Literary Latitude

Abstract

This note presents a critical analysis of Rahul Pandita’s memoir, Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, arguing that the text functions as a powerful, albeit contested, testament to the multifaceted precarity of the Kashmiri Pandit community. The central thesis is that this precarity is a direct consequence of a deliberate and systematic failure of the Indian state’s biopolitical duty. By examining this failure, the report demonstrates how the memoir provides a compelling case study that challenges and complicates two major theoretical frameworks from contemporary critical theory: Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ and Judith Butler’s notions of ‘grievability’ and ‘precarity.’ The analysis reveals that the state’s abdication of its protective function, alongside the active denial of Pandit suffering, exposes the limitations of these theories when applied to contexts of ethno-national conflict, where power operates not just through subtle control but also through selective neglect and the brutal disavowal of a minority population’s existence.

Introduction: The Memoir as a Contested Narrative and Political Artifact

Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots is a profoundly personal account of the 1990 exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, the Hindu minority of the Kashmir Valley. Published in 2013, the memoir recounts the author’s harrowing experience of being forced to flee his home in Srinagar at the age of 14, amidst the rising cries of Azaadi (freedom) and a burgeoning Islamist insurgency. The book’s power lies in its subjective and raw portrayal of a historical tragedy that, for decades, remained largely untold in dominant public and media narratives. It stands as a political artifact, a direct intervention into a polarized discourse by demanding that the suffering of his community be acknowledged. This note moves beyond a simple summary of the memoir to employ its granular, lived experience as a “test case” for established theoretical paradigms. The core purpose is to critically engage with and extend foundational concepts of state power and recognized suffering. The analysis will first explore the anatomy of precarity as it is viscerally rendered in the text, examining its existential, socio-cultural, and psychological dimensions. This will lay the groundwork for a detailed critique of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, an idea that struggles to fully account for the state’s selective and deliberate failure to protect a segment of its population. The note will then apply Judith Butler’s framework of ‘grievability,’ demonstrating how the Kashmiri Pandit experience serves as a powerful illustration of her theories on unacknowledged loss. However, it will also critically evaluate the limitations of these theoretical models, proposing that the specific dynamics of ethno-national conflict require a deeper understanding of how communal animus can precede and amplify political dispossession. By weaving together the historical narrative with contemporary critical theory, this report seeks to illuminate the complex interplay between personal testimony, state responsibility, and the politics of historical memory.

The Anatomy of Precariousness in Our Moon Has Blood Clots

The central narrative of Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the profound and multi-dimensional precarity experienced by the Kashmiri Pandit community. The memoir details a rapid and violent transition from a seemingly secure, rooted existence to a state of profound vulnerability, an unravelling that occurred with shocking speed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The precarity described in the book is not merely a political or economic condition; it is an existential state that encompasses physical, social, and psychological dimensions, each layer intensifying the trauma of displacement.

Existential and Physical Precarity

The memoir’s most chilling passages document the immediate and palpable threat of violence that became the daily reality for Pandits. The author describes an atmosphere of terror created by “thousands of Kalashnikov-toting Mujahideen” who walked openly in Kashmir. The book is filled with accounts of the brutal targeting of civilians, a reality that counters the claim that only those who worked with security agencies were at risk. Pandita recounts stories of doctors, professors, teachers, and even children being killed, often with the complicity of their own friends and neighbours. The cruelty of these attacks is so visceral that some critics have drawn parallels to the genocides of the Jews in Europe, the Christians in Armenia, and the people of Indian origin under Idi Amin’s regime in Uganda. The forced exodus was not a voluntary migration; it was a desperate flight for survival, a response to a campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at ethnic cleansing.   

Socio-Cultural Precarity: The Betrayal of “Kashmiriyat”

Beyond the physical threat, the memoir powerfully conveys the collapse of the social fabric. Pandita’s narrative is one of a community betrayed by those they once trusted. The book is filled with instances of “families turning against neighbours, friends conniving with persecutors, childhood friends raping and killing hapless Pandit women and even the police joining hands with cold-blooded murderers”. This rupture shattered the syncretic, harmonious culture of “Kashmiriyat” that had long defined the peaceful co-existence of Hindus and Muslims in the valley. The title itself, Our Moon Has Blood Clots, serves as a powerful metaphor for this loss, suggesting that the memories of a once-joyful culture are “now stained with blood and sadness”. The precarity of the Pandits was thus amplified by the intimate nature of the betrayal; the threat came not just from anonymous militants but from the very neighbours who were once part of their daily lives. The fact that the violence was facilitated by this communal complicity made the suffering uniquely profound and the precarity inescapable. This aspect of the narrative demonstrates that precarity in this context was not simply a top-down phenomenon of state violence but also a bottom-up process of communal dissolution that fundamentally undermined a community’s sense of belonging and safety.   

