Drawing childhood in conflict: Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir

Influenced by Art Spiegelman and Joe Sacco, Kashmiri artist Malik Sajad’s graphic narrative Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir calls the reader’s attention to the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, a South Asian region controlled by India, Pakistan and China since the 1940s. Using the hangul elk (an engendered species) to represent Kashmiris while portraying others as human characters, Sajad’s deliberate choice visually sets Kashmiris apart from the rest of the world. This article examines how the main character’s development from a boy with intermittent schooling to a cartoonist with political awareness is interlaced with the escalating violence in Kashmir from the early 1990s to the 2010s. In particular, it discusses how Sajad’s book presents massacres, curfews, crackdowns, mass graves and cover-ups as normalcy in Kashmiri daily life, how it experiments the conventions of comics, interrupts the temporal and spatial arrangements of the panels and creates gaps in the visual and verbal narratives often without foreshadowing or explanations and how it presents history as experiences lived instead of knowledge learned. Sajad’s graphic narrative does not provide a solution and ‘frustrates a reader looking for closure’. The closing panel visualizes Munnu disappearing into the all-encompassing darkness with only a flashlight guiding his way. Filling in the blanks of the ‘K-word’, the story comes to a stop without a sense of conclusion or a direction for the future, thus prompting the reader to contemplate the status of Kashmiris who have been left in a political limbo for decades and continue to be ‘endangered’.