Formidable and imposing, confounding but stunning, subtle yet weighty, The Lion of Kashmir is a pathbreaking work, in its surreal narrativ...
Formidable and imposing, confounding but stunning, subtle yet weighty, The Lion of Kashmir is a pathbreaking work, in its surreal narrative, the fluid/static narration, and the unreliable narrator. Kashmir’s territorial conflict has percolated into the psyche of its people, leaving ordinary minds struggling to find meaning of their troubled existence under warped conditions while holding on to vestiges of their crumbling sanity.
The Lion of Kashmir, a winding labyrinth of the human mindscape, explores this convoluted life. On the surface, it is a daughter’s account of trying to comprehend her relationship with her father within the frame of her “home” – “Kashmir has become a strange place…It seems unreal and hypnotic like a movie set or a fantasy. It entices with its false pretence…” At another level, however, the novel also documents an alternative history of a derelict paradise and its people’s fragmented existence, conflicts betweem identities, ideologies and affiliations.
What makes Siddhartha Gigoo’s third novel remarkable but also taxing is the portrayal of the inner psychosomatic processes of the protagonist, Zooni, who returns home from her more secure life in London to look for her missing father, Abdul Aziz, a commandant in the Special Forces. In the process, as the internal rhythms of thought...
