the grabbee. (45) The person named in the chapter title may be equated with the earth, whereas the other characters are similar to the planets that encircle and exert force on it. The narrator focalises

through the character named in the title, intimately exploring the character’s thoughts and emotions. By also focalising through the surrounding characters, the narrative incorporates an external portrayal and evaluation of events that affect the central figure. As each chapter vacillates between focalising through the primary character named in the title and other characters, the character after whom the chapter is named is henceforth referred to simply as the “focal character” to maintain clarity in an otherwise complex web of focalisers within a single chapter. The narrative structure embodies the celestial metaphor quoted above, as the other characters observe this focal character and their actions may affect them, exerting force like the other planets do on earth. The lives and choices of the novel’s numerous characters, despite often being separated by great physical distances, are depicted as suspended in a force field of influence and entangled in a complex multidirectional chain of causality. The temporal structure of the novel is as variable as the perspectives incorporated through the focalising narrator outlined above, and the novel is primarily structured in the form of a flashback. Titled after its male protagonist, the novel encloses the narratives of its many characters between introductory and concluding chapters named instead after a female character, dually named India and Kashmira by her two mothers. The introductory chapter begins with the assassination of Max Ophuls with his daughter Kashmira/India as the focal character. The following chapter delves into a flashback going back to the moment of the simultaneous birth of Kashmira/India’s biological mother Boonyi and her lover Shalimar. It follows their childhood romance with Boonyi serving as the focal character and concludes with the arrival of Max Ophuls alongside the disclosure of their forthcoming affair. The third chapter centres on Max as the focal character and his origins in Alsace, a borderland region similar to Kashmir, through an extensional flashback until it coincides with the concluding moment of the previous chapter, his arrival in Pachigam. The chapter also outlines the beginning of his relationship with his estranged wife, Peggy Rhodes, who becomes Kashmira/India’s adoptive mother. The following chapter figures Shalimar as the focal character, frustrated by his wife’s betrayal and susceptible to the call to arms by extremist Islamist groups appearing in the region. The novel finally circles back to Kashmira/India as a focal character and returns to the moment following her father’s assassination by Shalimar. The closing chapter describes her futile homecoming following the disclosure of her biological mother’s identity and continues with her return to Los Angeles. The novel ends inconclusively with a confrontation between Kashmira/India and Shalimar the assassin, both murderous and keen for vengeance.

3.2 Derrida and Deconstruction This section provides a brief overview of Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign, before elaborating on Jacques Derrida’s reading of Saussure, his definition of the term “différance”, and his study of the significance of proper names. It maintains a consistent underlying focus on the intertwined roles of presence and absence in the process of signification to return to the dichotomous phrase in the title of this thesis, which is analysed further in relation to the doubly-named Kashmira/India, the use of military and political terms, and the role of the narrator in the depiction of trauma in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown. The publication of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics marked a breakthrough in linguistics. He proposed that langue (language) was a “system of signs” in which each sign was made up of a “signifier” and a “signified”, “a sound-image” and “a concept” (Saussure 66). In addition, he “brackets the referent” according to Terry Eagleton’s analysis, separating the sign from what it refers to (84). Upon developing his theory further, he concluded that “in the linguistic system there are only differences, without positive terms” (Saussure 120). Jonathan Culler clarifies that if language is indeed a “system of differences”, “each [sign] is defined not by essential properties but by the differences that distinguish it from other signs”, further adding that signs are thus “not positive entities at all but effects of difference” (98-9). Eagleton additionally summarises that the “signified” was in turn the “product of the difference between two signifiers” (110). Saussure’s theory thus indicated the significance of differential relations as definitive of linguistic units, underlining an inherent lack as meaning is not contained within the unit itself. Derrida’s reading of Saussure, based on a critique of the metaphysics of presence and logocentrism underlying the tradition of Western philosophy in general, draws especially upon the emphasis on differential relations as formative to meaning. Eagleton explains that Western philosophy has been “logocentric” in that it has been “committed to a belief in some ultimate ‘word’, presence, essence, truth or reality which will act as the foundation of all our thought, language and experience” (113). Derrida concisely argues that logocentrism is “bound up in the determination of the being of the existent as presence” and challenges the notion of a centre defined by presence by dismantling the antithetical relationship underlying Saussure’s theory that opposes presence and absence (Of Grammatology 12). Julie Elaine Goodspeed-Chadwick summarises that Derrida “refute[s] Saussure’s rigid concept of the sign as a totality that meaningfully signifies through a pure signifier and a signified” but “approves of Saussure’s concept of difference as the source of linguistic value” (264-6). Firstly, Derrida criticises the binary underlying Saussure’s splitting of the sign into

the signifier and the signified as it also institutes an irreversible hierarchy as constitutive of this relation, as the signifier “signifier” cannot exist without a signified. He writes that “the signifier will never by rights precede the signified, since it would no longer be a signifier and the signifier ‘signifier’ would have no possible signified” (Of Grammatology 324). Instead of the singular correspondence between signifier and signified as a hierarchical binary where “presence” is ascribed to the “signified”, he argues that language is a system of differences in which “no element can function as a sign without relating to another element”, in which “[n]othing, either in the elements or in the system, is anywhere simply present or absent” (Positions 26). Clarifying Derrida’s emphasis on the relational structure of signs, Goodspeed- Chadwick insists that he claims “we can only know a chain of signs, not a presence” (264-5). Eagleton reiterates that meaning is thus “the spin-off of a potentially endless play of signifiers”, “scattered or dispersed along the whole chain of signifiers”, “never fully present in any one sign alone, but is rather a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence together”. He concludes thus that “the meaning of a sign is a matter of what it is not” as a result of which “meaning is not immediately present in a sign” and is “always in some sense absent from it too” (110-2). Derrida’s famous statement from Of Grammatology that “there is no outside-text” [il n’y a pas de hors-texte] is also indicative of the interplay of presence and absence. Amanda Bell concisely elaborates on this in her suggestion that “[w]ithout an outside of language, meaning can never be completely present” and that “we are separated from signification by the necessitated absence of linguistic forms” (2). Manfred Frank’s summary indicates that this chain of signs or signifiers does not have to be “finite” and emphasises the possibility of “new contextual constellations”, elaborating Derrida’s conclusion that the “boundaries of the semantic identity of a term are functions of an open system of permanent new differentiations, without the possible presence of a term with itself” (227). Culler similarly states that “meaning is context-bound but context is boundless” (128). Meaning therefore depends on what is “outside” the text, on context and on relations, such that it is no longer “outside-text” but is instead brought into close dialogue with the text itself for the production of meaning. Derrida’s use of the terms “différance” and “trace” further elaborate his critique of the metaphysics of presence that indicate the logocentric strain in Saussure’s theory of signification, and revaluate the relationship between presence and absence in the process of signification. It is first necessary to briefly examine his definition of the sign as a “deferred presence”:

The sign is usually said to be put in the place of the thing itself, the present thing, “thing” here standing equally for meaning or referent. The sign represents the present in its absence. It takes the place of the present. When we cannot grasp or show the thing, state the present, the being-present, when the present cannot be presented, we signify, we go through the detour of the sign. We take or give signs. We signal. The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence. (Positions 9) Derrida’s assertion is thus that the sign is representative for a presence but signals its absence, that signification itself is a process of signalling towards an absent presence. On the basis of this, he defines “différance” as the “playing movement that ‘produces’ - by means of something that is not simply an activity - these differences, these effects of difference” (Positions 11). Through the distinctive spelling of différance, Derrida implies that both difference and deferral are intertwined in the process of signification. He clarifies the dual axes in terms of temporality and spatiality, stating that the “two apparently different values of différance are held together in Freudian theory: to differ as discernibility, distinction, separation, diastem, spacing; and to defer as detour, relay, reserve, temporisation” (Margins of Philosophy 18). He further adds that différance is “a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence” and is instead “the systematic play of differences, of traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements relate to one another” (Positions 27). Later in the work, he elaborates on the term “trace”, indicating that it is “not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no site - erasure belongs to its structure” (Positions 24). Eagleton states in simpler terms that it is possible to “detect in each sign, even if only unconsciously, traces of other words which it has excluded in order to be itself” (111). To consolidate the idea of the absence that thus is inherently constitutive of a word, Derrida additionally outlines the concept of the “supplement”, which Culler summarises as an “inessential extra, added to something complete in itself, but … added in order to complete, to compensate for a lack in what was supposed to be complete in itself” (103). To briefly recapitulate, meaning is not inherently contained within linguistic elements but arises instead through différance. Derrida defines différance as the interplay of differing and deferring of meaning based on context that produces the differential relations between linguistic elements, while traces are the remnants of what is absent against which a presence or a meaning is identified. A signifier will hence contain traces of absent signifiers and signifieds from which it differs and defers, implying that neither signifier nor signified are

merely present or absent as what is present is marked by traces of what is absent, affected by the “spacing” and “temporising” of différance. Derrida also considers the status of proper names by drawing upon différance and traces. He identifies “the problem of the proper name as word, name, the question of its place in the system of a language”, which according to the analytic tradition of philosophy “ought to have no meaning, ought to be a pure reference; but since it is a word caught up in the network of a language, it always begins to signify” such that “[s]ense contaminates this non-sense … the name is not supposed to signify anything, yet it does begin to signify” (Signéponge 146). He explicates that like any other signs, the name is “always caught in a chain or a system of differences” and “does not escape spacing” (Of Grammatology 89). Geoffrey Bennington elaborates that “what is called by the generic ‘proper noun’ must function … in a system of differences: this or that individual rather than another and thus marked by the trace of these others, in a classification” (105). Barry Stocker recapitulates that according to Derrida there is no “indivisible unity between sign and bearer” and instead the “proper name is where the bearer is absent as absent from the word sign that exists in the spacing and difference that conditions all signs” (56). Proper names are thus caught in a system of differences, affected equally by différance and by the traces of absences, and signify despite only being intended to refer, attributes that Derrida emphasises are a signal of their impropriety. Derrida additionally writes of the double bind that characterises the proper name, in the “play … between singularity and generality” (Wolfreys 18). Roffe summarises that a proper name “calls out at once for recognition (translatability) and for singularity and a status of absolute non-appropriation (non-translatability)” (108). A proper name is “uniquely tied to a unique object, but it must be a common name with the features of any name, so it is naming at its most ambiguous point”, which leads to the intriguing conclusion that the “conditions of possibility are necessarily the conditions of impossibility” (Stocker 56). Furthermore, the proper name “operates improperly” as it can be used in “the subject’s absence or death” and is “not dependent on [their] being or presence”, thus implying that “[i]ts use erases its propriety”, its singularity (Wolfreys 18). The proper name is ascribed to a person but their propriety, their ownership of it, is countered by its autonomous capacity to signify their presence in or despite their absence. The “most present of absences”, taken from Rushdie’s novel as the title of this thesis, is death in the context of the sentence in which the phrase is used. Silvano Facioni briefly yet poignantly mentions that “within the proper noun the possibility of an absence always gleams, of a non-noun, of death (maybe doubled and confirmed by the resurrection with another name, with another story)” (132). However, as this

thesis contends, there are numerous absences that are jarringly present in the novel, that are indeed made present by rhetorical absences.