Economic and Psychological Precarity

The memoir also details the brutal reality of life after the exodus. Pandits who fled were rendered “refugees in their own homeland”. The book describes the dire conditions of refugee camps in Jammu, where families were packed into cramped quarters and struggled with poverty and heat. They were exploited by “heartless landlords” and humiliated by an “insensitive population” of fellow Hindus, a reality that dispelled any hope of a sympathetic reception. The psychological toll of this displacement is a recurring theme. The author’s mother, for instance, is unable to accept her status as a “refugee,” obsessively recounting the grandeur of their lost home, a motif that symbolizes the deep sense of an “irretrievable loss”. The narrative powerfully conveys the pain, agony, and embarrassment of a community that lost everything, yet still held onto its humanity. The memoir’s strength lies in its ability to render the abstract concept of precarity with visceral, personal detail. The account of a once-secure community’s rapid descent into this state of vulnerability, caused not only by external violence but also by the collapse of internal social trust, provides a powerful and unsettling narrative. This multi-dimensional precarity—encompassing the loss of physical safety, social bonds, cultural identity, and a sense of home—forms the foundation for the subsequent theoretical critique.

The State’s Abdication: A Critique of Foucauldian Governmentality

The exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, as documented in Pandita’s memoir, represents a catastrophic failure of state protection, an event that directly challenges and complicates Michel Foucault’s influential concept of governmentality. While Foucault’s work provides a framework for understanding modern power, the specific dynamics of the Kashmir conflict expose its limitations in addressing selective state failure in a context of ethno-national violence.

Defining Governmentality and Biopower

Foucault’s concept of governmentality explores the evolution of governance from traditional, sovereign power to a more complex, modern form that aims to manage and foster the life of a population. This “art of government” is not limited to the state but operates through a wide range of practices and institutions that shape the “conduct of conducts”.A key component of this shift is biopower, the transformation from a sovereign’s right to “take life and let live” to the modern state’s function to “foster life or disallow it to the point of death”. Biopolitics, in this sense, is the political rationality that manages and optimizes the biological existence of a population, using data on birth rates, mortality, health, and productivity to ensure the well-being of its citizens.   

The Biopolitical Failure

The Kashmiri Pandit exodus represents a total breakdown of this biopolitical contract. The Indian state, which is meant to be concerned with the prosperity, health, and longevity of its entire population , effectively abandoned the Pandits to their fate. Instead of “fostering life,” the state’s inaction “let die” a segment of its own citizenry. The memoir highlights the despair felt by Pandits at a nation that “mouths lofty platitudes but does little to protect its persecuted communities”.Political leaders and public intellectuals, who were meant to embody the secular, democratic values of the state, were accused of a “callousness” that made them turn away from the suffering of a community that did not constitute a political vote bank. The state’s selective application of its biopolitical apparatus—protecting some populations while failing to protect others—contradicts the “for each and all” aspect of Foucault’s model.   

Weaponized Abdication

The explicit, brutal, and ethno-religious violence recounted in the memoir—killings, torture, rape—seems to contradict Foucault’s later emphasis on power as a subtle, disciplinary force that operates on “docile bodies”. The facts (incidents) presented in the memoir suggests that for the Kashmiri Pandits, the state reverted to a more primitive form of sovereign power—one that simply allows its subjects to be killed. However, this is not a simple failure of a system; it is the weaponization of state failure. Foucault’s model suggests a movement away from brutal sovereign power towards a more sophisticated biopolitical apparatus, but the Kashmir crisis demonstrates a deliberate, selective application of sovereign power. The state’s power was not simply absent; its absence was a political choice. The Indian state chose to abdicate its duty to protect a minority population, thereby allowing violence to occur. This is a calculated form of governance. The biopolitical apparatus, which is meant to be concerned with the well-being of the population as a whole and every individual within it, was deliberately withheld from the Kashmiri Pandits. This reveals a limitation of Foucault’s model when applied to ethno-national conflicts, as it shows that the power to “let die” can be a calculated form of governance, not just a remnant of a bygone era. It is a form of power that uses the suffering of one group as a means of political control or inaction in a broader conflict.

