Bare Life as People's History: Subaltern Lives in Nadeem Aslam's The Wasted Vigil and The Blind Man's Garden

Abstract

This article examines how Nadeem Aslam’s novels The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man's Garden (2013) retrieve a subaltern "people's history" of the Pak-Afghan frontier. Synthesizing Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical framework of "bare life" and "sovereign exception" with the foundational critiques of Subaltern Studies, this paper argues that the borderlands operate as a zone of inclusive exclusion where the legal order is suspended to reduce peripheral subjects to zoe, or bare life. Rather than naively claiming to restore a transparent postcolonial voice, Aslam's non-linear narrative form exposes the structural mechanisms of "archival silence" and "bordertexturing", highlighting the representational "unreachability" of the subaltern caught within mutually hostile yet structurally hegemonic discourses. Drawing on Ranajit Guha’s critique of the "prose of counter-insurgency," we demonstrate how these elite narratives employ a "code of pacification" to overwrite local, domestic realities.