Narrating Kashmir Gender, Memory, and Narrative Imagination

Narrating Kashmir: Gender, Memory, and Narrative Imagination explores how contemporary Kashmiri English writing and cinema narrate, remember, and reimagine a region shaped by diverse histories, memories, and experiences of conflict and displacement, as well as enduring questions of memory and belonging. Through a genre-specific examination of memoir, fiction, short fiction, and cinema, the book explores how different narrative forms transform experiences of conflict, violence, disappearance, displacement, exile, and belonging into literary and cultural memory. Through close readings of works by Basharat Peer, Rahul Pandita, Mirza Waheed, Shahnaz Bashir, Nitasha Kaul, and Siddhartha Gigoo, alongside Haider and Shikara, the book considers how narrative form shapes the ways Kashmir is witnessed and remembered. Gender provides a central analytical framework, revealing how conflict and displacement reshape domestic life, family relationships, identity, mobility, and everyday forms of agency. At the same time, the book places Kashmiri Muslim and Kashmiri Pandit narratives in dialogue while recognising their distinct historical experiences and resisting their reduction to a single narrative. Bridging literary studies, memory studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and adaptation studies, Narrating Kashmir argues that genre is not merely a formal or classificatory category but a mode of knowledge through which Kashmir is variously witnessed, remembered, interpreted, and imagined. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of Kashmiri literature, Indian Writing in English, South Asian studies, memory and trauma studies, gender studies, and literary adaptation.