The Politics of Mourning: A Butlerian Analysis of Ungrievability

Rahul Pandita’s memoir provides a powerful illustration of Judith Butler’s concepts of precarity and grievability. The book demonstrates how the suffering of the Kashmiri Pandits was systematically rendered “ungrievable” by a dominant political and media discourse that sought to deny their experience. However, the conflict also reveals a limitation in Butler’s framework, suggesting that grievability is not just a political act of “framing” but can also be a pre-political condition rooted in deep-seated communal animus.

Defining Precarity and Grievability

Butler’s work defines precarity as a fundamental human condition of shared vulnerability and social dependence. This condition, she argues, should serve as the basis for a global ethics of solidarity. Grievability, in her framework, is the political recognition that a life matters and is worthy of being mourned in the event of its loss. According to Butler, political power structures and media narratives employ “framing” to render certain lives as “ungrievable,” effectively making them unworthy of empathy or protection. This derealization of loss justifies violence against a population and prevents it from being recognized as a human tragedy.   

The Unacknowledged Loss

The Kashmiri Pandit experience aligns perfectly with Butler’s notion of ungrievability. Pandita’s memoir and the discourse surrounding it highlight the “various forms of outright denial, falsification and conspiracy theories” that were used to dismiss the Pandit exodus. Critics of the memoir questioned the author’s memory and accused him of fabricating historical events, such as the slogan “Assi gacchi panu’nuy Pakistan, batav rostuy, bataenein saan” (we want our Pakistan, without Pandit men, but with their women). This denial was a political act aimed at absolving Kashmiri Muslims of “collective guilt” and framing the exodus as something other than a violent ethnic cleansing. The public sphere was thus “created on the condition that certain images do not appear… certain names of the dead are not utterable, certain losses are not avowed as losses, and violence is derealized and diffused”. The very act of writing Our Moon Has Blood Clots is a direct form of resistance to this framing. The memoir is a “bold attempt at countering propaganda with truth” and forcing a derealized loss back into public view. By providing a personal and detailed account of the tragedy, Pandita’s book becomes an act of political mourning, demanding that the grievability of his community be recognized and that their suffering be acknowledged as a legitimate human tragedy.   

Grievability as a Pre-Political Condition

While Butler’s framework is powerful, its focus on discursive and media framing may not fully account for the deep-seated communal animus described by Pandita and his critics. The memoir suggests that the ungrievability of the Pandits was not merely a result of political discourse but was rooted in an underlying ideological framework. A critique from Kindle Magazine accuses Pandita of promoting a “Brahmin idea” that views Kashmiri Muslims as “inanimate objects” or Mleccha. This framework, which casts Hinduism as a religion of equality only for Brahmins, posits that the Mleccha do not have free will and therefore cannot be held responsible for their actions. This perspective, regardless of its validity, points to a crucial limitation in Butler’s model. Butler assumes a potential for solidarity based on a shared recognition of precarity. However, the Kashmiri case suggests that grievability is not just a political act of “framing” but a pre-political condition rooted in social and historical antagonisms. When a community is already dehumanized—seen as lacking a fundamental moral capacity and agency—their lives become “ungrievable” at a fundamental, ethical level, before any political framing even takes place. The ideological lens through which one community views another can make their lives “ungrievable” from the start. This demonstrates that Butler’s model may need to be extended to account for how deeply embedded racial, caste, and religious ideologies can render an entire population as “ungrievable” from a communal, not just political, standpoint.   

The Contest of Narratives and the Politics of Representation

Rahul Pandita’s memoir is not a neutral historical account but an active participant in a deeply polarized political struggle over the Kashmir narrative. The book’s reception and the controversies it sparked reveal a contest for historical memory, where multiple communities are unwilling to acknowledge the painful experiences of the other. A critical examination of this contest requires a comparative analysis with other prominent Kashmiri narratives, such as Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night, to understand the politics of representation at play.

The Controversial Nature of the Memoir

Our Moon Has Blood Clots was received as a “controversial text” and became embroiled in discussions about its “factual authenticity and historical accuracy”. Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, in a review for Economic and Political Weekly, accuses Pandita of “selectively choosing historical instances to suit a particular narrative” and of presenting a history “without references”. She questions the precision of his memory, particularly a recollection from when he was only seven years old. The controversy extends to specific details, such as the slogan of ethnic cleansing, which many Kashmiri Muslims have contested as a “creation of the Pandit imagination”. The denial of the Pandit experience is a central theme in Pandita’s account, which suggests that the widespread challenge to his narrative is a continuation of the same denial that made their suffering invisible in the first place.   

