Keywords: Survival, Violence, Terrorism, Kashmir, Gujjars Literature is a creative and sensitive social mirror originating in the sensibilities and creativities of socially conscious writers. Concerns of literature have always been complex and diverse as it exhibits the complexity of human mind and diversity of human world. Literature looks at the ongoing social and cultural events through writer’s keen eyes. Understanding of social milieu provides the raw material; it is catalyzed throughthe creativity of a writer, and as a result a readable piece of writing is produced. While living in harmony, in a peaceful environment, writer produces a volume of literature which contains the fabric of diverse individual themes. In absence of some unifying …show more content…
Human life is not smooth; it has to tackle frustration, tension, loss of identity, alienation, trauma, fear, dissonance and despair. Along with physical struggle human mind always fights these odds conscious and unconscious level. This fight may be termed as defense mechanisms. Some of the common defense mechanisms are; suppression, repression, regression, projection, reaction formation, fixation, rationalization, intellectualization, compensation, emotional insulation, sublimation and violence. These defense mechanisms may also be called strategies of survival. Coleman asserts that in extreme threat to life we resort the primitive strategies of denial of reality or escape. Sometimes denial or escape are not enough, in that case, human mind creates an illusory world of its own. To our surprise indulgence in violence is also a survival strategy as Erich Fromm explains, “… life has an inner dynamism of its own: it tends to grow, to be expressed, to be lived. When this tendency is thwarted, the energy directed towards life undergoes a process of decomposition and changes into energies directed towards destruction. In other words, the drive for life and the drive for destruction are not mutually independent factors but are in a reversed interdependence. The more the drive towards the life is thwarted, stronger is the drive towards destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destruction”