Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies

“This crucial, timely volume not only explicates the political situation of Kashmir; it offers
a paradigm-shifting example of place as relational praxis. From the critique of area studies
and state-centric analytics to the attention to the ethics of knowledge production, the editors
and contributors make a trenchant case for why Kashmir both illuminates and connects with
numerous other liberation movements around the world. As such, the Routledge Handbook of
Critical Kashmir Studies is a brilliant envisioning of scholarship as solidarity that draws together
and transforms indigenous, decolonial, intersectional and transnational thought.”
– Jasbir K. Puar, Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies
at Rutgers University; author of Terrorist Assemblages and The Right to Maim
“This pathbreaking interdisciplinary volume – grounded in feminist principles that are at

once anti-colonial, anti-occupation, and anti-caste – brilliantly speaks to the urgency of self-
determination for Kashmir. Challenging statist and area studies frameworks that typically
privilege international relations and security studies, this rich collection features crucial
epistemological interventions that enable the decolonial knowledge production necessary for
political liberation – the best in Critical Kashmir Studies.”
– J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Professor of American Studies and an affiliate
faculty member in Anthropology at Wesleyan University; author of Paradoxes
of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism
“This handbook is a vital intellectual contribution to Kashmir studies. It provides essential

space for the radical thinking, the Kashmiri voices, the feminist approaches, the anti-colonial
critiques that have been decisively breaking apart dominant assumptions in mainstream
scholarship on Kashmir. It will prompt us to think fundamentally differently about Kashmir, as
well as more broadly about colonial occupation, about technologies of repression, about land,
place, transnational solidarities, resistance, and more. And at a time when reactionary Hindu
nationalism continues to take on more fascistic and Islamophobic forms, this handbook is also a
crucial political contribution to knowledge and knowledge production.”
– John Reynolds, Associate Professor, National University of Ireland,
Maynooth; author of Empire, Emergency and International Law
ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF CRITICAL
KASHMIR STUDIES
The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies presents emerging critical knowledge
frameworks and perspectives that foreground situated histories and resistance practices to
challenge colonial and postcolonial forms of governance and state building. It politicizes
discourses of nationalism, patriotism, democracy, and liberalism, and it questions how these
dominant globalist imaginaries and discourses serve institutionalized power, create hegemony,
and normalize domination. In doing so, the handbook situates Critical Kashmir Studies
scholarship within global scholarly conversations on nationalism, sovereignty, indigenous
movements, human rights, and international law.
The handbook is organized into the following five parts:
• Territories, Homelands, Borders

• Militarism, Humanism, Occupation
• Memories, Futures, Imaginations
• Religion, History, Politics
• Armed Conflict, Global War, Transnational Solidarities
A comprehensive reference work documenting and consolidating the growing Critical Kashmir
Studies scholarship, this handbook will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, political
science, cultural studies, legal and sociolegal studies, sociology, history, critical Indigenous
studies, settler colonial studies, and feminist studies.
Mona Bhan is Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Associate Professor of
Anthropology at Syracuse University, USA. She has authored Counterinsurgency, Development, and
the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? (Routledge, 2014); co-authored Climate Without
Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene (with A. Bauer, 2018); and co-edited Resisting
Occupation in Kashmir (with H. Duschinski, A. Zia, and C. Mahmood, 2018). Bhan is on the
editorial board of Cultural Anthropology, Critical Disaster Studies and AGITATE. Her writings and
interviews have appeared in various forums, including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Scholars Circle,
CGTN, Indus TV, TRT, and Open Democracy.
Haley Duschinski is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University, USA. She is

a legal and political anthropologist with research specializations in law and society; violence,
war, and power; human rights and international justice; and militarization and impunity. She
co-edited Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (with M. Bhan, A. Zia, and C. Mahmood, 2018) as
well as special issues of Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law (2018), Critique of Anthropology
(2020), and Himalaya (2020). She has published her research in Social & Legal Studies, Political &
Legal Anthropology Review, Cultural Studies, Race & Class, Memory Studies, Anthropology Today,
Interventions, and Anthropological Quarterly, among others.
Deepti Misri is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at the University of
Colorado Boulder, USA. She is the author of Beyond Partition: Gender, Violence and Representation
in Postcolonial India (2014) and the co-editor of a special issue on “Protest” in WSQ: Women’s
Studies Quarterly (2018). Her recent scholarship has focused on visual culture, gender, disability,
and militarization in Kashmir and appeared in the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies,
Biography, and Public Culture.
ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK
OF CRITICAL KASHMIR
STUDIES
Edited by Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski

