View of ECOLOGICAL OTHERING: A POST COLONIAL ECOCRITICAL STUDY OF MIRZA WAHEED’S THE COLLABORATOR

(1)

ACCENT JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS ECOLOGY & ENGINEERING Peer Reviewed and Refereed Journal (International Journal) ISSN-2456-1037

Vol.04,Special Issue 05, (ICIR-2019) September 2019, Available Online: www.ajeee.co.in/index.php/AJEEE

1

ECOLOGICAL OTHERING: A POST COLONIAL ECOCRITICAL STUDY OF MIRZA WAHEED’S THE COLLABORATOR

Jan Mohmad Pandit Research Scholar (Ph.D)

Department of Comparative Languages and Culture Barkatullah University, Bhopal (M.P.)

Abstract - In conflict narratives landscape is often treated or depicted as subaltern or marginal passive entity; otherwise essentially and primarily related to the human predicament. The terrain attains respective codification by the opponents as enemy zone to vindicate wholesale devastation of the land and its people and moreover, on the pretext of this codification the landscapes turned into the militarized zone and thereby not only erase the ecological complexity but also turn this natural space into hostile space and ultimately a deaths cape. In this phenomenon geographical space as a natural body is erased and simultaneously replaced with politicized security tropes by two nuclear powers that sandwiched the natural inhabitants of this space. Drawing the inference from this phenomenon, this paper reads Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator through the postcolonial ecocritial perspective and acts of violence that permeates the natural landscape i.e. a village on the Indian side of the Line of Control (LoC) – Nowgam (Kashmir). The novel delineates the story of unnamed 19 years old son of village headman who refused to vacate when violence gripped the geographical landscape and subsequently the young boy was forcibly implicated by the army officer to go down the mountain ridge and collect IDs and weapons from the corpses of the militants. During these monotonous trips into the gostland, the protagonist felt nostalgic vibe when he ‘used to swim in the shallow green brook that ambles its way across the meadow’ fallowed by traumatic and hallucinatory experience accompanied with ecological devastation of the same landscape.

Key words: Ecological Othering, The Collaborator, Postcolonial, Eco critical, natural landscape, militarization, deaths cape.

In conflict zone violence on the landscape is often given a subaltern position, but Mirza Waheed portrays how the natural landscape is violated by the two nuclear states with utmost indifference. The ecological presence and importance is always implicated with the collective memory of the Kashmiris in a way that any anthropocentric concerns interact with the landscape as Sheikh ul-Alam, 14^th century Sufi saint, adored by Muslims and Hindus equally says, ‘Ann Poshi Teli Yeli Wan Posh’ means ‘As long as there are forests there will be food.’ The narrator’s first visit to the gostl and filled him grotesquely with nostalgic vibe and fear borne out of the present wretched state of the landscape which is indicative of intrinsic relationship between the natural history and human history. In the present macabre situation; surrounded by the dead bodies of the militants, the narrator ponders over the past glories of the landscape and the childhood forays when he along with his friends make boot marks on ‘fresh-from-dried-dew grass’, ran downhill and took a bath in the ‘low and languid stream’, and after swimming in the chilly water, ‘lie down on the thick carpet of grass for ages’, in short, ‘assumed full ownership of the place’ and didn’t care who was peering at them from the ‘ugly check-posts’ on the mountainside of India and Pakistan. Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator is a environmental work that shows as in the words of Lawrence Buell that “...the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history” (Buell 7-8). The natural landscape is now so fortified and constructed by India and Pakistan in terms of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ that advances unprecedented violence on the landscape and its inhabitants as the narrator says on witnessing the dead bodies down the hill, “I just cannot remove my eyes from this landscape, heaps of them, big and small, body parts, belongings littered amidst the rubble of legs and arms...Macabre, horrid ghouls on either side of the brook watch me from their melancholic black-hole eye sockets”

(Waheed 8). At times, the narrator felt an urge to ask the Captain Kadian to come along with him to inspect ‘his harvest of human remains’ and to see ‘the putrid trench he’s turned my valley into.’ (Waheed 13)What interests Kadian is the ID cards and photos meant to be shown on Doordarshan and these ID cards meant for him ‘little schoolboy trophies’, ‘a score he lives by in his murderscape!’ (Waheed 14) The beauty and serene of the landscape

(2)

2

mingled with blood and death which turn it into a deaths cape as the narrator says that

