Papers by Dr Ishrat Bashir
Ishrat Bashir 'I know what you're thinking right now. What wouldn't have been possible in the wor... more Ishrat Bashir 'I know what you're thinking right now. What wouldn't have been possible in the world if only you were mine? But you're wrong to think so. I'm nothing if I'm not yours. Every speck of my soul and body belongs to you.' 'Please! It would be better if things remained unsaid. One word opens the gates for more words to burst forth and drown you.' 'But I'm happy if they do. I wouldn't mind if your words drowned me. It's like basking in your light.' Silence. Rabia no longer remembers if she had imagined this conversation or she had really had it with him. The place she was born in was a city brimming with light. The mountains that surrounded it helped to contain all that brightness which she feared would otherwise be lost. It would leak out into the plains if the mountains ever gave away the secret of their being. The fear was illogical, of course. How could light leak into plains? Even if light were a fluid, it would need an osmotic gradient to flow. But she feared, nonetheless. Faisal had his fears, too. He was afraid of the terror that words unleash when they have multiple meanings. The word would often become a bone of contention between the two lovers. 'What is freedom but a word with multiple meaning? Polysemy is the magnanimity of our language, Faisal.' 'A word with multiple meanings is vulnerable, my love. No, not that. It makes us vulnerable. It becomes a tool in the hands of our enemies to defeat us, to confuse us, at least.' 'And who is our enemy?' 'I mean if we had enemies.' 'I only know that words are beautiful when they are endless, like alif in Urdu.' 'But they are curved and twisted in all manners of the other crooked letters of Urdu. I think words like "love" and "truth", "justice" and "freedom" should have only one meaning. They are important and fundamental words.' 'But the most important of them all is "life" and life cannot have only one meaning. If it were not for the multiple meanings, how could it embrace love and truth, justice and freedom? Multiplicity makes words what they are. Haven't you read our beloved poet Shahid? He plays on the multiple meanings of his name.
Transnational Literature, 2014
Translation of a story by novelist, playwright and short story writer, Ali Mohammad Lone, born in... more Translation of a story by novelist, playwright and short story writer, Ali Mohammad Lone, born in 1927 in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India. He worked as Assistant Producer in Radio Kashmir, and as Deputy Secretary of Cultural Academy of Jammu and Kashmir. He began his literary career by writing in Urdu but soon turned to his mother tongue Kashmiri. Lone has authored many novels, plays and short stories. Asi Ti Chi Insaan (We Too Are Humans) is his famous novel in Kashmiri. His play Suyya, which has been translated in a number of Indian languages, bagged the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972. Lone has also translated Maxim Gorky's famous novel Mother into Kashmiri. He has been honoured with Soviet Land Nehru Award. Though influenced by left-oriented Progressive Writers' Movement in India, Lone skilfully uses modernist elements in his work. He died in an accident on 22 December 1987 while returning home in Indira Nagar, Srinagar.
Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din, a Kashmiri writer writes about the people who are economically deprived and p... more Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din, a Kashmiri writer writes about the people who are economically deprived and politically marginalised. What is significant about Mohi-ud-Din’s body of work is that it does not simply reveal the socioeconomic conditions of the deprived population but it also offers an insight into the very evolution of this society and, the gradual but inevitable rise of consciousness among the people, challenging and puncturing the status quo. Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din’s work reveals a society where hegemony is maintained by coercion coupled with consensus. The consensus is not earned once for all. People resist and challenge the hegemony continuously and therefore liberty does not become a state of being rather it is an incessant act, a becoming. The paper is an analysis of his short fiction to show how liberty becomes a continuous exercise of protest rather than a state of being, and how the hegemonic power structures are demolished and re-established. Assistant Professor, Dept. of Eng...