and Deepti Misri
Cover image: Rollie Mukherjee, Shadows Beyond the Ghost Town (2014),
watercolor on paper.
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski and
Deepti Misri; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski and Deepti Misri to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-35343-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-31049-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-33081-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
List of Contributors xi
Acknowledgementsxv
Critical Kashmir Studies: Settler Occupations and the Persistence

of Resistance 1
Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, and Deepti Misri
SECTION I
Territories, Homelands, Borders 17
Ather Zia
1 Peasant Imaginaries and “Kashmiri Nationalism” 21

Idrees Kanth
2 On Naya Kashmir 37
Suvir Kaul
3 Closing the Frontier? Extraction, Contested Boundaries, and the

Greening of Frontier Politics in Ladakh 49
Alka Sabharwal
4 Kashmiri Sikh Women and Their Experiences With Conflict 60

Khushdeep Kaur Malhotra
5 Disabling Kashmir 72
Deepti Misri
vii
Contents
6 Hortus Interruptus: A Time for Alegropolitics in Kashmir 81

Ananya Jahanara Kabir
SECTION II
Militarism, Humanitarianism, Occupation 93
Mona Bhan
7 Claiming the Streets: Political Resistance Among Kashmiri Youth 97

Mohd Tahir Ganie
8 The Writ of Liberty in the Courts of Kashmir 115

Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh and Haley Duschinski
9 Trade, Boundaries, and Self-Determination 127

Aditi Saraf
10 Sensory Remembrance: Retelling the 1990s in Downtown Srinagar 138

Bhavneet Kaur
SECTION III
Memories, Futures, Imaginations 149
Deepti Misri
11 Dogs of War, War Dogs: The Afterlives of Manto in Two Kashmiri

Graphic Novels 153
Amit R. Baishya
12 Cosmopolitanism, Food, and Memory: The Lhasa Restaurant

of Srinagar 170
Anisa Bhutia
13 The Country of Privilege: Problematizing the Country Without a

Post Office 183
Huzaifa Pandit
14 Mixing Genre, Making Truth Claims: Human Rights Storytelling

in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness195
Rakhshan Rizwan
15 Cached Resistance: The “Unheard” Narratives of Militancy in Kashmir 207

Haris Zargar
viii
Contents
16 Playing Cricket in Eidgah: Affective Labor in Kashmiri

Childhood(s)221
Sarbani Sharma
SECTION IV
Religion, History, Politics 235
Hafsa Kanjwal
17 Religious and Political Power in Kashmir: Recollecting the Past

for the (Post)colonial Present 239
Dean Accardi
18 Tehreek History Writers of Kashmir: Reconstructing Memory

at the Margins of Postcolonial Empire 252
Mohamad Junaid
19 Remembering Home, Imagining the Future: Changing Meanings

of Home Among Kashmiri Pandits 268
Ankur Datta
20 Liberal Silence on Kashmir and the Malleability of Ethics in India 278

Gowhar Fazili
21 Territory, Identity, and Islamization in Medieval Kashmir 293

Rafiq A. Pirzada
22 Examining Sacred Necropolitics as Popular Resistance in India-

Controlled Kashmir 308
Umer Jan
SECTION V
Armed Conflict, Global War, Transnational Solidarities 319
Haley Duschinski
23 Third World Imperialism and Kashmir’s Sovereignty Trap 323

Haley Duschinski and Mona Bhan
24 The Forms and Practices of Indian Settler/Colonial Sovereignty

in Kashmir 341
Goldie Osuri
ix
Contents
25 Sanctioned Ignorance and the Crisis of Solidarity for Kashmir 355

