Mapping the aftermath of honour killing: A sociological analysis of Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon

Abstract

Despite Pakistan’s legal reforms, honour killings remain a gendered violence problem. Drawing from qualitative data, including semi-structured interviews, this study analyses honour killings as a socio-cultural phenomenon through Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon (2011) and includes interviews from five bereaved families, two legal experts, a senior journalist, and two clinical psychologists from rural Pakistan. Relying on Gramsci’s hegemony, Althusser’s state apparatuses, Bourdieu’s symbolic violence, Galtung’s violence typology, and Mbembe’s necropolitics, this study extracts four dominant ideas. The first objective analyses honour killings as state-sanctioned, collective, and premeditated violence manifested in the jirga system and state’s deliberate inaction. The second one examines the unforgiving aftermath of honour killings through the lens of psychological and social trauma bereaved families endure (fear and trauma becoming their ‘new normal’). The third objective inquires the symbolic and institutional control of honour manifested through the entrapment and ‘gaze’ of hidden, captured, and psychologically controlled elders. The fourth one looks into gender inequality manifested in the commodification of women, socialisation of women as honour-bearers, and posthumous granting of agency to women. The fragmented narratives of the bereaved families are captured through the fragmented narratives of survivors in the novel. The study contains praxes for legal reform, mental health care, and mediatic sensitivity.