3.3 Trauma Theory and Narrative (Im)possibilities Trauma theory draws upon Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of trauma as a psychological wound. His concept of neurosis based on childhood trauma developed to accommodate the experiences of the war neuroses of First World War veterans who returned with “shell shock” (Freud 32). Consequently, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recognised based on the experiences of veterans of the Vietnam War and was included in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), which defined it as the response to an event “outside the range of human experience” (236). Influenced by the Yale School of Deconstruction, Cathy Caruth extends the analysis of trauma in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. She defines it as an “overwhelming experience of sudden and catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11). Theorists since have nuanced definitions of trauma based on other traumatic experiences, and theories of continuous forms of trauma are mentioned in the historical overview in Chapter 2. Three aspects of trauma theory are especially relevant in relation to this thesis, and more specifically in relation to the discussion of narration in Chapter 6, namely the collapse of witnessing underlying an experience of trauma, belatedness, and dissociation. Dori Laub outlines the “collapse of witnessing” in relation to the Holocaust, explaining that not only was “history taking place with no witness” due to the deaths of the victims, but “it was also the very circumstance of being inside the event that made unthinkable the very notion that a witness could exist” (“An Event Without a Witness” 81). He elaborates further with references to the interplay of absence and presence, echoing Derrida’s discussions as discussed in the previous section. Laub emphasises that the victim “testifies to an absence […] an event that has not yet come into existence”, that “has not been truly witnessed yet, not been taken cognisance of” (57). Felman adds that “testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not yet settled into understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference” (5). The emphasis in both explanations is on an excess, an overwhelming experience, an absence or a lack of clarity in attempts to retell.

The victim may thus be absent as a result of death, but a victim may also be absent in the event itself, in that it is a missed experience that must be integrated belatedly due to its overwhelming effect. Caruth translates Freud’s term Nachträglichkeit as “belatedness” and explains that the traumatic “event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (Trauma: Explorations in Memory 5). This belatedness is a structural aspect of language as discussed in the previous section, as it gathers and acquires multiple meanings in retrospect. Furthermore, theorists outline that this belatedness may cause dissociation. Gary Rodin, Janet de Groot, and Harold Spivak argue that the definition of dissociative disorders in DSM-IV as a “disruption in the usual integration of functions such as consciousness, memory, identity, and perception of the environment” fails to include the possibility that it “may represent an attempt to manage overwhelming emotional experience”, and thus add to the official definition that it is also a “coping mechanism by which individuals attempt to or remove themselves from an emotional experience that is too intense or distressing” (161). Circling back to Laub’s analysis of witnessing, the possibility and impossibility of narration is a crucial element of discussion in trauma theory especially in relation to the representation of trauma in literature. Laub outlines different levels of witnessing before suggesting the tension between the “imperative to tell” and the “impossibility of telling”, of providing a sufficient testimony that enables one to witness their own trauma and for their trauma to be witnessed by others. He elaborates that the “imperative to tell” is perceived as an infinite task, in that “[t]here are never enough words or the right words, there is never enough time or the right time, and never enough listening or the right listening to articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory and speech” (78). Roger Luckhurst elaborates that this frustration with narration is incorporated in literature often in the form of “fractured Modernist forms”, which “mimic narrative possibility disarmed by trauma” (81). This emphasis on the inability to tell appropriately due to the inherent ambiguities and inadequacies of language is apparent in literary works that incorporate formal linguistic absences, struggles, or failures.

4 Proper Names and Absences: Kashmira/India and Her Mothers Rushdie’s novel persistently draws attention to the names that characters are given, the names they choose for themselves, and the meanings of these names. Krishna Sen states cursorily that “[t]he political connotations of all these names and events are self-evident”, but this thesis contends that they lend themselves to further analysis especially from a deconstructive point of view (86). The female protagonist is named doubly by her biological and adoptive mothers after two places of significance, Kashmir and India. The names that she acquires carry absences due to multiple relational differences that separate her, despite being one of the bearers, from her own names as they also stand for territorial spaces. This chapter first considers her dissatisfaction with the name “India”, the only name that she is first aware of, and consequently evaluates the discernible absences of Kashmir and her Kashmiri mother. Furthermore, her biological mother’s name not only invites but necessitates an evaluation of Kashmira/India’s relationship to her mother and land together. Before delving into an analysis of Kashmira/India and the absences enfolded in her names, a clarification regarding the usage of names in the thesis is necessary. The various motivations behind the names given to characters render it difficult to give precedency to one name over another. In this thesis, the majority of the characters are referred to by the name with which they identify best or are referred to most commonly in the novel. The exception is the female protagonist in focus who is referred to as the hybrid “Kashmira/India”. The trajectory of her evolving names is tracked in this chapter in more detail. Opening with a chapter titled “India” and closing with “Kashmira”, the novel encloses the sections named after other key characters between the portrayal of this doubly-named focal character, torn between these two names, identities, and origins that are ascribed to her by her two conflicting mothers. She is named after India and Kashmir, two geographical entities that have historically been suspended in tension as explicated in the historical overview but are unified symbolically by being attributed to one person in the text, who is intriguingly named after yet ironically distant from both, harbouring these territorial absences within her own presence.

4.1 “India” Kashmira/India is the daughter of Max Ophuls and Boonyi Kaul Noman. She acquires the name “Kashmira Ophuls” from them but remains estranged from it just as she does from both parents until later in her life. She spends her childhood instead with her adoptive mother Peggy Rhodes, Max’s estranged wife, who first decides to name her “India Ophuls”, a name

that would answer “the question of origins” (Shalimar 211). It is revealed later in the novel that she is instead “baptised India Rhodes”, in denial of the name of the father, of the name given to her by her biological mother, and by extension in denial of both parents themselves (344). The choice of “India” is presumed to be a reference to her stepmother’s work with Indian orphanages while “[t]he Rumpelstiltskin truth, that she had disposed of a husband and taken his love child in his place, was so strange that nobody suspected it” (344). Kashmira/India recalls how Peggy first informed her that she was adopted, in her distinctly nervous and fragmented speech structures: I’m very sorry, the Grey Rat told her, but, hmmm, hmmm, I don’t know the name of the woman who bore you. Hang it! I believe she died shortly after you were born. The identity of the father is likewise not confirmed. (346) Peggy hesitantly and cryptically provides what is only a false explanation, concealing the names and identities of her parents despite her knowledge. India chooses to adopt “Ophuls” the name of her father as her last name when she establishes a relationship with him, but remains estranged from the name “India”. She explicitly acknowledges her dissatisfaction towards it, explaining that “[s]he did not like this name”, that it “still felt wrong to her, it felt exoticist, colonial, suggesting the appropriation of a reality that was not hers to own, and she insisted to herself that it didn’t fit her anyway, she didn’t feel like an India” (5-6). The formal addition of double inverted commas around the name indicate that she dissociates herself from it as the narrator is focalising through her in this section. Furthermore, the indefinite article preceding “India” suggests that it momentarily behaves like a common noun. Kashmira/India is thus intuitively aware of the inadequacy and inaccuracy of “India” as a proper name for her. The dissociation is further apparent when she meets Shalimar, as she feels that in his attempt to touch her “he hoped to reach out to someone else”, “[a]s if she were just a representative, a sign” (13). She additionally complains to her father that the name was “pretty much a burden”, “[t]his foreign country [he] made [her] carry around on [her] shoulders” (14). The proper name “India Rhodes” indicates impropriety on multiple levels, beyond the level of impropriety in proper names that Derrida suggests. By naming her after a territory, her stepmother already reduces her ownership of the name as it is a proper noun already ascribed to another entity, thus cancelling the singularity that is expected of a proper name. Furthermore, the use of a proper name is intended to substitute for an absence and the name “India” for Kashmira/India is a signal for the territory first, rather than a mark that identifies her. It is additionally improper as she remains physically, emotionally, and culturally distant

from the territory that the name represents, growing up in Los Angeles instead with her English stepmother and French father, a distance that she expresses herself in the aforementioned quotations. Her proper name, by belonging already to another existent entity, signifies and refers to an externality, which causes her to inversely perceive herself as an externality to the proper name. She thus becomes a carrier for an absence that is constantly present, ascribed to her as it is in her very name. In addition to the aspects of impropriety that Kashmira/India recognises in the aforementioned quotes, the name is also improper as it is not the name she should have acquired from her parents. Kashmira/India acknowledges and struggles with their absence, their physical absence, the absence of their “names” in that she is initially unaware of their identities, and the absence of her other name. These absences and the denial of their names are inscribed instead into the name “India”, given to her by her stepmother who forces her own name upon a daughter who is not hers, a daughter who resists it. The traces of the absences, the absent names, the absent parents, and the absent territory are marked as present absences underlying the name “India” that result in Kashmira/India feeling estranged from her own name. The différance that obliquely conditions the name “India” lies in these present absences, the play of differences between what is present and absent, that are indicative of the meanings that are differed and deferred in the use of this name.