Ather Zia
26 Kashmir, Feminisms, and Global Solidarities 367

Nitasha Kaul
27 Kashmir Diaspora Mobilizations: Toward Transnational Solidarity

in an Age of Settler Colonialism 379
Hafsa Kanjwal
Index396
x
CONTRIBUTORS
Dean Accardi is Assistant Professor of History at Connecticut College. A historian of gender

and religion in South Asia, his research reexamines notions of mutually exclusive religions,
hybridity, and syncretism; reconceptualizes relationships between religions and other social phe-
nomena; and highlights how historical and religious narratives reconstruct the past to serve
socio-political agendas. His current book project, An Ascetic Body Politic, examines depictions of
asceticism in histories and hagiographies of sixteenth-century Kashmir and analyzes how bodily
practices of saints like Lal Ded and Nund Rishi were used to shape ideas of gender, sainthood,
and sovereignty.
Amit R. Baishya is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of

Oklahoma. His monograph Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and
Survival was published by Routledge in 2018. He is the co-editor of two collections of essays
titled Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and Postcolonial
Animalities (Routledge, 2019). He also co-edited a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Stud-
ies titled “Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman”
(2021–2022).
Anisa Bhutia is an advanced doctoral scholar of social sciences at Tata Institute of Social
Sciences (Mumbai). An anthropologist of place-making and community in South Asia, her
research elaborates on the interconnected histories of the Himalayan region. She examines the
relationship between infrastructure, colonialism, frontiers, and how the past is imagined and
constructed by the people to make sense of their present. Through the Khache (Tibetan Muslim)
community, her work reexamines categories of citizenship and her work on Kalimpong engages
with the conceptual idea of loss in frontier spaces.
Ankur Datta teaches in the Department of Sociology at South Asian University. His work
addresses themes of displacement and dislocation, violence, and the politics of victimhood. He
has published articles based on his research in different journals such as Modern Asian Studies and
Contributions to Indian Sociology, and has edited a special issue on victimhood in Seminar. He is
the author of On Uncertain Ground: Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir.
xi
Contributors
Gowhar Fazili is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi. Centered

around fieldwork in Kashmir, his ethnographies of political subjectivity in Kashmir examine the
intermeshing of the intimate and the political around local agitations, in familial grief, in the
narratives of local policemen and in the life and work of a working-class fictional writer. His
work has appeared in a range of academic and popular journals and edited volumes centered
on civil wars or the ongoing conflict in Kashmir. His book-length volume is forthcoming with
Routledge India in the series on Ethnographic Innovations, South Asian Perspectives.
Mohd Tahir Ganie teaches at IUST, Kashmir. He has worked as assistant professor of politics,
Dublin City University, Ireland, and lecturer of political science, Cluster University Srinagar,
Kashmir. His research focuses on the dynamics of the Kashmir conflict, with particular attention
to youth politics. His academic work has appeared in Social Movement Studies, South Asia: Journal
of South Asian Studies, and Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, among others.
Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh is a lawyer and legal anthropologist whose work focuses on
questions of rights and justice, and the law’s relationship to everyday forms of subjectivity and
violence. She has worked with local coalitions and organizations on a number of human rights
documentation and litigation efforts in Kashmir, Mumbai, and New Delhi. She has a BA LLB
from National Law School of India University in Bengaluru; a Master’s degree in research from
Birbeck School of Law in London; and a PhD from the Centre for Study of Law and Govern-
ance, Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
Umer Jan is a journalist and graduate researcher at the University of Westminster, where
his project focuses on the functioning of civil bureaucracies in Indian-administered Kashmir.
Another trajectory of his ongoing research concentrates on the imposition of necropolitical log-
ics in the region, and how they shape popular politics and social milieu. His work has appeared
in LA Review of Books, Jacobin, The Independent, Al Jazeera English, Haaretz, Pulitzer Centre, and
elsewhere.
Mohamad Junaid is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts College of Liberal

