From Lived Space to Liminal Space: A reading of Freny Manecksha’s Behold I Shine: Narratives of Kashmir’s Women and Children.

Abstract

The paper is an attempt to read the non fictional work by the Indian Journalist, Freny Manecksha titled, Behold I Shine: Narratives of Kashmir’s Women and Children to surface how the army occupation in Kashmir led to drastic transformation of its people’s engagement with the space they inhabit leading to liminality. Thinkers in Spatial studies have analysed urban space beyond its materiality by relating the human experience with geographical aspect, thereby revealing urban space as the vibrant venue for various human activities. Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, and Edward Soja have led studies from a spatial perspective counter to historical and temporal ones. Such studies have resulted in novel approaches to the space we inhabit and interact. Concepts like ‘heterotopia’, liminality, lived space and third space have elevated space from narrow understanding of it as stagnant and mere backdrop for various historical events and turned it to be regarded as an active agent in determining the very nature of human actions enacted upon it. The concept of ‘lived space’ as envisaged by Henri Lefebvre in his work, The Production of Space stands for the symbolic use of physical space where as ‘liminality’ as envisaged by Arnold Van Gennep refers to the space in the threshold or in transition. The present paper tries to look at the relationship between the people of Kashmir and their long disputed land which turned them alienated in terms of regional and cultural aspects. When the state of Kashmir got divided as Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Kashmir under Indian administration, the physical borders and lines of control created deeper wounds in the lives and culture of the people of Kashmir. FrenyManecksha’s Behold I Shine: Narratives of Kashmir’s Women and Children is taken as the representative work to analyse how the people of Kashmir get accustomed to the changed spatial arrangement of the places they live in which have turned their lives uncertain and in transition.