Reading Camus From Kashmir

Why this French philosopher-novelist's ideas still resonate outside Europe and academia.

- Malik Daniyal

I return to Albert Camus's The Stranger from Kashmir, and the book meets me with a familiarity that feels lived rather than learned.

The novel has carried decades of commentary on absurdity, alienation, and moral indifference, though the question that matters to me moves away from theory and toward daily life.

The question rests on why this book continues to speak with such force in places where restraint gets confused with coldness, silence draws suspicion, and emotional display turns into a public obligation.

I read Meursault as someone trapped less by his actions and more by how he refuses to act out feelings for an audience.

He works, eats, sleeps, feels heat, desire, tiredness, hunger, and relief, and he reports these sensations without ornament. His mother dies, and he reacts without ceremony. A killing follows, and the world closes in.

Camus keeps pulling the reader away from crime and punishment and toward something deeper, the clash between a human need for meaning and a universe that offers none.

That clash feels familiar in Kashmir, where explanations rarely arrive and certainty stays out of reach. Absurdism here reads like daily practice rather than philosophical posture.

Camus presents a world that shows neither kindness nor malice, only indifference, and he suggests that suffering grows when people demand stories that comfort them.