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Title From Violence to "Utmost Happiness": An Anarchist Critique of South Asian Anglophone Fiction

Author(s) Shaista Malik

Abstract Title: From Violence to “Utmost Happiness”: An Anarchist Critique of South Asian Anglophone Fiction Imparting a new dimension to the critical inquiry, the current research is an anarchist critique of selected literary texts with an attention to violence in South Asian context. I have selected Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2013), Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), and Nayomi Munoveera’s Island of Thousand Mirrors (2012) as primary texts. The strategic location of Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, with povertyridden population, war-torn communal structures, an intensifying religious fundamentalism, ethnic homogeneity, and ecologically worsening environment, has inspired many writers to raise the question of affability of civilization in their creative writings. With the help of a multi-modeled theoretical framework, I question the logic of the present technological civilization founded upon the principle of “development” and “progress” as explicitly stated by hegemonic convictions and examine civilization’s bearing and implications for multiple forms of life existing in these locales, as presented by the writers. The contemporary elevation of civilization as harbinger of symmetrical power relations, class parity, social justice and “happiness” has been questioned by South Asian writers; they deem the current model of civilization as suffused with perennial violence and its proliferation of social injustice, class disparity, and strangulation of ethnic communities in the name of “nationalism” as genocidal. In addition to that, the alternatives voiced by these writers in their respective contexts are also studied and analysed. The thesis examines the atrocious consequences of land appropriation, alienation and objectification of human beings, disintegration of non-human life, only for economic and political gains, as engines of perennial violence. I explore if civilization and its strategies, as identified in the selected fiction, are subjecting all forms of life to erasure for the vested interest of a few segments. I contend that by narrating the violent strategies of civilization, manifested in the social, economic, political and environmental spaces of their lands, the selected writers state the disruption created for multiple forms of life and by giving an alternative solution for a violence-free life, the South Asian writers are broadening the scope of contemporary knowledge produced in this field.

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2023-11-17

Subject PhD English Literature

Publisher Department of English (GS)

Contributor(s) Dr. Nighat Ahmad

Format As per departmental guidelines

Identifier Dr. Muhammad Haseeb Nasir (PhD English Program Coordinator)

Source PhD

Relation PhD

Coverage PhD

Rights PhD

Category PhD English Literature Thesis

Description From Violence to "Utmost Happiness": An Anarchist Critique of South Asian Anglophone Fiction