‘bright yellow outlines of human forms enclosing darkness inside’ and “in some cases the outline has started to become fuzzy now, with the tiny plants encroaching into the space of the ever-shrinking human remains” (Waheed 14) that makes the narrator cry, runaway and disappear from the gory scene. Moreover, this whimsical construction of the landscape into

‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ is similar to what Edward Said calls ‘...giving rise to geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary’ (Said 55), as the narrator wonders that how some families have some near and distant relatives on the either side of the border, but they can’t ever meet. The line not only divides geographical space but also the emotions while separating the relatives from each other, “Among other things, the line of control also curtailed bonding of the blood, prevented contact between brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, as if it were a sin” (Waheed 107). The hegemonic powers utilize this arbitrary geographical distinction to create “geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control”

(Said 225). The violence on the landscape left a deep impression on the child psyche;

snatches the childhood pleasures and brings forth a deep resentment as in case of Ashfaq who whacked the stumps with a furious blow of the bat and started shouting on hearing the sudden outburst of shelling while playing cricket. The narrator noticed that a tremor ran through his body and procure a loud shriek ‘as if something deep within him had come unstuck’ and said:

They are making this a Jahannum, we are all consigned to this hell! Look, look, look how they have killed that mountain...look at that forest they have just scorched, look! If only, if only they were themselves at the receiving end some day...They will, some day they will, huh... (Waheed 46).

The ecological space is often effaced and clothed as a hostile space and then

‘profoundly connected with operations of power’ (Loomba 43), and in a similar fashion both India and Pakistan are pounding on it in a pathetic way as the narrator says, “there would be blood, and sulphur, on the trees. Dark plumes of smoke would emerge from the green canopies. Pines, those majestic umbrella pines, would be broken, their spectacular dark green spreads turning to umbrellas of crumbling flame, smoke and ash” (Waheed 115). The violence pervades over the landscape in a way that the landscape and its inhabitants are cooped as a single entity while dealing with ‘terrorism’ and thus subjected to violence;

mixing the green with the red. Derek Gregory writes in The Colonial Present that there is a

“metonymic relationship between territorialisation and terrorism, in which each endlessly stands for the other: ‘terrorism’ is made to mean these territories, and these territories are made to mean terrorism” (Gregory 60). The narrator thinks that LOC is like a firework exhibition where the two states compete to make their scores:

They are pummelling the forest ground, burning the mossy earth, making scorching holes in the green, uprooting pines, deodars and firs, and hurling their gnarled branches and roots and burned berries and blossoms far, far away into the darkness...The whole jungle must be on fire, smoke and fumes and soot flying everywhere – what on earth are they doing, tearing the jungle apart, mixing limb with limb, branches and arms, grass and hair, sap and blood? Exploding the pine- needled surface, taking it to a boil (Waheed 129).

The narrator does not want to see Kashmir as a perpetual war zone where weapons of America, China or any other country find a testing zone as he says, “What better place to test it, huh?” (Waheed 130) In an attempt to clear the landscape of the dead bodies, the narrator, at first, tries to make graves of the deceased souls in one time cricket pitch, in a hope that “someone will at least discover them some day and tell others about what he has seen...there will at least be some record, some evidence, of what they have done here”

(Waheed 290), but because of their large number he makes the burning pyre for them that also suggests an attempt on his part to overcome the trauma through which he underwent in all these years. Towards the end of the novel, he castigates both India and Pakistan for what they have left of Kashmir as he narrates:

To hell with this all, I think, to hell with them all, to hell with the Indians ... to hell with all this swarming Army here, to hell with the Pakistanis, to hell with the line of control...to hell with Jihad, and to hell with, to burning, smouldering hell with everything! It must all end. It must all, all end (Waheed 300-301).

(3)

3 WORKS CITED

1. Baker, William Wayne. Kashmir: Happy Valley, Valley of Death. Las Vegas: Defenders Publications, 1994.

2. Buell, Lawrence. The Environment Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

3. Gregory, Derek. The Colonial Present. Oxford, Blackwell, 2004.

4. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism and Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge, 1998.

5. Said, Edward.Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books: New York, 1994.

6. Said, Edward W. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001.

7. Varma, Saiba. “From Terrorist to Terrorized: How Trauma Became the Language of Suffering in Kashmir.”

Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan., etal. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008, pp.135.Waheed, Mirza. The collaborator. Landon: Penguin, 2011.