4.2 The Absences of Kashmir and the Kashmiri Mother The discomfort and dislike towards “India” is voiced in the introductory pages alongside Kashmira/India’s acute awareness of the absence of her biological mother Boonyi, her Kashmiri mother, and therefore of Kashmir. It surfaces naturally as part of the subject of her mother and her origins, which emerges abruptly as she shares her paranoia about an “intruder” in her bedroom as the cause of her disturbed sleeping patterns. There was no intruder. The intruder was an absence, a negative space in the darkness. She had no mother. Her mother died giving her birth: the ambassador’s wife had told her this much, and the ambassador, her father, had confirmed it. Her mother had been Kashmiri, and was lost to her, like paradise, like Kashmir, in a time before memory. (That the terms Kashmir and paradise were synonymous was one of her axioms, which everyone who knew her had to accept.) (4) The narrative reveals explicitly that the intruder is psychological rather than physical. The absence of her mother and Kashmir are personified as an intruder, as a presence that disturbs Kashmira/India. The inclusion in brackets of the “synonymous” nature of the words

“Kashmir” and “paradise” is a supplement, an “inessential extra” in brackets that is added to “compensate for a lack” in the elaboration of the significance of Kashmir for Kashmira/India (Culler 103). The information is relegated to brackets to structurally suggest that it is an “axiom”, so unwaveringly acknowledged by her and those around her that it does not need justification. While she is aware of Kashmir as the geographical origin of her mother, she is unaware of the territory’s relationship with the name given to her. The name “Kashmira” is only revealed to the reader in the concluding pages of the chapter titled after Max as focal character, which detail the birth of Kashmira/India and Peggy’s forceful adoption of her. The section serves as the only moment of contact between Boonyi and her daughter, but Kashmira/India does not learn about the name or her mother’s identity until later in her life and later in the text. On the other hand, the reader is aware of the name as a pregnant absence of information as much as it is a supplement to Kashmira/India’s intuitive realisation of the importance of Kashmir, of paradise. Kashmira/India’s awareness of the absence despite her unawareness of the significance of its name signals towards the palpable deference and difference of meaning as “Kashmira” is not yet associated with her. Kashmira/India remains equally unaware of the existence of Boonyi, who Peggy falsely claims died during birth. It is the death of her mother that is the “most present of absences”, which is the context of the phrase used in the title of this thesis. The narrator adds that she struggles with her mother’s “deadness”, which was “the worst and deadest kind” as her father had entombed her memory under a pyramid of silence”, and the “deadly dead woman her mother had become was lost in the ambassador’s silence, had been erased by it” (18). The absence of Kashmira/India’s mother through the concealment of her name and the false account of her death is a deliberate erasure to the degree of death by her father and stepmother. Kashmira/India’s identity and origins, even when they are being slowly disclosed, are still policed, manipulated, and denied by Peggy and Max. For Kashmira/India, her birth mother is a markedly totalising absence without a proper name to even mark her absence at first. Despite this, she is the “most present of absences”, exerting force despite and perhaps through this absence on her daughter Kashmira/India. She resists the hegemonic narratives of the stepmother and father, maintaining the “synonymous” nature of “Kashmir and paradise” as an “axiom” and remembering her Kashmiri mother, and inverts the hegemonic relation by rhetorically assigning more importance to “Kashmir” over “India”, and her Kashmiri mother over Peggy as follows. The force with which Peggy attempts to (re)name Kashmira/India is countered as Peggy is structurally stripped of power and agency by being rendered nameless during the sections

with Kashmira/India as focal character. There are many options of reference as she is born Margaret Rhodes, nicknamed “Peggy”, “Grey Rat” by the Germans for her “elusiveness” in the resistance movement during the Second World War, and “Peggy-Mata, mother of the motherless” in India for her work with orphanages. The opening chapter “India” excludes Peggy from the narrative save the brief, unsympathetic, and nameless acknowledgement of her as “the woman who had not been her mother, the buttoned woman who had raised her in the aftermath of scandal” (15). In the final chapter “Kashmira”, she is described similarly and relegated to brackets, as though Kashmira/India would rather not mention her at all. The narrative thus formally reinforces Kashmira/India’s perspective that Peggy was “the woman who was not her mother, the woman who did not give her life but gave her her name, the name she did not like” (341). She is rendered nameless and “not-mother” by the daughter whose name and mother she conceals through this linguistic vengeance that inverts the power dynamic and constitutes a symbolic counter-suppression of the suppressor herself. To summarise the trajectory of Kashmira/India’s nominal changes thus far, Kashmira/India is raised as “India” in a city, country, and culture that are devoid of Indian as well as Kashmiri elements. Yumna Siddiqi describes her thus as a “largely deracinated” figure herself, suspended physically and psychically between her multiple origins - India and Kashmir from her biological mother, France from her father, England from her mother, Los Angeles as the city where she is raised (224). She is named instead after territories, a nominal grounding that attempts to ascribe origins to a figure who transcends such a singular spatial root. Kashmira/India as encapsulated in the hybrid that her two names necessitate is perhaps a borderland herself, distanced and marginalised from her own name and the territory that it refers to. She is raised first by her stepmother who conceals the identity of her biological parents and later her father who conceals the identity of her biological mother. Kashmira/India’s mother is depicted namelessly and falsely as dead in their accounts, which is formally reversed as her presence is more strongly acknowledged than the presence of her stepmother, who Kashmira/India renders nameless instead. Kashmira/India expresses dissatisfaction towards the name “India” but an intuitive appreciation of the significance of “Kashmir”, before she learns that it is the root of the name given by her biological mother after which she adopts it, as is evident in the nominal transition to “Kashmira” in the final chapter of the novel. The name “India” is pregnant with the absence of “Kashmira”, usurping the name that she is given by her biological mother. It withholds traces, signalling towards the names and the meanings that are different and deferred, towards some of the “most present of absences”, the mother and the territories that both names refer to.

The narrative repeatedly draws attention to the absences of the name “Kashmira”, of Kashmir, and of her Kashmiri mother that Kashmira/India experiences as invasively present. Krishna Sen’s discussion of her mother’s name is an additional point of significance in the degrees of separation and absences that Kashmira/India perceives. Like many of the characters in the novel, Kashmira/India’s biological mother is known by her adopted name “Boonyi”. However, she is first named “Bhoomi”, defined in the novel as “earth”, which is supplemented by Boonyi’s alternative unromantic definition of it as “mud and dirt and stone” (46). The proper name derives from a common noun that is translatable, similar to Derrida’s own discussion of “pierre” [rock] the common noun and “Pierre” the proper noun. As Derrida writes, the proper name is affected by spacing and caught up in a chain of differences, one of which lies between “bhoomi” as a common noun and “Bhoomi” as the person’s name. The root in a common noun effaces the propriety of a proper name, and the traces of absent meanings deriving from the common noun exert influence on the evaluation of a name as a trope for a fictional character. Krishna Sen’s etymological analysis adds that “bhoomi” is a common noun that is a “Sanskrit homonym for janmabhoomi (the land of one’s birth or ‘desh’)” (85). Furthermore, “bhoomi” is also a constituent of a commonly used compound “matrubhoomi”, meaning “motherland”. As a signifier, the meanings of “bhoomi/Bhoomi” are entangled in a chain of signifiers that link it to land of origin, or motherland, and her specific mother, which is but a perfunctory list of a theoretically infinite chain. The forceful use of the name “India” despite her explicit dissatisfaction is traced with the absences of the name “Kashmira” that is denied to her, of Kashmir and her Kashmiri mother, of “matrubhoomi” and “Bhoomi”. Furthermore, the intertwining of territory and female encapsulated within the name “Bhoomi” resonates with the cartographic imagining of India as a female body, a goddess, as outlined in the historical overview. Kashmira/India is severed from the female body and the feminised land, both Bhoomi and “matrubhoomi”, mother and motherland, absences that are invasively present for Kashmira/India, who refers to them as specifically as is linguistically possible without names. From the perspective of Boonyi too, both Kashmir and Kashmira/India inherently carry the traces of each other’s absence. After Peggy takes the newborn Kashmira/India from her, the reader follows Boonyi on her journey back to Pachigam as she “repeated the magic mantra to herself, over and over, There is no Kashmira, there is only Kashmir” (219). The erasure of Kashmira/India is significant here as it reiterates the impropriety of “Kashmira” as a name for her, that it cannot belong to her or refer to her as it signifies another differential identity. The absences of Kashmir and Kashmira/India are mutually exclusive as one of the two is always

present for Boonyi while the other is always absent. Boonyi names her daughter “Kashmira” for the home that she is distant from, to substitute the absence of a territory with a name that is already a substitute for an absence as Derrida argues, by virtue of being a proper name. She thus renders Kashmira/India into a surrogate for absences that Kashmira/India herself does not know and cannot remove, present as they are in her very name. Between Kashmir and Kashmira/India, the presence of one is traced by the absence of the other, leaving both marked by the absence that is pervasive due to the shared names.

4.3 The Deaths of Boonyi After learning of the name “Kashmira” and the name of her mother’s village “Pachigam” Kashmira/India embarks on a trip to India in a futile attempt of homecoming, to fill the absence of her mother and of Kashmir as a present “intruder”. She returns only to discover remnants of Pachigam and realise that her mother had been alive but has now died. Her mother and Pachigam become in this instance the “most present of absences”, exacerbated as she returns to the geographical space of their existence in a section that performs the meaning of Derrida’s “spacing”, only to find absences abound. The presence that she yearned to find were spatially and temporally constricted to an elusive present that has already passed and left in its space absences galore. The multiple symbolic deaths and the ultimate death that Boonyi endures are dramatically concentrated into a single page in the final chapter “Kashmira” with the focal character as Kashmira/India. She learns of the Pachigami villagers who “treated [Boonyi] like a ghost” when she returned after her affair with Max, how they murdered her with “signatures and seals”. Meanwhile, Peggy “killed her mother with a lie, killed her when she was still alive, and her father had joined in the lie so he was her killer too”. She concludes that Boonyi’s exile in the hut was a “long period of living death while death circled her waiting for its time and then came in the guise of a clown”, referring to Shalimar with the epithet that is in the title of the novel itself. The realisation of these symbolic deaths appears as an incessant and recurring trauma that belatedly echoes Kashmira/India’s first separation from Boonyi, with the oscillation between “alive” and “dead” repeated until neither can be defined against the other. Kashmira/India’s inability to process the life and death of Boonyi is palpable in this repetition and the consequent circularity of her concluding one-line summary, that “she had believed her mother to be dead when in fact she had been alive and then believed her mother to be alive when she was already dead and now, finally, she had had to accept that her dead

mother was dead, dead for the last time, dead in such a way that nobody could kill her any more” (367). The repetition of “dead” in the context of symbolic deaths pushes the term to the point of redundancy by the time it is supposed to signify her bodily death. Boonyi’s symbolic deaths reinvigorate the term instead with additional meanings and contexts, and it seems to collapse with the traces of these meanings when it is expected to singularly signify bodily death. Kashmira/India’s futile attempt at homecoming concludes in a land devoid of the people she is in search of, and echoes Boonyi’s homecoming to Kashmir without Kashmira/India. Boonyi and Kashmira/India thus spend their lives perpetually missing each other, separated physically and emotionally, unaware of the other’s life but acutely aware of the other’s absence to the point that it is as tangible as a presence. In conclusion, the Derridean différance conditions the name “India” that is ascribed to Kashmira/India by her adoptive mother, “the woman who was not her mother” (341). There are multiple facets of its impropriety as discussed but especially in that it conceals, usurps, and threatens to erase the name that is given to her by her biological mother. As a name, it is pregnant with absences that it attempts to erase, and attempts to define itself against and without. Furthermore, it is the name of a territory that she is severed from, which is also true for the name “Kashmira” given to her by her birth mother Boonyi. The names do not belong to her, they signify the territories instead of referring to her, and she is removed physically and emotionally from what they already signify. As the only accurate information she has about her mother is that she was from Kashmir, Kashmira/India maintains that it is of significance to her despite being unaware of its relation to the name given to her by her birth mother. The absence of the territory and of her mother are experienced as intrusive in an explicit metaphor. In the context of the sentence in the novel, it is the death of Kashmira/India’s mother that is described as the “most present of absences”. However, the death of the mother is not at first the literal death of her mother Boonyi as her mother remains alive for the majority of the time that Kashmira/India believes her dead. It is instead an originary lack, both in relation to mother and motherland, that pervades her everyday life as a presence of great magnitude. Kashmir additionally also carries the trace of Kashmira/India’s absence as the name is ascribed to her. It is an absence that is as palpably present for her mother Boonyi as hers is for Kashmira/India. Boonyi returns to the land without the surrogate she had created and named in its absence, and Kashmira/India returns to same territory to find her mother, “the most present of absences”, only to learn of her mother’s multiple symbolic and final bodily deaths. As soon as there is the possibility of presence, it is lost to death, to

absence, in a deafening echo of the deconstructivist oscillation between presence and absence, such that there is always neither and always both.

