Reading Literature on Riots as Affective Testimony

Abstract

Through a reading of Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness, the paper looks at affective strategies deployed in literature that write of sectarian violence in postcolonial India. Thinking through the affect-trauma paradigm, an argument for looking at literary responses to sectarian violence as affective testimonies– one that records both the ungraspability of pain and the more than of representation– would be made. A reading of these affective strategies in Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness would help us understand the writer’s attempts at establishing affective connections between different bodies, both the writing body and the reading body, which open up the reading body to feel the inaccessible experience. It is affect and its contagion that further make way to feel what has not yet happened to the readers, which makes a possibility of intersubjectivity, allowing readers to access the psychic space of the characters in the fiction.