‘The Last Knot’: An inventive novel that transports us to Kashmir’s era of tyranny under Dogra rule

Shabir Ahmad Mir’s 2020 debut novel, The Plague Upon Us, concludes on a haunting note, where darkness lingers and hopelessness persists in the lives of its characters. His second (and most recent) novel, The Last Knot, transports readers to the brutal, twilight world of Kashmir ruled by Dogras, fraught with despair, where a carpet-weaver dares to dream the impossible – creating a conduit of his liberation, to weave a carpet which can fly.

Mir sets his narrative a century and a half ago to the Dogra rule, where nearly everything was controlled by the monarch. The carpet-weaver reflects at one point in the novel, “New histories, new cities, are just mirages born of the skeletons of the old ones.” The “mad” pursuit of freedom, we see, dates back to history, an idea that the author had tackled in his debut novel too.

The novel starts with a weaver seeking to create a magical carpet. This ambition, which feels almost like a delirious dream, soon reveals itself to be more – a metaphor for artistic obsession. It is, which we find towards the end, a meditation on entrapment and futility.

Feigning madness

He is sent away by his Wusteh, his master, to the enigmatic Abli Bab, a thumbless weaver who lives in a...

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