Arts. He has a PhD from the Graduate Center, CUNY, with research on violence, youth activ-
ists, and political subjectivity in Kashmir. His work on military occupation, history writing,
space, and memory has appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,
Identities, The Funambulist, and several edited volumes and anthologies.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King’s College London. For her
innovative work in the humanities, she has received the Infosys Prize for the Humanities (2017)
and the Humboldt Prize (2018). She is the author of Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley
of Kashmir (2009) and Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971, and Modern South Asia. She is cur-
rently writing the book, Alegropolitics: Connecting on the Afromodern Dance Floor, and developing
a new research project around Creole Indias. In May 2020, she and the Franco-Pondicherrian
author Ari Gautier co-founded Le Thinnai Kreyol, a cultural platform for promoting their
vision of a plural, multicultural, and creolized India.
Hafsa Kanjwal is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College. She received
her PhD from the University of Michigan in history and women’s studies. Her current book
project, Controlling Kashmir: State-building Under Colonial Occupation, focuses on post-Partition
xii
Contributors
state-building in Indian-occupied Kashmir. She has written and spoken on Kashmir for a vari-
ety of news outlets including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English, and the BBC.
Idrees Kanth is a guest researcher at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), Leiden Uni-
versity. He has an MA and PhD (history) from Leiden University, the Netherlands. His areas of
interest are modern and early modern Kashmir and South Asian history, global history, Islam,
peasant studies, and archives.
Nitasha Kaul is a multidisciplinary academic, novelist, poet, artist, and economist. Currently
Associate Professor (Reader) in Politics and International Relations at the Centre for the Study
of Democracy, University of Westminster in London, she has previously worked as Assistant
Professor in Economics at the Bristol Business School and as Associate Professor in Creative
Writing in Bhutan. Over the last two decades, she has researched and published extensively on
themes relating to democracy, political economy, identity, rise of right-wing nationalism, femi-
nist and postcolonial critiques, Bhutan, India, and Kashmir.
Suvir Kaul is A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is

the author of Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics; Eighteenth-Century British Literature
and Postcolonial Studies; Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth
Century; and Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: Ideology and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century Eng-
land. He has edited The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India and co-edited
Postcolonial Studies and Beyond.
Bhavneet Kaur is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Jindal Global Law School, Jindal Univer-
sity. Her research investigates practices of remembrance and the making of the social in down-
town Srinagar, Kashmir. More broadly, her work is anchored around the social anthropology
of violence, politics of emotion, memory studies, affect theory, and gendered violence. Her
academic writing has been published in journals such as Ethnography and Himalaya as well as a
forthcoming chapter in a volume published by Orient BlackSwan.
Khushdeep Kaur Malhotra is a PhD candidate in political geography at Temple University,

with an interest in understanding citizenship and claims-making among ethnic minorities in
majoritarian states. Khushdeep’s dissertation research examines migratory responses to conflict
in Kashmir, focusing on the experiences of the Kashmiri Sikh community in the valley.
Goldie Osuri is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. Osuri’s work,
which lies at the intersection of political sociology, critical social and cultural theory, critical
race and whiteness studies, and media and cultural studies, has focused on mapping forms of
sovereignty in the context of colonialisms, race, religion, and nationalisms.
Huzaifa Pandit is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Higher Education,

Jammu and Kashmir. His book Green Is the Colour of Memory won the first edition of Rhythm
Divine Poets Chapbook Contest in 2017. He has won several poetry contests, including the
Glass House Poetry Competition and Bound Poetry Contest. His poems, translations, inter-
views, essays, and papers have been published in various journals such as Post-Colonial Stud-
ies, Indian Literature, PaperCuts, Life and Legends, Jaggery Lit, JLA India, Punch and Noble/Gas
Quarterly.
xiii
Contributors
Rafiq A. Pirzada is Associate Professor of Tourism and Cultural Studies at Nawakadal Col-
lege, University of Kashmir in Srinagar. Since 2013, he has been Visiting Research Fellow, CY
Advanced Studies (CY AS) and Cergy Paris University. A historical sociologist, he specializes in
Bourdieusean sociology of cultural consumption. His work focuses on transnational approaches
to historiography, postcolonial turn in cultural studies, First World War memory and heritage
practices, and power relations in tourism, especially within the context of political conflict and
occupation. His recent journal publications are in Memory Studies, Cultural Studies and Tourist
Studies.
Rakhshan Rizwan works as an acquisitions editor at Rockridge Press, a Bay Area-based pub-
lishing house, and as a remote postdoctoral scholar at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht
University. Her book Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure, and the Local Cosmopolitan
(Routledge, 2020) looks at how Kashmiri authors use innovative languages of happiness to do
human rights advocacy.
Alka Sabharwal is an adjunct lecturer at the University of Western Australia. Sabharwal’s PhD
thesis examined the cultural politics of environment and development in the margins of the
Himalayan borderlands in India.
Aditi Saraf is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her book