5 A Deconstructivist Approach to Political and Military Terms The anxiety about language and the meanings of political and military terms of great historical significance as manifest in Khan’s analysis extends to a rhetorical deconstruction of certain terms in Rushdie’s novel. This chapter contends that these words, like the terms in Khan’s analysis of the Partition and the names of characters in the novel as discussed in the previous chapters, incorporate a crucial absence within them as signifiers and are unable to do justice to the lived realities of the characters, the experiences that constitute the corresponding signifieds. Rushdie spotlights the terms “Hindu and Muslim”, removing the binary between them through and within “Kashmiriyat”, “integral”, and “azadi” [freedom]. Through a close reading of passages that employ similar rhetorical techniques, this chapter elaborates on the deconstructive logic through which these sections evaluate, challenge, and reinvigorate the meanings of political and military terms. Différance is performed through the inclusion of meanings that are different and deferred, as Rushdie depicts multiplicity in perspectives and lived realities to challenge the fallacies of hegemonic institutional narratives.

5.1 Hindus, Muslims, and “Kashmiriyat” Rushdie roots his novel in nostalgia for the pre-1947 state of inter-religious harmony, before the “politicisation of religion” in the years leading up to 1947 (Khan 34). The narrator explains that “[t]he words Hindu and Muslim had no place in their story”, emptying them if only momentarily of the gravity they gained in the years not only leading up to 1947, but also in the post-1947 period. The narrator adds poignantly that “these words were merely descriptions, not divisions”. Two linguistic choices are of special interest in this explanation. The past tense “were” indicates immediately that the situation and therefore their meanings have since changed, and that the narrator, in acknowledging such a temporal development, is not bound to the narrative present. By referring to “Hindu” and “Muslim” initially as mere “words”, the narrator creates a rift between the terms as signifiers and the multiplicity of lived realities that have since come to constitute the meanings of these terms as the signifieds. Consequently, the narrator claims that they were “descriptions” rather than “divisions”, implying that the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” could function as both. As words, they are affected by spacing, as a result of which their meanings are deferred until the context is known and can differ as the context changes with time. In this case, the pair of words encapsulates the range of difference in meaning due to such spacing. While one meaning is realised, the term remains marked by the trace of the absent meanings. The narrator continues

that “[t]he frontiers between the words, their hard edges, had grown smudged and blurred” (57). The words are disambiguated as signifiers from their meanings and implications in this metaphor, presented in the language of topography that resonates with the geographical pre- 1947 frontiers that turned into borderlands. The terms are additionally weighed down by their own history of significance as an overwhelming motivation for the Partition on the basis of two identity groups. The terms “Hindu” and “Muslims” are employed and textually discussed with an awareness of the change and evolution of their meanings, albeit in a simple spectrum from “descriptions” to “divisions”. The traces of their weighty pre-1947 and post-1947 pasts become the “most present of absences” that strain the superficial and momentary reference to these terms as what they once were, mere words. The pre-1947 state of inter-religious harmony is included as a fundamental aspect in the novel’s depiction of “Kashmiriyat”, the religiously intertwined culture of the state that is maintained after 1947. An extended section elaborates how Pyarelal, Boonyi’s father, expresses appreciation and pride towards Kashmiriyat. ‘Just consider for a moment!’ cried Pyarelal. ‘Today our Muslim village, in the service of our Hindu maharaja, will cook and act in a Mughal - that is to say Muslim - garden, to celebrate the anniversary of the day on which Ram marched against Ravan to rescue Sita. What is more, two plays are to be performed: our traditional Ram Leela, and also Budshah, the tale of a Muslim sultan. Who tonight are the Hindus? Who are the Muslims? Here in Kashmir, our stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes.’ (72-73) The use of “Hindu” and “Muslim” in this passage corresponds historically to the immediate period after Partition, as the invasion of the kabailis coincides with this performance. The questions levied do not deny the significance of the terms as “divisions” but counter them with the example of Kashmir where their “hard edges” were still “smudged and blurred” (57). The reader’s knowledge of the history of sociopolitical tensions and violence that are now almost synonymous with Kashmir imbues the depiction of a pre-1947 state of nostalgia and harmony with a distressing irony, exacerbated by the fact that this supplementary information is not fiction. The defence of Kashmiriyat, of religious coalescence, directs the Pachigami villagers in their support for the marriage of Boonyi and Shalimar. As Sen suggests, their attempt to preserve Kashmiriyat is a “poignantly inadequate strategy of survival” as is their choice to place confidence in a marriage of adolescents to fulfil the task of preservation (88). Upon hearing about the initial rise of tensions between Hindus and Muslims, Shalimar’s parents

express concern that the “union” was perhaps a “falsely optimistic symbol” and “their fierce defence of that union was […] some kind of futile last stand” (131). Pachigam’s resistance unravels as the marriage of Boonyi and Shalimar, their symbolic stance against these “divisions” collapses. After the failure of the marriage and the deterioration of the sociopolitical situation, Boonyi’s father echoes in a similar statement that “[m]aybe Kashmiriyat was an illusion” and maybe “peaceful coexistence was an illusion” (239). Representative of the minority Hindu pandit community of Kashmir, he is perplexed by the “political circulars” he receives from “pandit organisations” that tell a “tale of abuse” according to which “Sikander the Iconoclast crushed Hindus the most” and “[t]he crimes of the fourteenth century needed to be avenged in the twentieth” (239). These circulars are an example of Siddiqi’s claim that the divisive ideologies are not “natural” or “given” in Rushdie’s text but are “produced when resources grow scarce and when outside forces intervene in local spaces” (221). To provide two brief supplementary examples, it is the extended family members who express discontent towards the inter-religious marriage of Boonyi and Shalimar and Bulbul Fakh who propagates radical Islamist beliefs in Pachigam. These divisive ideologies propagated by primarily outsiders reinstate the “hard edges” between the words “Hindu” and “Muslim” (57). The new relational positioning of these terms at odds with each other implies that the words are affected by lived realities elsewhere, such that the words must slowly start to incorporate the implications of these words as “divisions”. The terms as signifiers, in failing to represent the multiple signifieds in the form of the varied lived realities, belatedly acquire new meanings after context redefines them, exemplifying the conditioning effects of différance. The multiple implications become the “most present of absences” in the form of the fear, the threat, and the anticipation that the divisive nature of the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” could pervade Pachigam, and as history tells, does pervade the valley in which this fictional village is located. The nostalgic portrayal of Pachigam and its Kashmiriyat thus begins to unravel slowly as the sociopolitical situation outside the village begins to intrude and affect its internal sociopolitical situation as well as alter the villagers’ understanding of the terms “Hindu” or “Muslim”. The village is portrayed initially in isolation, unaffected at first by the swing of sociopolitical changes of decolonisation, freedom, and Partition that it seems to be a magical realist element itself. Siddiqi describes it as a “charmed place” and the “magical moments in the early part of the novel” as a “residue, a vestige of an earlier enchanted Kashmir” (221). The depiction of harmonious coexistence in Pachigam acquires a nostalgic dimension as it can be supplemented by the reader’s awareness of the sociopolitical tensions between India and

Pakistan, concentrated in this region, since 1947. Such an awareness is encouraged by the integration of key historical events into the fabric of Rushdie’s fictional narrative. Pachigam is representative not only of the village but also of Kashmir, rendered into a microcosmic portrayal of its sociopolitical history. It initially seems devoid of history but it begins to intrude and undo the peaceful situation, as the fictional narrative moves forward with history and incorporates a number of historical events discussed in the first chapter. The invasion of the Pakistan-backed tribals in October 1947 marks a turning point not only in Kashmiri history but also in the novel. The performances of Ram Leela and Budshah by the Pachigami villagers coincides with the historical invasion by the Pakistan-backed kabailis in the months following the announcement of Partition when the state was yet to declare its allegiance. The night also marks the birth of both Shalimar and Boonyi in the Shalimar Bagh. The inclusion of the event that historically anticipated that Kashmir would become an especially volatile post-1947 region in the text is the first intrusion of history in Pachigam, the magical realist and idyllic village. The terms “rumour”, “kabailis”, and “Pakistan” are evaluated in passages that rhetorically evoke deconstructive concerns about the différance that conditions words, and the last is studied in Khan’s aforementioned historical analysis of the Partition in a similar manner. While the events unfold in Shalimar Bagh, the narrator retreats to a non-focalising position to tangentially consider the word “Pakistan”, discussing how it was also “a former rumour, a phantom-word that had only had a real place attached to it for two short months” (86). The hyphenated “phantom-word” as a description is somewhat synonymous with the trace that Derrida suggests is engrained in words, absences that are present. Consequently, the section formally encapsulates the evolution of a “rumour”, and is worth quoting in its entirety for the remarkable assimilation of varied lived realities of history experienced as the present in literary form. ‘Pakistan has right on its side,’ said one rumour, ‘because here in Kashmir a Muslim people is being prevented by a Hindu ruler from joining their coreligionists in a new Muslim state.’ A second rumour roared back, ‘How can you speak of right, when Pakistan has unleashed this murderous horde upon us? […].’ A third rumour blamed the maharaja. ‘He’s been dithering for months. The Partition was two months ago! – And still he can’t decide who to join, Pakistan or India.’ A fourth butted in. ‘The fool! He has jailed Sheikh Abdullah, who has sworn off all communal politics, and is listening to that mullah, Moulvi Yusuf Shah, who obviously tilts towards Pakistan.’ Then many rumours clamoured at once. ‘Five hundred thousand tribals are attacking us, with Pak army soldiers

