Trauma, Exile and Hybrid Identity in Shafi’s Leaves from Kashmir

Abstract

This study highlights the political scenario of Indian occupied Kashmir that forces the people to migrate from their native land to new land and their struggle to modify themselves in a new environment. The larger collective understanding as responses to a political conflict governs and at times directs or even overpowers the individual’s sense of who they are or what they stand for and thus there is a potential dichotomy or split that holds one back. Shafi in her novel Leaves from Kashmir shows how power affects the identity of victims and leaves the catastrophic impacts on their psyche. She beautifully blends the events of trauma, exile and hybridity as diasporic people always relate themselves with their roots. Pain becomes the innate part of their personality as they become unaware of the fact that what the pleasure is. The present research also throws light on the brutality of Indian military due to which many people lost their loved ones and how they are living a repressed, agonizing life in their own region. Even though they live in their own state, still they are not secure as they are afraid of when this will be their last moment because they are treated inhumanly. Cathy Caruth and Bhabha’s theory helps to analyze and understand the catastrophic traumatic effects of the imposition of migration on the people in the selected novel Leaves from Kashmir and their dreams to see the valley as it used to be, ‘The Paradise on Earth’.