Cafe Dissensus, 2020
Today, Kashmir is a classic example wherein the repressive state apparatus (Penal system, the pol... more Today, Kashmir is a classic example wherein the repressive state apparatus (Penal system, the police, the army, the legislature and government administration) is employed to provide an ecology for Ideological state apparatus to take root and grow in certain ‘pockets’ to use the state vocabulary. The discourse of new Kashmir as a heaven of economic progress and development for hitherto excluded social groups, in the absence of civic and political freedom of all, is reiterated from ramparts of historical buildings, stadiums and media studios. This heaven seems to require an inferno of a protracted desolation to simmer at the least 8 million people as a condition to come into being. This desolation that the colonial state calls “peace and normalcy” would have to stifle each word of dissent. To ensure that the desolation does not echo and resound the dissent, which is its natural characteristic, a scenario of potential law and order crisis is assumed and circulated. This legitimizes the state’s mapping of a people into categories that are essentially criminalizing basic human rights like right to freedom of expression. A blueprint for tackling the law and order in the state emerges which is in essence a grammar of mapping the whole population as varieties of ‘terrorists’: the blueprint of four Ms (as the state calls it) — Movers, Mobsters, Militants and Moulvis. It is immaterial to attempt a description of these terms because these are essentially various labels employed in colonial paraphernalia to curb dissent and make any meaningful civil protest impossible. To indulge in describing and differentiating these terms from one another is to fall in the trap.
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International Journal of Communication and Social Research, 2014
Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din, a Kashmiri writer writes about the people who are economically deprived and p... more Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din, a Kashmiri writer writes about the people who are economically deprived and politically marginalised. What is significant about Mohi-ud-Din's body of work is that it does not simply reveal the socioeconomic conditions of the deprived population but it also offers an insight into the very evolution of this society and, the gradual but inevitable rise of consciousness among the people, challenging and puncturing the status quo. Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din's work reveals a society where hegemony is maintained by coercion coupled with consensus. The consensus is not earned once for all. People resist and challenge the hegemony continuously and therefore liberty does not become a state of being rather it is an incessant act, a becoming. The paper is an analysis of his short fiction to show how liberty becomes a continuous exercise of protest rather than a state of being, and how the hegemonic power structures are demolished and re-established.
FORTELL, 2019
This paper critically analyzes the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali to demonstrate how Ali's poetry envi... more This paper critically analyzes the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali to demonstrate how Ali's poetry envisages a cosmopolitan ethos. Though the politico-legal ramifications of a cosmopolitan philosophy cannot be underestimated but the moral and cultural substratum is significant for the development of cosmopolitan attitude. Literature is a site where the real and imagined boundaries are continuously transgressed. It makes possible the ideological exchange across the most rigid and formidable borders. Agha Shahid Ali's poetry is an illustration of such a site of exchange. Though Ali writes from a specific spatial and temporal location, his poetry encompasses more than one place and speaks from a position of cosmopolitan empathy. This paper attempts to demonstrate how Ali's poetry weaves cosmopolitan ethics into its thematic and formal structure. It is further argued that he weaves his concern against oppression, violence and injustice into the cosmopolitan empathy without creating a 'contemptible other'.
Transnational Literature
It is a work of fiction, a short story.
Nationalisms 'have typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and mascul... more Nationalisms 'have typically sprung from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope', remarks Cynthia Enloe in Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. So is Mirza Waheed's debut novel The Collaborator, typically a 'masculinized' narrative in which women are pushed to 'the edges of print'. The women in the narrative come across as 'ghosts' and 'shadows' rather than real suffering human beings. Their voices are hardly heard in the narrative yet their tongues are cut out. While the story tells us how the narrator is made to collaborate with the oppressor, we see patriarchy and colonizer as collaborators in perpetuating violence against women. Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator tells a harrowing tale of a village, Nowgam, near the "silly line of Control" that is caught into the turmoil when armed struggle breaks out in Kashmir during 1990s. The nameless narrator, a 19-year old boy, struggles to keep sane in the testing times that can drive anyone mad. Nowgam, we are told, had come into existence only five decades ago when Gujjars (nomadic people) settled there following the land reforms by Sheikh Abdullah in 1950s. When the armed struggle breaks out in Kashmir against Indian occupation, the people of this village are set onto the roads again. They leave the village to escape the wrath of military. The only family that stays behind is that of the narrator whose father is the Headman, sarpanch, of the village.
Translations by Dr Ishrat Bashir
Transnational Literature, 2013
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Papers by Dr Ishrat Bashir
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Translations by Dr Ishrat Bashir
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