in disguise commanding them!’ – ‘They are only ten miles away!’ – ‘Five miles!’ – ‘Two!’ – ‘Five thousand women raped and murdered on the Jammu border!’ – ‘Twenty thousand Hindus and Sikhs slaughtered!’ – ‘In Muzaffarabad, Muslim soldiers mutinied and killed their Hindu counterparts and the officer in charge as well!’ – ‘Brigadier Rajender Singh, a hero, defended the road to Srinagar for three days with just 150 men!’ – 'Yes, but he is dead now, they slaughtered him.’ (86) A conversation between two anonymous people about their opinions regarding “Pakistan” grows as two other people chime in with their understanding of the complex political state in the immediate post-1947 period. As the sentences shorten, the passage gathers momentum and transforms into an explosion of run-on dialogue, amalgamating snippets of dialogue from an indefinite number of fragments of individual opinions or simply rumours of events. The multiplicity of opinions that emerge are representative of the confusion caused by the contradictory information and the overwhelming pace of change following the announcement of Partition. The historical belatedness of Kashmir’s accession is hinted amidst this depiction of the aftermath of confusion and indecision. The extended state of uncertainty portrayed in this passage challenges the reduction of the events of 1947 to India’s and Pakistan’s two respective dates of independence, as neither the violence nor the anxiety ceased with the passing of those dates, especially not for the state of Kashmir. The arbitrariness of the hurried formation of “Pakistan” and the overwhelmingly unexpected speed of change is further encapsulated in a comically fast transformation of its meaning in the text from a “phantom- word” to a “real place” to the source of the threat, the kabailis, within a single page. Furthermore, the hostility and friction between the terms “Hindu” and “Muslim” here starkly contrast Pyarelal’s praise of Kashmiriyat and further indicate the transformations of these terms into “divisions”, traced by the harmonious coexistence that the reader has witnessed in the introductory chapters when these words were mere “descriptions”.

5.2 “Integrity”, “integral”, and “integer” Colonel Tortoise is representative of another external force that exerts control over the territory of Kashmir and threatens the Kashmiriyat of Pachigam. By focalising through his voice, the novel explores and questions binaries in military discourse in passages that reflect a deconstructivist concern with the relational links between signifiers. He is most frequently referred to as Colonel Tortoise, a parody of his surname “Kachhwaha”, which is similar to the Hindi word for “tortoise”, “kacchwa”. In contrast, he chooses his first name “Hammir” as the basis of his “preferred nickname”, “Colonel Hammer”, an attempted “self-naming” that

“fail[s]” (94). Similarly, the army headquarters where he is based is not identified by geographical or historical markers but is named “Elasticnagar” instead by the local population for its “well-established tendency to stretch” (94). A mocking parody of how much the Indian forces expand in the region, the name is suffixed by the Hindi word for town, “nagar”, in a transparent pretence of authenticity. The narrator elaborates that “[a]s Elasticnagar grew - as soldiers flooded north into the valley and brought with them all the cumbersome material of war, guns and ammunition […] its need for land increased, and Colonel Kacchwaha requisitioned what he needed without explanation or apology” (95). This is a starting point for the subsequent analysis of the implications of the term “integral”, commonly used by the Indian government to uphold the nation’s inseparability. The passage is quoted below and words similar to “integrity” are italicised to emphasise the logic, or rather lack thereof in the Colonel’s reasoning. Elasticnagar was integral to the Indian effort and the Indian effort was to preserve the integrity of the nation. Integrity was a quality to be honoured and an attack on the integrity of the nation was an attack on its honour and was not to be tolerated. Therefore Elasticnagar was to be honoured and all other attitudes were dishonourable and consequently illegal. Kashmir was an integral part of India. An integer was a whole and India was an integer and fractions were illegal. Fractions caused fractures in the integer and were thus not integral. Not to accept this was to lack integrity and implicitly or explicitly to question the unquestionable integrity of those who did accept it. Not to accept this was latently or patently to favour disintegration. This was subversive. Subversion leading to disintegration was not to be tolerated and it was right to come down on it heavily whether it was of the overt or covert kind. The legally compulsory and enforceable popularity of Elasticnagar was thus a matter of integrity, pure and simple, even if the truth was that Elasticnagar was unpopular. When the truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that had to be given precedence. Not even the truth could be permitted to dishonour the nation. Therefore Elasticnagar was popular even though it was not popular. It was a simple enough matter to understand. (96) The italicised words are linked in Colonel Tortoise’s reasoning due to their apparent similarity. The syntactical pattern is to begin a sentence with a phrase or a word from the preceding sentence, in severance with its previously established context. The tangential digressions mimic mathematical problem-solving techniques, disguising themselves as step- by-step developments through the repetition of words that reveal themselves with closer analysis as illogical transitions. Siddiqi confirms the underlying “mock-mathematical logic”

evident not only in the explicit reference to “integer”, but also in the syntactical patterns in this passage (222). Her literary analysis further identifies the passage above as “tautological and paratactic” in which the “reasoning and pseudo-reasoning that the army uses to justify its violence” is mocked (222). Furthermore, the transitions rhetorically act out a language without différance in their explicit disregard for the differential relations that structure the system of language, yet simultaneously draw these differential relations between the terms that are linked in Colonel Tortoise’s logic to the fore as they cannot escape a reader. The differences between the terms are thus the “most present of absences”, in defiance of a passage that relies on their similarities as a defence for the stance it represents. Tracking the development from one to the next becomes futile as it indicates the redundancy of their connections. The passage deconstructs its own logic and ridicules the perspective it elucidates as well as the hegemonic institutional narrative that this perspective represents. Siddiqi discusses the “corruption” and “decay” of language thus indicated and “associate[d] with military aggression”, a decay that is rhetorically mocked in sections with Colonel Tortoise as the focaliser (222). The concluding sentence simply states that “[i]t was a simple enough matter to understand”, by which time the reference of the vague indiscriminate “it”, the subject, is ambiguously lost through the misleading trail of supposed relational connections in the passage. Despite the multiple elaborations on the implications of “integral”, the passage makes no progress in explicating the lived realities of the people affected by it.

5.3 “Freedom” As discussed in the historical overview, Khan delineates the worrying ambiguity of the word “swaraj”, which is similar to “azadi” [freedom], in the context of the demand for independence from British rule. “Azadi” appears in the text with its weight pre-1947 and post- 1947 past in the context of India and Pakistan, imbued with renewed relevance, expectations, and even greater ambiguity in the context of the novel. Varying opinions and understandings of “azadi” are depicted in the novel through the focalising narrator. The opinions of Boonyi’s father Pyarelal, Shalimar’s father Abdullah, Colonel Tortoise, and Shalimar’s radicalised brother Anees are presented not as simple oppositional binaries but as a spectrum of boundless anticipated meanings. Abdullah and Pyarelal, close friends though they are, seem unable to understand each other’s perspective on “azadi”. A parallel sentence separated with the simple conjunction “but” encapsulates their limited and polarised understanding of the word: “Abdullah had started mentioning the word azadi, but to Pyarelal the word didn’t mean

freedom but something more like danger, and it made a difficulty between the two old friends” (250). The emphasis on variation in that the word could represent anything from “freedom” to “danger” resonates with the aforementioned différance that conditions “Hindu” and “Muslim” such that they could range from “descriptions” to “divisions”, as well as the coalescence of “Kashmiriyat”. Any distinct use of the word is conditioned by différance in that its sense differs and is continuously deferred on the basis of the speaker and the context. Colonel Tortoise’s rejection of “azadi” appears in the text before the Pachigami villagers become acquainted with the idea of Kashmiri independence. He refers to it as a “moronic idea”, mocking it with a series of rhetorical questions concluding with the most condescending: “Why not demand freedom for one’s bedroom, or call one’s toilet a republic? Why not stand still and draw a circle around your feet and name that Selfistan?” (102) The reductive and self-cancelling logic of his analysis of “integral” is replaced here with patronising sarcasm. Coming from a member of a group from a post-1947 state with a collective memory so intimately familiar with the demand for freedom and independence, with its meaning and its implications, Colonel Tortoise’s comment is puzzlingly void of empathy and dramatises the other extremity of opinions arising from the hegemonic institutional narrative perpetuated by the military on “azadi”. As the narrator focalises through Anees, “azadi” is again mockingly discussed with a series of reductive representations of what is demanded and what it may mean. A tiny valley of no more than five million souls, landlocked, preindustrial, resource rich but cash poor, perched thousands of feet up in the mountains like a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant’s teeth, wanted to be free. Its inhabitants had come to the conclusion that they didn’t much like India and didn’t care for the sound of Pakistan. So: freedom! Freedom to be meat-eating brahmins or saint-worshipping Muslims […] Freedom to choose folly over greatness but to be nobody’s fools. Azadi! Paradise wanted to be free. (253) Despite the fact that Anees is the first character in the novel to join a militant group demanding freedom, this passage indicates his growing disillusionment about the implications of the word. The opening sentence of this textual discussion of “azadi” is nearly identical to Colonel Tortoise’s in its mockery for the demand for freedom, which is remarkable considering they fall under rivalling groups that exert force on the territory. Binaries regarding the definition of “azadi”, unavoidably familiar from its use in reference to the events of 1947 and the region’s colonial past, are challenged in the text. In the aforementioned comparison of the distinct perspectives of Abdullah and Pyarelal, the meaning of “azadi”

ranges from “freedom” to “danger”, but is reduced artificially to these two other signifiers. Furthermore, the mockery of the passages with Colonel Tortoise and Anees as focalisers indicate the many simple or unimportant implications of the word, as though the elusive present grand meaning, unaffected by différance, could be grasped amidst the absences. The fiction makes no claim to define “azadi” in any conclusive or exhaustive manner but emphasises its significance for the lives of the characters described, turning it into yet another absence that is palpably present and affects them. By telling a story, the novel performs the “flickering of presence and absence” as meaning, not the meanings of distinct words, comes to the fore often without the explicit use of words such as “azadi”, “Hindu”, “Muslim”, and “integral” to which the complex interplays of meaning are often ascribed.

