This thesis is a study of the literature of ‘disturbed areas’, the legal designation used to localise emergency powers in Kashmir and Northern Ireland. It focuses on the designation as a political euphemism, and on the ways literary texts reconstitute the realities and lived experiences that these legal instruments elide. The study covers a wide range of fiction, poetry and film, from canonical poets Seamus Heaney and Agha Shahid Ali to contemporary works by Anna Burns, Mirza Waheed, and Bollywood filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj. I argue that the literary mode can act as one of many methods of political agitation, but one with a unique capacity to connect the minutiae of lives lived under emergency law with the larger frames of history, law and governance. Locating myself at the intersection of legal history and literary studies, I begin by tracing the common colonial roots of the disturbed areas clause and its historical use in Ireland and India. I follow its evolution into the twentieth century as a related set of legal responses to the conflicts in Kashmir and Northern Ireland.

My thesis then asks how the material conditions of lives lived under emergency law are translated into creative work. It focuses in successive chapters on the ways the pastoral mode is modified in conflict poetry; how state violence is responded to in fiction; how political imprisonment disrupts text’s generic and thematic concerns; and how fiction thematizes the fear of being seen to be complicit with the authorities.

By bringing these histories and literatures together for the first time I construct a cultural history of the disturbed areas paradigm as reflected in the anglophone literary production of the conflicts in Kashmir and Northern Ireland, situating it and its literary artefacts as important parts of the global material legacies of the colonial world.