FROM AN (IM) MOBILE LAND: INSCRIBING THE (POSTCOLONIAL) OTHER IN MALIK SAJAD’S MUNNU- A BOY FROM KASHMIR

Abstract

Kashmir has often figured in the popular imagination either as a fantastical setting or as a breeding ground of terrorism. Notably, the native Kashmiri “body” is insubordination or absent from most of these popular representations. It’s against this material effacement of Kashmiri body in mainstream visual representations that this paper reads Malik Sajad’s autobiographical graphic narrative Munnu – A Boy from Kashmir (2015) as making a discursive intervention. Sajad’s graphic tale of an ordinary boy from Kashmir growing up to become a cartoonist, in the adverse political climate of the 90’s in the region, offers a counter-discourse by inscribing the body into the
landscape, thereby infusing representation with materiality. However, this reclaiming as proposed by Kabir (2009), is far from celebratory as the Kashmiri body in the landscape is one in pain, scarred by violence. By embodying the author’s personal and the collective trauma of surviving in a "conflict zone” on to a visual medium, Sajad pushes against the discourse of the unspeakable and the unimaginable by taking what Chute (2016) refers to as the “risk of representation.”