6 Narrative (Im)possibilities: Who Speaks and Who Can Speak? The deconstructive breakdown of relevant political and military terms that carry considerable weight in relation to the history of the subcontinent as well as Kashmir is facilitated through the focalising narrator. The incorporation of multiple perspectives in the narrative challenges the ostensible singularity of definitions in institutional narratives for terms with associated actions that affect lived realities in many more ways. The text draws attention to absences within words and their inherent inadequacy in incorporating multiple lived realities as their signifieds, as discussed in the previous chapter. The lived realities are instead incorporated in the fabric of the novel itself, through the focalising narrator who tells from multiple perspectives. The threat of narrative impossibility implied by the emphasis on the inadequacies of words in depicting trauma and lived reality is countered by a third-person narrator who is only a grammatical product but who tells nonetheless. Yet, its existence is marked by the trace of the absent voices for which the narrator is a mere substitute. The multifaceted implications of “crackdown” and “ethnic cleansing” are presented in the novel through a reversal of the tendency to name, as previously discussed in relation to Kashmira/India, and this removal of names becomes the final “most present of absences” analysed in this thesis. The initial concealment and absence of the name “Kashmira”, as well as the subsequent suppressions of mother and motherland, is a marked absence in the use of “India”. Alternately, the names that are concealed or absent in the sections discussed below reinstate multiplicity by virtue of their perceivable absence into the implications of the terms “crackdown” and “ethnic cleansing”.

6.1 “Crackdown” and “ethnic cleansing” The narrator introduces the term “crackdown” whilst focalising through Colonel Tortoise, explaining that “[t]he philosophy of crackdown was, fuck the enemy in the crack”, “and then fuck them in the crack again” (292-3). The explicit language contrasts with the distant passive voice of the subsequent section which details his military decisions that are informed by his belief that “every Kashmiri was a militant” and those who lied “needed to be assisted towards the truth” (292). With the Colonel as focaliser, the narrator recounts the case of one such man: He was beaten, obviously. Then his beard was set on fire. Then electricity was offered to his eyes, his genitals and his tongue. Afterwards he claimed to have been blinded in one eye, which was an obvious lie, an attempt to blame the investigators for a previously existing condition. He had no pride and begged the men to stop. He repeated this lie, that

he was just a schoolteacher, which offended them. To assist him they took him to a small stream containing dirty water and broken glass. The liar was pushed into the stream and kept there for five hours. The men walked over him with their boots, applying his head to the rocks in the water. He lost consciousness to avoid questioning, so when he woke up they chastised him again. In the end it was deemed correct to let him go. He was warned that the next time he would be killed. He ran away screaming, I swear I’m not a militant. I’m a schoolteacher. These people were beyond saving. There was no hope for them. (292) The passive voice removes the presence of the perpetrators who are syntactically included only twice, referred to vaguely as “the men”. Their position as agent of violence is concealed, leaving only the passive verbs and the subject identifiable. The deliberately controlled distance of Colonel Tortoise’s commentary is disturbing. The use of “claimed” silences the man and disregards his identity as a schoolteacher, as does the reference to him as a “liar” if not simply by the third-person pronoun “he”, itself devoid of particularity. The namelessness of the man is countered instead by the only use of “I” without quotation marks in an otherwise surgically distant passage and additionally substantiated by the use of italics that distinguish his plea in the passage. The use of the first-person pronoun to inhabit the perspective of the schoolteacher instead of Colonel Tortoise deconstructs the unity of the passage in which it appears and by extension the perspective of Colonel Tortoise. Imprisoned structurally amidst emotionless comments about his unquestionable guilt and identity, the plea enacts the reality of the schoolteacher. It constitutes the sole empathic moment in the section, subtly undermining the detachment in Colonel Tortoise’s retelling. The implications of “crackdown” grow from this momentary inclusion of the schoolteacher’s perspective, emphasising not only the failure of Colonel Tortoise’s definition to include the teacher’s lived reality but also his position as the perpetrator of violence despite his rhetorical attempt to erase the mark of the agent. The following pages continue with the narrator focalising through Colonel Tortoise and describe villages that “come under crackdown” (293). His grand claims that he “knew everything and forgot nothing” are rendered ironic by the exclusion of the names of villages and victims in this section, referred to instead with letters (292). The namelessness in this military account is reminiscent of the institutional narratives of history that resort to numbers instead of names of victims. Jhuma Sen’s essay in Butalia’s collection tackles the hierarchical structures of power that dictate what is remembered, how it is remembered, and who chooses what is remembered in the context of West Bengal, arguing that systems of privilege and

caste calibrate memory, as events appear and disappear from public memory depending on the choices of those in political power (Sen 124). The appropriation of memory in military and political discourse is highlighted in this fictional portrayal through the namelessness of victims, of people and of places, drawing attention to critical questions of selectivity and biases in hegemonic institutional memory. A crucial question thus surfaces with regard to the possibility and impossibility of narration in the novel: who is capable of remembering when Pachigam comes under “crackdown”? The removal of names in Colonel Tortoise’s section contrasts with Pyarelal’s prayer-like repetition of the list of villages that were subject to “ethnic cleansing”, a term that is discussed in a pattern comparable to those discussed in Chapter 5. As mentioned earlier, Pyarelal is representative of the Kashmiri pandit community in the text. Rushdie intertwines the pandit exodus of 1989/90, presenting the experience of fear, vulnerability, and confusion from Pyarelal’s perspective. The narrative indicates that the radical Islamist groups had “new words for ‘pandit’: mukabir, kafir. Meaning spy, infidel” (294). The double inverted commas around “pandit” indicate its marginalised position, excluded from use for the people it refers to in a manner that suggests an internalised distance and absence in the signifier itself. The reference to change in terminology indicates a significant sociopolitical change in how people began to view members of the same community but of the other religion as the Other, with words that emphasised their religious otherness over their familiar geographical or cultural backgrounds. The metaphysics of presence that Derrida criticises underlies the renaming of the pandit community, as it defines one group as other against the self, instituting a hierarchical binary that artificially severs the relationship that they share, the Kashmiriyat that belongs to both and exists in both. The term “ethnic cleansing” surfaces gradually. It is initially described obscurely through metaphor as a “phrase from another part of the world that had flown many thousands of miles to find a new home in Kashmir”, and defined hauntingly in direct speech without a speaker as “[k]ill one, scare ten” (295). Pyarelal repeats the list of the villages three times, before the narrator adds while focalising through him that “[t]hese names had to be remembered. Forgetting would be a crime” (296). The conscious effort to remember through the repetition of names starkly opposes the namelessness in the Colonel’s depiction of “crackdown”. The focalising narrator integrates the perspective of both giving rise to a tension that elaborates on the singularity of institutional memory and infuses it, at least fictionally, with traces of personal individual memories of trauma that are absent as Pyarelal’s knowledge of the event reaches its limit with the names of the villages.

A distinctive form of questions are employed in the following section, during which the narrator retreats from a focalising position and steps in to narrate with zero focalisation. The absence of any focalising figure is markedly present and the stylistic features of this passage draw this absence out to the fore. Two syntactic techniques are of special importance, partly discussed in Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès’s analysis of the representation of trauma in the novel. Firstly, the passage repeatedly employs the phrase “why was that”, a question severed from its complementary punctuation that is replaced instead with a full stop. This syntactic choice asserts the unanswerability of the question, that there is nobody willing or capable of answering the question. Furthermore, it also substantiates the inability to explain or justify the government’s insufficient provisions for humanitarian support and aid that was necessary to at least facilitate if not prevent migration. Secondly, the passage dissolves into a chant-like run- on repetition of this phrase, syntactically imitating the very pandits it describes in prayer. Fortin-Tournès adds that the passage “accelerates to adopt a staccato rhythm when gruesome details are accumulated to evoke the horrors of population displacement as a result of religious strife”. She continues that it evolves stylistically into “a prolonged shout of pain which [is] denied the alleviating possibility of an answer”, concluding that the passage is a “successful stylistic feat that perfectly evokes the mechanisms of painful senseless repetition in trauma” (Fortin-Tournès 208). The narrator recounts the exodus of the pandits when Pyarelal’s knowledge falls short. and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that. (297) Fortin-Tournès argues that the “evocative power” of such passages in the novel “lies in the fact that they write violence in - linguistically, syntactically and rhythmically”, as is the case with this passage in which “punctuation disappears and the linguistic tempo accelerates so that language stammers and verges on the inarticulate” (207). The analysis of stylistic features and the emphasis on the inarticulacy of this section however compromises the importance of the narrator’s incorporation of multiple perspectives and memories in contrast to the lack of focalising in this section, a transition that is crucial to understanding the narration of trauma in the novel. The underlying suggestion is that the “most present of absences” is Pyarelal, and the threat is that he too has become a victim of the symbolic and real “deaths” of self and of the “broken valley” with which the passage concludes. It leaves the narrator, a grammatical

product that exists to fill an absence who must dissociate from the focaliser, turning into an un-personified and un-embodied dissociation, severed from the people and the voices through whom it has focalised until this point in the narrative, but narrating nonetheless.

6.2 The Fate of Pachigam The novel is rooted in a nostalgic depiction of Pachigam as a microcosmic portrayal of an idyllic space, an idyllic Kashmir before and outside history, such that the setting seems to be a magical realist element in itself. Early in the text, the narrator explains the origins of the “the official name of their village, Pachigam, [which] lacked any apparent meaning; but some of its older inhabitants claimed that it was a latter-day corruption of Panchigam, which is to say ‘birdville’” (60). Both potential meanings are imbued with a sense of irony as the novel’s plot progresses while integrating the history of Kashmir, as the word “Pachigam” turns into a signifier for a land that is teeming with the absence of the lives of people that once filled it, characters that the reader witnesses over the course of the text. As a proper name, its impropriety derives from its meanings as a common noun and its ability to remain a name for a place that was home to people who are dead, to still represent a territory devoid of its people. In a predictable yet disheartening conclusion, Pachigam comes under “crackdown”. The village vacillates between the forceful demands of the Islamist radicals and the army, finally collapsing under the threat of both. Anees’s body is brought back to his parents and the soldiers threaten to hurt his father Abdullah, at which point the narrator retreats in a manner similar to the sections recounting the tribal invasion and the exodus of the Kashmiri pandits. The passage is abruptly stripped of direct dialogue and the narrator resorts instead to a dissociated account of the traumatic memory. The narratorial frustration in this section is exacerbated as is hinted by the multiple attempts with distinct stylistic alterations to explain what “crackdown” implies for the lives of the Pachigami villagers that the reader has become acquainted with over the course of the text. As Siddiqi indicates, Rushdie first begins “paradoxically” with “a celestial metaphor to attempt to communicate once again the full horror of what has happened” (222). Pachigam was the earth, the grabbee, helpless, and powerful uncaring planets stooped low, extended their celestial and merciless tentacles and grabbed. (308) The inadequacy of this metaphor is signalled in that it abruptly ends and is followed instead by a different stylistic attempt to summarise the event.

