“Laashon Ko Farq Nahi Pareyga?”

Affirmative Biopolitics in Death Camps in Asad Muhammad Khan’s Selected Short Stories

Abstract

This paper draws on an affirmative biopolitical framework to analyze how the marginalized characters in Pakistani writer Asad Muhammad Khan’s Urdu short fiction endeavour to redefine their understandings of their individual and communal power that has been confiscated by the state. I engage with his two eminent short stories, “Ghus Baithiya” translated as “Intruder”, and “Murda Ghar Mein Mukaashfa” translated as “Apocalypse in the Mortuary” from his short stories collection, “Burj e Khamoshan” translated as Tower of the Dead (1990). The title of his anthology inspires my reading of his short fiction as a site of renegotiating what the ideas of death and life entail for individuals of a necropolitical state, driven into death camps. I argue that despite this condition of confinement to their respective necropolitical spaces, Khan’s characters envisage an alternative to this zone of exception by redefining their comprehension of death not as a finality to life or the state’s right to keep using their dead bodies for their aims, but a chance to “resist modes of dominance over, or negation of, life” (Lin et al., 2018, p. 887). Their exposure to death and the re-reading of its politics pave the way for their engagement with an affirmative biopolitics that aids them in re-accessing their power as individuals or as small communities brought together by a common purpose – ‘to live and let others live.’