Victims of Violence: A Critical Analysis of Khalid Hussain’s Selected Stories from Satisar Ka Suraj

Abstract

Violence and resistance has been the major motif of the majority of conflict-zone literatures. The authors have used this motif either as a mode of resistance or as a means to outpour their traumatic experiences. Hannah Arendt, in her book On Violence, deals with the ideas as to how violence is related with power. She details how the institutional power structures exercise violence in order to maintain their rule and status quo as well as to suppress any resistance to the state power. This paper however analyses how the violence meted out either by the state or by those coercive forces who turn militant against the state affects the common lot in the remote areas of Jammu and Kashmir. For this purpose, the paper deals with a few stories from a collection of a regional author Khalid Hussain, titled Satisar Ka Suraj, (which translates as ‘The Sun of Sati Sar’)[i] written in Urdu.

[i] Satisar is one of the Old names of Jammu and Kashmir. The title of the book by Khaled Hussain is therefore well translated as the Sun of Satisar. (See Khaled Hussain pp. 25)