The narrator consequently employs questions in his attempt to integrate traumatic memory, a technique used in the section recounting the exodus of the Kashmiri pandits as discussed earlier. Who lit that fire? Who burned that orchard? Who shot those brothers who laughed their whole lives long? Who killed the sarpanch? Who broke his hands? Who broke his arms? Who broke his ancient neck? Who shackled those men? Who made those men disappear? Who shot those boys? Who shot those girls? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? Who smashed that house? […] Who raped that lazy-eyed woman? Who raped that grey-haired lazy-eyed woman as she screamed about snake vengeance? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that woman again? Who raped that dead woman? Who raped that dead woman again? (308). The namelessness in this section is comparable to Colonel Tortoise’s account, but the victims are recognisable to the reader despite the exclusion of their names. Abdullah the sarpanch and Firdaus “the lazy-eyed woman” are, despite and perhaps due to the exclusion of their names, the “most present of absences”. The violence against Firdaus is remarkably disturbing as it does not cease despite her death. Syntactically, the passage counters the absence of the perpetrator as agent in Colonel Tortoise’s description of “crackdown” as discussed earlier. Sentence structures are symbolically inverted in this series of questions starting with “who”, which draw attention to the importance of assigning culpability. Fortin-Tournès argues that the “repetition of recurring unanswered questions […] mimics the process of traumatic neurosis, whereby the traumatising event returns in the form of flashbacks and dreams or hallucination, thus painfully repeating itself in the subject’s psyche until the subject can organise those repetitions into a coherent” (208). The passage syntactically depicts trauma but the traumatised are absent in that they are silent and dead. Furthermore, the use of questions also alternately underscores the inability to assign culpability when there are no living victims left to speak, only a disembodied dissociated narrator who is not a presence at all. The narrator, left with an empty Pachigam at the end of the novel, acknowledges the inability to do justice despite three distinct attempts to a description of Pachigam without the people who once gave meaning to a place whose name had no literal “meaning”. The first is a close observer, not very different from the reader perhaps, who recognises and identifies the people of Pachigam sensitively and nostalgically, realising that the remnants of Pachigam on the official maps is a “paper self” that is “its only memorial, for where Pachigam once stood by the blithe Muskadoon, where its little street ran along from the pandit's house to the sarpanch’s, where Abdullah roared and Boonyi danced and Shivshankar sang and Shalimar

the clown walked the tightrope as if treading upon air, nothing resembling a human habitation remains” (309). The run-on sentence presents a series of memories connected repeatedly by “and” as though gaspingly overwhelmed by the memories of lives that have been portrayed with such thorough detail over the course of the text. The question and the impossibility of narrating strikes the narrator as he defeatedly concludes this first attempt to write a history of Pachigam: There are things that must be looked at indirectly because they would blind you if you looked them in the face, like the fire of the sun. So, to repeat: there was no Pachigam any more. Pachigam was destroyed. Imagine it for yourself. (309) The narrator concludes with the reader’s ethical responsibility of remembering Pachigam by directly addressing and implicating them with the final imperative and the intimate use of the second person. The narrator’s second attempt avoids the horrific details as well as the invasive memories of the idyllic past that intruded in the first attempt, claiming simplistically instead that “Pachigam still existed on maps of Kashmir, but that day it ceased to exist anywhere else, except in memory” (309). However, the statement is burdened by its own inaccuracy, which urges the question of who can remember Pachigam when its villagers have either dispersed or died. As though aware of the failure of the second attempt, the narrator attempts once more to fulfil the need to describe Pachigam: “Third and final attempt: The beautiful village of Pachigam still exists” (309). “Pachigam” as a proper noun refers to and signifies the complex interactive web of people and land, and its impropriety is most exacerbated in that the name continues to be in use after they are dead. It becomes a name, a substitute that depicts the “most present of absences”, the death of a great part of its own chain of signifiers. Turned into a place without people and therefore the agency to speak or remember its histories and traumas, the narrator reduces it to a “beautiful village”. With this final attempt, the narrator succumbs to the desire of remembering it nostalgically, in a symbolic cyclical return to the start of the novel, before 1947, when it was an idyllic village unaware of the ramifications of sociopolitical events and history that would slowly begin to affect it most severely. With the continual present tense “exists”, Pachigam is left suspended as this nostalgic memory in denial of its temporal present and un-future, in denial of the inescapable spacing and temporising of différance, without people who can speak or remember its histories and traumas. The end of the chapter indicates that the narrator is conclusively and self-avowedly defeated in his attempts. Robert Eaglestone’s analysis follows that of Fortin-Tournès in its

emphasis on the “very rhetoric of attempts”, adding that “the final collapse of Pachigam into an existence that is solely textual, marked only in a map and in a guidebook, reveals simply the inability of the text to enunciate the terror”, where Fortin-Tournès might replace “terror” with “trauma” (363). However, from the position of the reader, the narrator is a construct that has functioned as a medium for narration and has narrated by focalising through multiple characters. Colonel Tortoise’s explanation of “crackdown” is supplemented by the narrator’s presentation of other perspectives and other lived realities, despite this linguistic breakdown in their absence. Inversely, their absence is supplemented and the questions of culpability that the narrator asks are answered elsewhere in the text, through Colonel Tortoise’s explanations of the brutality of “crackdown”. The reader’s encounter with the implications of “crackdown” are intensified due to the stark contrast between the Colonel’s depiction, “to fuck the enemy in the crack”, and the reader’s intimate recognition of the characters affected by it and the extent of violence they suffer. Abhibunnisha Begum describes it as a “polyvocal text suffused with unheard memories”, with “[c]ounter-memories” that challenge the limits of institutional memory (220). The exploration of “crackdown” is the most disarming criticism in the text of the use, misuse, and abuse of language in political and military discourse. The narrator is thus a grammatical product, an absence itself whose existence is necessitated by the lack of other capable speakers, other living figures who could function as first-person narrators. The narrator too is one of the “most present of absences”, narrating in absence and reminiscent of Derrida’s concept of trace, an absence that was never a presence at all. As Fortin-Tournès discusses, the passages discussed above fulfil the Modernist aesthetic expectations of literary representations of trauma. Siddiqi concludes with more nuance that by “[d]eftly moving between linguistic registers, Rushdie probes the representational challenges, the ethical demands, and the ontological exigencies of chronicling genocide” (223). This thesis argues that, in addition to these stylistic features, the trauma and the dead are pervasive in the construct of the narrator in Rushdie’s novel as well, in the dissociative and disembodied figure who is able to focalise and enables the movement between linguistic registers that Siddiqi mentions. The narrator speaks not only for but as characters representative of multiple groups, integrating multiple perspectives and memories in a challenge to any singular hegemonic institutional narrative. The narrator is thus a disembodied grammatical construct, a voiceless voice, who exists to fill the absence of the dead, turning into a trace of all that there is and was in Pachigam and in Kashmir. The narrator is also a witness to the traumas when no other survivors remain to listen, tell, or remember. The narrative impossibility suggested formally in the three distressed attempts to

describe Pachigam is countered by the narrative itself, the fact that narration has occurred for the characters who have lived and for the deaths they have suffered. In contrast however is the narrative impossibility in content, that nobody alive remains to narrate or to remember, necessitating the disembodied narrator into existence. The possibility and impossibility of narration are underlying oppositional features of the narrator in whom they exist simultaneously, allowing narration to occur but only with a cautious emphasis on the non- existence of the narrator that is needed to facilitate this narration. A victimised territory suspended in volatility and vulnerability until it finally comes under “crackdown”, Pachigam turns into what its equivalent common noun implies. It is reduced to a space of absences. Similar to the absences incorporated into the name “Kashmira”, “Pachigam” is also imbued by a similar lack with the conclusive absence of people. Abhibunnisha Begum claims that the novel ends with Kashmiriyat “annihilated without deliverance” (206). However, Kashmiriyat, like Pachigam perhaps, continues to exist alternately as a trans-spatial state, “flying” with those who have left it behind but share its Kashmiriyat nonetheless, thus turning into a literal “Panchigam”, which is translated as “birdville” in the novel. Both Kashmira/India and Pachigam encounter each other as absences in the concluding chapter of the novel, as Kashmira/India returns to a void left in place of the village that the reader knows better than any of the surviving characters. The nostalgia she feels for a place that she has never known is apparent: ‘Pachigam.’ She spoke the name as if it were a charm, an open-sesame that would roll back a boulder from the door of a treasure cave inside which her mother glistened and gleamed like hoarded gold. Pachigam, a place from a fable that needed to be made real. (360) In a symbolic return to its pre-1947 past, Pachigam is described here in light of its earlier magical realist dimension, as a “fable” that is not “real”. The name itself is “an open-sesame” as though it is marked by the absences of the lives, the stories, and the traumas that Kashmira/India may never have access to, separated as she is from the narrator by the division of fiction in a split that places the reader closer to the narrator and the characters that she has missed. The word “crackdown” is used for the first time in direct reference to Pachigam, when Yuvraj informs a confused Kashmira/India that it had “come under crackdown”, unable to “tell her how brutal an event a crackdown could be” (360). Amongst the characters in the text, the reader is elevated to the position of the figure with the most information about Pachigam, as the narrator has already depicted the event more closely while Kashmira/India knows nothing about it and Yuvraj appears to know only a limited amount. The only other

survivor from Pachigam in the reader’s knowledge who is capable of speaking is Shalimar, who speaks so little and remains silent even in the lengthy chapters in which he is the focal character, even in a novel that is named after him, and is thus yet another “most present of absences”. The remaining survivors are thus unable or choose not to remember or tell. The sliver of narrative possibility that remains between Shalimar and Kashmira/India decreases with the novel’s conclusion. It ends inconclusively with an encounter between them in a manner that suggests that at least one, if not both of them, dies, further reducing the possibility of remembering and narration. The banality of the cycle of violence, ending as it does with only the hint of an imminent confrontation between Shalimar and Kashmira/India, renders the text into a narrative of defeat in which a non-real narrator narrates for a number of mostly dead people. Pachigam transforms into a violent stage for multiple groups to fight out and exert control over territory, leaving the community in tatters and a land devoid of its people. The inclusion of traumatic memories as disruptive linguistic breakdowns is but one of the techniques in which they are represented. This thesis asserts that the threat of narrative impossibility urges the narrator into existence, a presence that is an absence, a disembodied grammatical construct that dissociatively focalises for the myriad characters in the novel, enables narration, and witnesses their traumas while simultaneously emphasising the threat of its impossibility.

