‘The Man from Kashmir’: An inventive novella about the unfolding of life inside a collapse
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Mudassir Ramzan’s novella The Man from Kashmir opens with an epigraph from James Joyce’s Ulysses: “History…is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
These lines are spoken by Stephen Dedalus in an uncomfortable conversation with his headmaster, Mr Deasy. Deasy rambles on about his own narrow views – British nationalism, religion, and a grand divine purpose moving history toward a predetermined goal. Stephen counters this view by perceiving history as chaotic, relentless, filled with violence and trauma.
Ramzan’s novella may well be read as the history and becoming of young Dedalus. Ahmed – born in a mosque of the fictional town, Poshmarg, and raised within a particular Kashmiri Muslim texture – dies at the end by suicide in a foreign land. In his prehistory and disintegration are the lives and stories of his tribe that finally weigh him down. When Ahmed’s friend Peter asks Rahil about his profession, he replies:
“What does any brown man with a degree in the humanities do in academia? Colonial studies. Postcolonial literature of India and Africa. He had also been working on a book about Kashmir – specifically, the application of postcolonial theory to the region.”
But what should have culminated in the attempt to “express oneself in some mode of art...