Vulnerability, Resistance and the Idea of Home: A Study of a Kashmiri Memoir

Home has been one of the most challenging and enigmatic questions for the Kashmiri Pandits in recent decades. The Pandits had to flee from their centuries-old ancestral homeland to escape persecution. Hostility perpetrated against the Pandits turned their lives into a piteous existence, forcing them to live in refugee camps for decades without any chances of peaceful resettlement or re-rooting in Kashmir, the much cherished homeland. This paper undertakes to analyse Siddhartha Gigoo’s A Long Season of Ashes (2024) to examine the ideas of home, vulnerability and resistance in the context of the uprooted Pandit community of Kashmir, which inevitably brings into play the concepts of identity and belongingness. In analyzing Gigoo’s memoir that records the precarious existence of the Pandits in camps who constantly suffer from a sense of colossal loss, the paper will also try to assess the debate circling around the notion of Kashmiriyat at the present times.