A Comparison with Curfewed Night

The ideological contest over the Kashmir narrative is most clearly understood by comparing Pandita’s memoir with Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night. These two books, published within a few years of each other, offer “different narrative and ideological perspectives” on the same period.   

• Peer’s Narrative: Peer, a Kashmiri Muslim, focuses on the “lived experience of Indian counterinsurgency”. His memoir chronicles the brutality of the Indian state, including the systematic use of torture, extrajudicial killings, and disregard for human rights. He depicts a Kashmir where the “Indian state” is the primary antagonist, and the insurgency is framed as a response to the “denial and subversion of democratic rights” and the failure of the electoral process.   
• Pandita’s Narrative: Pandita’s memoir, by contrast, presents the perspective of Kashmiri Pandits, whose forced migration is “often overlooked in dominant narratives”. He argues that the violence was orchestrated by Islamist militants with the complicity of the Muslim population. His book is a “counter-narrative to the predominantly Muslim victimhood discourse” in Kashmir. The primary antagonist in his story is the communal violence facilitated by his former neighbours and the negligence of the Indian state.   

The Memoir as an Active Participant in the Politics of Grievability

The memoir is not a neutral record of the past; it is an active intervention in the present. The very act of its writing and the subsequent backlash it faced are not just external critiques. They are the live-action evidence of the “struggle of memory against forgetting”. The academic and public debate surrounding the book is the continuation of the “politics of grievability” in action. The contest over “factual authenticity” and the questioning of his memory are themselves part of the larger struggle to determine which narrative, and whose suffering, will be deemed legitimate and worthy of public recognition.   

The table below provides a concise overview of the competing ideological perspectives and their central narratives, which shape the politics of representation in Kashmir.

	Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots	Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night
Author/Community	Rahul Pandita (Kashmiri Pandit)	Basharat Peer (Kashmiri Muslim)
Central Narrative	Exodus as a result of Islamist violence and communal complicity.	Insurgency as a result of state repression and electoral rigging.
Primary Antagonist	Islamist militants and the Muslim population.	The Indian state and security forces.
Reception	Controversial, accused of historical simplification and one-sidedness.	Acclaimed for showcasing “Kashmiri voices” against state violence.
Core Theme	Victimhood of a persecuted minority and a neglected narrative.	Resistance to state occupation and the trauma of counterinsurgency.
Ideological Underpinning	The Hindu Right’s view of Kashmir as “formerly Hindu territory” seized by Islam.	Kashmiri nationalism and self-determination, with a focus on human rights.

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Conclusion: The Memoir as a Theoretical and Political Artifact

Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots, despite its acknowledged limitations and the fierce contestation it faces, is a critical text that exposes the shortcomings of dominant theoretical frameworks in explaining the complexities of ethno-national conflict. The analysis demonstrates that the memoir is more than a personal story; it is a document of profound precarity that forces a re-evaluation of concepts like state responsibility and the politics of grief. The Indian state’s failure to protect the Kashmiri Pandits cannot be adequately explained by Foucault’s model of governmentality, which focuses on subtle mechanisms of control. The incidents suggest that a more deliberate and brutal form of power was at play—the weaponization of state failure. The state’s selective abdication of its protective function was a political choice that used the suffering of one community as a means of political management. This extends Foucault’s analysis by demonstrating that the power to “let die” is not just a remnant of a bygone era but can be a calculated, modern form of governance. Similarly, the concept of grievability, as developed by Judith Butler, powerfully explains how the Pandit experience was rendered invisible and unmourned by dominant narratives. The memoir’s existence itself is an act of resistance against this political “framing.” However, the analysis of the memoir’s reception suggests that grievability is not just a political act but can be a pre-political condition rooted in deep-seated communal ideologies. When one community views another as fundamentally “other” and “less than human,” their lives are rendered “ungrievable” from the outset, before any political discourse takes hold. This represents a crucial limitation of Butler’s model when applied to conflicts where dehumanization is a socio-historical condition. In its very existence, the memoir stands as a testament to the struggle for historical truth in a polarized environment. It is a text that demands a re-evaluation of how we understand power, responsibility, and suffering in postcolonial conflict zones. The academic and public debate surrounding Our Moon Has Blood Clots is not just a discussion of the past but a continuation of the politics of grievability in the present. Future research and reading should explore how personal testimony can both challenge and be co-opted by competing political narratives, and how theoretical frameworks can be adapted to more effectively analyse the selective application of power in conflicts where the state’s primary function shifts from fostering life to managing death for political gain.