‘The Last Knot’: A novel rooted in Kashmir's past, present and future
Summary
Shabir Ahmad Mir’s new novel, ‘The Last Knot’, balances aesthetics and politics. The author proves that it is possible to experiment with structure and ideas, while staying rooted to the harsh reality of his people’s lives
Shabir Ahmad Mir’s new novel, The Last Knot, is set in Kashmir under the Dogra rule, but the overall mood it conjures up isn’t a million miles away from the state of darkness and despair that the region has found itself plunged into over the last several decades. The main actors of his story are the Muslim carpet weavers from the state, who, in the 19th century, had to pay exorbitant taxes under the rule of the Dogra kings. Although their craftsmanship was highly valued, these carpet weavers could not save themselves from persecution by the ruling elite. The price of defection from their profession could be lethal, including death, so running away wasn’t a solution. The community was kept under a strict watch, tethered to weaving carpets all their lives, their thumbs bound to the loom, as the narrator puts it towards the end of the novel. The outcome of their hard labour—the precious things of beauty they produced—bore no trace of their inhuman toil, all the blood, sweat and suffering that it exacted from the weavers.
Living under this oppressive regime, the protagonist of Mir’s story is not any ordinary weaver. He dreams of creating a magic carpet, one that is able to fly unfettered over the vast hills and dales of his homeland. Like those who live in subjugation and conflict zones, his wish is to find freedom from a life preordained to a state of servitude. Exasperated by his ambition, his wusteh, or master, sends off his apprentice to seek out Abli Bab, the thumbless weaver, who lives in a secret cave in the mythical Haer Parbat.
Like the fantastical adventures of Amir Hamza, the fleeing weaver’s journey towards creating his magic carpet is crossed by fatal enemies. But unlike the exploits of the folkloric hero, this flesh-and-blood man must weather the storms of a merciless world, where soldiers are out for his blood. Mir packs into his protagonist the tragic consciousness of a Hamlet-like figure, who is forced to feign madness in order to deceive the tyrants hot on his trail. He finds refuge with a rangur, a seasoned dyer, who, in spite of his mastery at his trade, is unable to concoct the perfect blue, a dye that won’t run out under the influence of the elements. It’s the only secret of his trade his forefathers had failed to pass on to him, a fate from which he has no redemption. Living as a destitute moutt (madman) with this dyer and his daughter Heemal, the weaver finds himself in possession of the mysterious key to the colour blue. But his discovery is lost in a cycle of deception—the dyer betraying his daughter, who betrays the moutt, who, in turn, betrays her, and so on.
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The Last Knot is a fount of fascinating stories— some drawn from history, others from folklore and oral traditions—endlessly proliferating as the novel moves on, like Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Mir’s design is complex and intricate, like a finely woven carpet, where facts and fiction merge to create truths that no folklorist or historian has had access to. The novel may hark back to the past, but the writer’s consciousness is keenly informed by the realities of his time. The result is a tapestry made of time, tightly knotted up like an expertly woven carpet, where the strands of past, present and future can no longer be untangled.
In spite of its social realist scaffolding, The Last Knot is a deeply modernist novel, told through episodes that interlock, overlap, and repeat, pulling the reader into a dizzying maze of stories. The progression of the plot isn’t linear, and the ending isn’t neat either. Like his debut novel, The Plague Upon Us (2020), Mir doesn’t make it easy for the reader who looks for a structure—one that will lead to an inevitable crescendo. Instead, he likes to layer his narrative with allusions— especially to Greek mythology, Oedipus Rex, and the blind prophet Tiresias in this novel—all the while spinning a web of words that seduces the reader to keep turning the page.
It may be tempting to label The Last Knot as a work of magic realism, but that would be a disservice to the novel. More fittingly, the novel resembles a hall of mirrors, where the atrocities of the past and present reflect one another in an endless loop to create a premonition of the future. Just as the British sold Kashmir to Gulab Singh, the Dogra ruler, for a sum of ₹75 lakh in 1846 following the Treaty of Amritsar, a century later, the same colonial rulers left the region in a shambles after the independence of India and Pakistan. As Hari Singh, the last ruler of the Dogra dynasty, acceded Kashmir to the Dominion of India, his action triggered a conflict that continues to this day, with no end in sight.
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In a sense, The Last Knot may be read as a prequel to The Plague Upon Us, which is focused on Kashmir’s present crisis. The Last Knot is almost like a preamble of things to come, but both novels fit into the intellectual vision of Mir’s career as a fiction writer—one that he outlined in an essay he wrote for Lounge in 2021, shortly after he had been nominated for the JCB Prize for Literature that year. As he wrote, raising a rhetorical question, “There is too much blood for good literature in Kashmir, says writer Arundhati Roy. Should I, then, let my aesthetic reign supreme and dilute the blood? Or should I let the blood of my people overwhelm my art and reduce whatever I write to mere polemic?"
It’s not easy for a writer marked by the tragic history they have inherited to walk the fine line between aesthetics and politics, to refuse to let their creative impulses be subsumed by a desire to speak on behalf of their people, who have been living through violence and injustice for centuries. With The Last Knot, Mir has proved that it is indeed possible to experiment with form, structure and ideas, while staying rooted to the harsh reality of his people’s lives—the impossibly knotted past, present and future that bind them all together into a common fabric of tragedy.
