‘Boxes of grief’: reading Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir as a counter-historical graphic memoir

The graphic narrative has emerged as a significant site of counter-historical intervention. It challenges traditional historiography, which has long functioned as an instrument of power by archiving and legitimising the sovereign’s narrative. As Pramod Nayar asserts, graphic narratives function as ’performatives’ that challenge the mainstream histories of the nation and attempt to restore the lived experiences of the marginalised. Its embodied and participatory reading allows them to capture what traditional historiography has consistently overlooked. It is within this context that this paper analyses how Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir employs the graphic medium as a counter-historical intervention in the contested terrain of Kashmiri political memory. Firstly, it examines how the medium’s formal strategies, such as the visual-verbal synthesis, mimetic approximation, closure, metalepsis, and multimodal narration, perform the counter-historical act of fracturing the dominant historical accounts and opening space for the ‘small voices of history’. Secondly, it analyses how the memoir personalises history to anchor macro-political violence in individual Kashmiri lived experience and how it operates personal testimony as a legitimate mode of historical knowledge.

Keywords: Graphic Narratives, Counter-History, Kashmir, Subaltern, Kashmir, Munnu, Autographics.

Read the full paper here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21504857.2026.2706649#abstract

Published in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics Manuscript DOI: 10.1080/21504857.2026.2706649