ABSTRACT
Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous Urdu short story “Tetwal ka Kutta” (The Dog of Tetwal) has had afterlives in two contemporary graphic productions from Kashmir – Malik Sajad’s künstlerroman Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir and Arif Ayaz Parrey and Waseem Helal’s graphic-segment “Tamasha-e-Tetwal.” This chapter analyzes the intertextual resonances and critical departures from Manto in the two Kashmiri graphic productions via two optics: (1) the polyvalent circulation of stray dogs as symbols, material presences, and interspecies cohabitants, and (2) the erasure of Tetwal/Kashmir as historically specific locales in Manto’s oeuvre. Adopting a critical animal studies perspective, the first optic considers the fluid meanings of “human” and “animal” in a necropolitical zone and the ways in which unprecedented forms of interspecies encounters are represented in the three works. The second optic considers the absent presence of Kashmir in Manto’s oeuvre. Kashmir is presented as a bone of contention between India and Pakistan without a distinct status of its own. By critiquing Manto’s erasure of Kashmiri specificity, Sajad, Parrey, and Helal foreground Kashmiri voices and histories in their graphic productions.
