ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night and Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Bloodclots and classifies these life narratives as non-fictional Bildungsromane. The generic features of the coming-of-age novel are used by Peer and Pandita to plot their stories, and craft human rights narratives that advocate on behalf of Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits and attempt to generate sympathy and evoke affect within the ranks of their national and transnational readers. This chapter argues that the traditional Bildungsroman is steeped in narratives of pleasure, and Peer and Pandita’s memoirs use this genre’s connection with discourses of both human rights and pleasure for representing Kashmiri subjectivity under oppression and the state of both enjoying and losing rights in the cosmopolitan, politically turbulent, and picturesque Valley of Kashmir.
