WEAVING AGAINST THE STATE: CRAFT, LABOUR AND SUBTERRANEAN RESISTANCE IN SHABIR AHMAD MIR’S THE LAST KNOT (2025)

This paper examines Shabir Ahmad Mir’s The Last Knot (2025) as a literary intervention that reconfigures resistance beyond the dominant paradigms of protest, insurgency and counter- insurgency. By setting his novel against the backdrop of the draconian Dogra regime and the lesser-known Shawlbaaf movement, Mir articulates a form of subterranean resistance embedded in craft-based aesthetics, particularly through his protagonist’s attempted weaving of an ‘impossible’ flying carpet, which I intend to analyse using James C. Scott’s concept of ‘hidden transcripts’. However such an audacious enterprise is fraught with perils and must be carried out covertly to avoid the Dogra sledgehammer. Mir’s novel chronicles the carpet- weaver’s painstaking efforts to procure the mystical blue dye to bring the flying carpet to life and how the act of weaving, so deeply ingrained in Kashmiri culture, assumes larger political, epistemological and ontological dimensions. By invoking hagiographical figures such as Mir Sayyid Ali Hamdani and situating Kashmiri craftsmanship within a Sufi-inflected moral economy, where labour is oriented toward ethical formation rather than symbolic representation, The Last Knot resists the statist or nationalist appropriation of craft/artisanship. Also, the novel’s attention to the suffering of the Kashmiri shawl weavers under the Dogra rule accentuates how craft is inseparable from the histories of extraction and coercion that the labouring bodies are subjected to. In this regard, I intend to use theories on labour and craft by Tim Ingold and Richard Sennett. Mir’s protagonist’s inability to tie ‘the last knot’ of the carpet is not only a metaphor for the unresolved historico-political status of Kashmir, but is also symptomatic of the fact that resistance in Kashmir’s context is not necessarily teleological, but an ongoing process. At the end of the novel, the protagonist’s prophetic vision of a speck of light transforming into a carpet flying in the metaphysical realm is suggestive of creativity as defying cartographic regimentation and the unending nature of the Kashmiris’ aspiration for freedom. To what extent, then, does The Last Knot expose the inadequacies of South Asian nationalist paradigms that mostly frame liberation and sovereignty as the inevitable outcome of resistance and struggle? What light does Mir’s novel throw on the politics of visibility and invisibility in a conflict zone like Kashmir where open dissent is mostly incriminated? These are some broader questions the paper aims to explore. KEYWORDS: subterranean resistance, weaving, craft, labour, visibility, invisibility, Kashmir