ABSTRACT
Foregrounding Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider (2014) as a contextual archive, this chapter not only explores the enduring influence of Partition as the ‘originary trauma’ in the Indian national imaginary, but also examines how the filmmaker has framed the lingering ghost of Partition as it manifests itself in the consequent insurgency in Kashmir, nation-formation, and citizenship within the spectral-realist cinematic. The analysis of Kashmiri identity as spectral absence(s) in Haider is enabled through an understanding of the state as inflected through Agamben’s notion of ‘state of exception’ and Mbembé’s idea of ‘necropower’. Written from a position informed by a critique of the subjectivity model of trauma theory and its relations with the discourses of spectrality, spectro-politics, and spectral resistance, this chapter explicates that the legacy of Partition violence is more dangerous than violence itself.