7 Conclusion: Kashmiris, the “Most Present of Absences” Now This thesis takes as its starting point a statement from Rushdie’s novel that describes death as “most present of absences”. In the context it appears, it refers to the concealment of the identity of Kashmira/India’s birth mother but it takes on a host of meanings as absences of many varieties multiply and occupy the text with a force that brings them to the fore. Three “most present of absences” are analysed: in proper names for people and places, in political and military terms, and in the narration. First, the doubly-named Kashmira/India is evaluated with a focus on her two names, her two mothers, and the intrusive presence of Kashmir and her Kashmiri mother due to their absence. The absence embedded thus in names extends to the concern about language in the following chapter, which evaluates passages that reveal a deconstructivist concern with the extents and the ambiguity of signification. The final chapter provides more examples of the deconstructive logic at work in passages considering the meanings of the terms “crackdown” and “ethnic cleansing” as well as the proper name of Pachigam, the village that serves as the setting for a great part of the novel, focusing especially on the role of the narrator in presenting the implications of these terms on the lived realities of the characters. After the historical overview and the theoretical framework, Chapter 4 contends that both proper names used for Kashmira/India are essentially improper, as they refer to external territories that she is disconnected from and signify rather than refer, loaded as they are with the personal significance of the territories for each mother. The chapter concludes that the force with which the name “India” is ascribed to her slowly comes undone as does the narrative imposed by her stepmother Peggy, who is inversely stripped of agency in Kashmira/India’s nameless references to her. The absences of her other name “Kashmira”, of her Kashmiri mother Boonyi, and of the territory of Kashmir surface instead as presences that cannot be ignored. The relationship between Kashmira/India and Kashmir are evaluated additionally in relation to Boonyi’s given name “Bhoomi” as a common noun for “land”. With degrees of separation setting Kashmira/India and the territory she is named after apart, their mutually exclusive and internalisation of absence emerge in the text as mother and daughter continually keep missing each other. In the following chapter, the internalisation of absence in words is extended to the analysis of key political and military terms such as “Hindu”, “Muslim”, “Kashmiriyat”, “integral”, and “azadi” [freedom]. By evaluating the rhetorical techniques used to emphasise the nature of words as well as their meanings through a close reading of key passages, the chapter

concludes that the deconstructivist concern with language is evident in how the passages perform what différance implies and performs itself. Focalising through multiple characters, the narrator outlines the multifold meanings of “Hindu” and “Muslim” in relation to “Kashmiriyat” as well as external contexts that alter and defer their meanings. As is the case for Pachigam itself, outside contexts and sociopolitical situations seep into the terms and change them gradually until they can no longer coalesce within the term “Kashmiriyat” in isolation of the other lived realities that are marked by the use of these terms. The novel thus enacts how “Hindu” and “Muslim” evolve into divisive terms, acquiring meanings of disharmony, tension, and violence only belatedly as new lived realities are incorporated into them, in contrast to the harmony and the nostalgic Pachigam of the past. The village becomes entangled with the history of the territory it depicts, and its Kashmiriyat begins to unravel as “Hindu” and “Muslim” turn into antithetical identities. In the passage concerning the implications of “integral”, superficially similar terms are presented as chains of related signifiers. Colonel Tortoise’s illogical transitions in his defence of “integral” undo his own explanation that is supposed to support his logic, drawing attention to the singularity of military discourse and of any hegemonic institutional narrative that marginalises perspectives and memories. Concluding with an evaluation of understandings of the word “azadi” [freedom] in the novel, the chapter contends that the novel, despite making no explicit claim or attempt to define freedom, intertwines it into the fabric of the novel in a manner that its effects on the lived realities of the characters simply cannot be ignored. The potential of an infinite chain of signification is depicted in mockery, as Colonel Tortoise sharply reduces freedom with a patronising question worth repeating: “Why not stand still and draw a circle around your feet and name that Selfistan?” (102) Leading into further analysis of military and political terms, Chapter 6 considers the implications of “crackdown” and “ethnic cleansing” in light of the characters by focusing on the role of the focalising narrator in narrating without focalisers. The namelessness in the description of “crackdown” with Colonel Tortoise as focaliser is compared to the chant-like repetition of names by Pyarelal and the namelessness of sections that recount the deaths of characters with a narrator without focalisers. In its evaluation of the representation of trauma in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, the thesis contends that the grammatical construct of the disembodied narrator who enables the narration of multiple perspectives and lived realities both counters and embodies the impossibility of narration. The narrator dissociatively shifts from presenting the lived reality of one character to the next, before encountering the impossibility of narrating without them, attempting to narrate still, while the narration has

already occurred in the form of the text. The narrative as a whole functions as a supplement to the silence of the Pachigami villagers, to their inability to narrate in death, thus defying the impossibility of narrative that is signalled in content. This thesis focuses on a handful of present absences in the novel in light of Derrida’s concepts of deconstruction, considering how deconstructive concerns structure textual evaluations about the ambiguity of language, the impropriety of proper names, the multiplicity of meanings, and the différance that conditions linguistic elements and language as a whole. The topics evaluated in this thesis would benefit from further consideration in light of a theoretical framework that integrates postcolonial responses to deconstruction, and incorporates relevant studies about institutional memory culture in postcolonial nations. Furthermore, this thesis briefly mentions that the silence of Shalimar is a notable absence in a novel that is named after him. A significant body of research pertaining to the novel as post- 9/11 fiction criticises the portrayal of Shalimar as a terrorist, and could contribute to readings of the significance of his silence. Furthermore, Rushdie’s work must be considered with an awareness of his place in between the Western literary tradition and his Indian origins. He elaborates on his transnational identity, reminiscent of Kashmira/India’s background in Shalimar the Clown: I have constantly been asked whether I am British, or Indian. The formulation ‘Indian-born British writer’ has been invented to explain me. But my new book deals with Pakistan. So what now? British-resident-Indo-Pakistani writer? You see the folly of trying to contain writers inside passports. (“‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist”, 371) In light of the postcolonial criticism levied at trauma theory for its Eurocentrism, Rushdie’s complex position between Western literary traditions and his national origins would be an avenue for further research, especially with reference to the representation of trauma in his other works or in comparison to other transnational or migrant fiction. Furthermore, a feminist reading of the depiction of women and their narratives could contribute to a deeper understanding of the ways in which this novel undermines the singularity of a hegemonic institutional narrative that is masculinist. Very often in the novel, it is not the characters but the words that are used - to name them, to affect them, or to describe how they are affected - that function as the subject of the novel. In its tendency to obsessively name and discuss the meanings of names against the removal or concealment of names, the novel challenges the singularity of a hegemonic institutionalised account of memory that only provides numbers and a linear story for multiple lived realities

and chains of causality. The military and political terms that the novel spotlights are evaluated in a way that attends to their volatile nature, and their unpredictable and unforgiving consequences. Echoing the famous words of Jay Winter in his formative analysis of the post- World War I memory culture, the names of people and places, and these military and political terms weighed down by their past and anticipatory meanings, transform into “sites of memory” as Pierre Nora conceptualises as well as “sites of mourning” in Rushdie’s text. They represent absences and impropriety, as proper names and linguistic elements do according to Derrida, in that they remain in use after death, in that they ultimately represent death, the “most present of absences”, which necessitates a non-real narrator into existence. This narrator attempts to fulfil “the imperative to tell”, to counter “the impossibility of telling” (Laub 78-9). However, as a mere grammatical product, as a disembodied absence that focalises through characters, this non-real narrator’s ability to narrate is marked by the absence of a first-person narrator. The third-person narrator is thus in itself an impossibility, embodied in a disembodied construct, that counters the impossibility of telling itself. In her contribution to Butalia’s collection of essays analysing the aftermath of Partition, Kavita Panjabi questions “what happens when this need for historical reparation is as compelling as the loss is irredeemable”, and whether this implied that the post-1947 period would be marked by the threat of a “civilisational dead end” with more violence and war to fulfil, albeit in futility, the need for reparation (52). The narrative of Shalimar the Clown is threatened by a similar “civilisational dead end”, closing with the imminent confrontation of Shalimar and Kashmira/India while the other Pachigami villagers have died. In content, the impossibility of narration due to deaths of the villagers constitutes a “civilisational dead end” as nobody can remember, tell, or identify the culpable. However, as a grammatical construct rather than any being at all, the narrator forces back against this dead end by focalising and retelling their pasts. The narrator shows an inability to narrate in moments of linguistic breakdown, but the existence of the narrative that encompasses the lives and memories of the dead characters indicates that the “imperative to tell” has been fulfilled, ironically by a construct that is an absence itself. The phrase “most present of absences” deconstructs itself as there are so many absences that are so present that none of them can be the most present, which by virtue of being a superlative with strict differential relations undermines the possibility of multiple options. However, in light of ongoing sociopolitical changes, like colliding tectonic plates whose extent of disaster is not yet known, there is a more urgent example of the “most present of absences”. The Indian government abrogated Article 370, introduced in the historical

overview as the legal framework that outlines the relationship of the state of Jammu and Kashmir with the central government and its special constitutional status that allowed it a certain degree of autonomy. Furthermore, a bifurcation of the state into the two distinct union territories, of Jammu and Kashmir and of Ladakh respectively, has been approved. This will put the territory through its third partition in 70 years, while the trauma of the previous has barely healed. The initial opinions and analyses of the implications of this change, ranging from “darkest day” to “historical blunder corrected” as an article in the Economic Times summarises in its title, read much like the passage from Rushdie’s novel in which the invasion of the kabailis is treated through an explosion of vacillating dialogue from unidentified people, which function merely as predictions of meaning for lived realities that will be affected and understood only with hindsight. As explained in the historical overview, Kashmir is a remnant, an unhealed wound, a belated repetitive reminder of the failures of 1947. It has remained in a continuous state of volatility, suspended and tangled for seven decades between the anxieties of India and Pakistan. The terms “Partition”, “Hindu” and “Muslim”, “azadi” [freedom], “crackdown”, “ethnic cleansing”, and “integration”, which were key to the creation of new nation-states in 1947, are cropping up today in media coverage of the announcement of the bifurcation and the abrogation of Article 370. These words will inherently mutate into new meanings as the events of Kashmir will have to be incorporated in them. The hashtag “#kashmirintegrated” is trending on Twitter, while the Indian newspaper The Telegraph has reported the event as another “Partition”. However, Kashmir is silent and under “lockdown” as internet and phone services remain severed. The changes and their implications are beyond imagination as they have not begun to surface yet, and they cannot be anticipated until the people who will be affected by them are able to speak. Their silence is the “most present of absences” now, as they have been rendered incapacitated from knowing or speaking for their own lives, their own pasts, and their own futures. The anxiety about an annihilative silence provoked by Rushdie’s novel will continue to acquire more meanings in the aftermath of these events.

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