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The scenic terrain of Kashmir has also shaped its cultural imagination, history, and daily life. More recently, contemporary Kashmiri authors have incorporated political conflict, exile, and ecosystems into their representations of nature. This paper conducts an ecocritical analysis of two contemporary Kashmiri books: Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator (2011) and Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night (2008) to determine how ecological environments generate trauma, memory, and resilience within Kashmir. This analysis employs concepts of ecocriticism, post-colonial environmental studies, and environmental memory. The article argues that both works illustrate Kashmir's inability to disconnect ecological considerations from its socio-political histories. Kashmiri literature is thus woven together through the experiences of violence, loss, and survival.
The Collaborator depicts natural features like mountains, forests, and rivers as impacted by militarization, death, and ecological disaster; whereas Curfewed Night focuses on how rivers, orchards, and seasonal landscapes have been used by Kashmiris to sustain memory, identity, and collective belonging during long-term violence. Although these two works are written in different genres (one is a novel, and the other a memoir), both pieces of literature illustrate that the Kashmir landscape can be understood as an ecological witness to the consequences of political violence and cultural alienation. By putting these two works together, the article argues that contemporary Kashmiri writers articulate an environmental consciousness in which the terrain acts as a site of trauma, memory, and political conflict. These narratives offer an ecological perspective of militarism, extending existing discussions of ecocriticism in postcolonial contexts. The focus on literature also shows how it can be used to keep alive the environmental memories of places with their difficult histories.
Harshita Sharma. “Rivers of Memory, Mountains of Trauma: A Comparative Ecocritical Study of Mirza Waheed and Basharat Peer.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 493-514. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.30.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
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