Between Humanity and Technology: A Humanistic and Posthumanist Reading of Rehman Rahi's Poetry

This study interrogates the poetic oeuvre of the Kashmiri modernist poet and Jnanpith laureate Rehman Rahi (1925–2023) through the dialectical frameworks of classical humanism and critical posthumanism. While conventional critical reception predominantly anchors Rahi within the paradigms of anti-colonial progressivism, existential phenomenology (Dasein), and vernacular linguistic revivalism, his sustained engagement with technomodernity, mechanization, biopolitical surveillance, and the ontological dissolution of the human remains substantially undertheorized. Tracing Rahi’s trajectory from the sovereign, anthropocentric agency of Nawroz-i-Saba (1958) to the fragmented, visceral ecology of Siyah Rood Jaren Manz (1997), this paper demonstrates how Rahi systematically deconstructs the autonomous liberal humanist subject. Engaging close readings of representative texts—including “Soni Lanki Pyeth,” “Akh Sawaal,” and “Thoni Russ Sadaa”—this article argues that Rahi anticipates a critical posthumanist condition wherein the rigid demarcations separating the biological, the machinic, and the more-than-human collapse under the pressures of historical trauma and instrumental rationality.