manuscript investigates the relationship between commerce, sovereignty, and ecology in the
Kashmir region. More broadly, she is interested in questions around political economy, bor-
derlands, the environment, militarization, and place-making practices. Her academic and
public writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Ethnologist, Economy and Soci-
ety, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, and The Caravan Magazine (India) among
others.
Sarbani Sharma is Assistant Professor in the School of Development at Azim Premji Uni-
versity, Bangalore. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social and
Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Her work on the itineraries of
political aspirations and articulations in Kashmir has appeared in Contributions to Indian Sociology,
Society and Culture in South Asia and Political and Legal Anthropological Review.
Haris Zargar is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus
University Rotterdam based in the Hague, Netherlands. He has an MA in violence, conflict
and development from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and
an MA in mass communication and journalism from University of Kashmir. He works for
Johannesburg-based New Frame media publication and has in the past contributed articles to
the Press Trust of India (PTI), Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle, and The Mint.
Ather Zia is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at the University of
Northern Colorado in Greeley. She is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation
and Women’s Activism in Kashmir and co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? and A
Desolation called Peace. Zia has won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology for
her ethnographic poetry on Kashmir. Her published collection of poetry is The Frame. She is
the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit.
xiv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Decolonial knowledge production is a deeply collaborative endeavor. This handbook has

emerged through the labor, engagement, and vision of all project participants and their intellec-
tual commitments to research and writing as emancipatory projects that align with the political
goals of liberation, freedom, and self-determination. As curators of this handbook, our editorial
work has been an honor and a privilege. We express our deepest gratitude to people in Kashmir
and beyond whose activist, academic, artistic, and advocacy work has been a constant source of
moral strength, direction, and inspiration.
This project has been three years in the making. When we first initiated this project, we
did not know that all contributors would be writing and revising through such incredibly
tumultuous times, including the abrogation and its aftermath as well as the prolonged global
pandemic. As editors, we have aimed to approach the project in a way that fulfills our deep ethi-
cal obligations to a politically just and equitable mode of academic collaboration and scholarly
production.
We express our deepest gratitude to our contributors and section editors for their commit-
ment to this project across time: Dean Accardi, Amit R. Baishya, Anisa Bhutia, Ankur Datta,
Gowhar Fazili, Mohd Tahir Ganie, Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh, Umer Jan, Mohamad Junaid,
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Hafsa Kanjwal, Idrees Kanth, Nitasha Kaul, Suvir Kaul, Khushdeep
Kaur, Bhavneet Kaur, Goldie Osuri, Huzaifa Pandit, Rafiq A. Pirzada, Rakhshan Rizwan,
Alka Sabharwal, Aditi Saraf, Sarbani Sharma, Haris Zargar, and Ather Zia. Their patience and
perseverance have been extraordinary across the entire duration of this project. Since we first
began inviting scholars to participate in this project in 2019, contributors have worked through
significant challenges in Kashmir including the abrogation and communications shutdowns, the
escalating criminalization of expression and dissent, and the various hardships associated with
the global Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic especially impacted scholars who are located,
and whose families are located, in Kashmir and India. Given these extremely difficult circum-
stances, we have deeply appreciated that all project participants, contributors as well as editors,
have attempted to approach our collaborative efforts through an ethic of generosity and care.
We also extend our deepest appreciation to artist Rollie Mukherjee, who graciously per-
mitted us to use her painting, Shadows Beyond the Ghost Town (2014), for the handbook
cover, as well as our editorial board members Nosheen Ali, Purnima Bose, Jinee Lokaneeta,
Richa Nagar, Martin Sökefeld, and Siddiq Wahid. Their scholarship has greatly inspired us and
xv
Acknowledgements
contributed to our intellectual growth, and their valuable reviews and commentaries on essay
submissions helped move this complex project forward under extremely challenging conditions.
We also appreciate the time and investment of anonymous scholars who reviewed our initial
book proposal.
This handbook, and the field that it represents, coheres through an explicitly feminist and
anti-occupation praxis of knowledge production and scholarly exchange. It builds on a com-
mitment to approaching academic production differently – through dialogue, collaboration, and
care with reflexive attention to differential locations of power and privilege. Over the past two
decades, Critical Kashmir Studies has taken form through the consistent and committed labor of
Kashmiri scholars and activists who have radically transformed academic modes of knowledge
production and circulation on Kashmir. This has advanced scholarly conversations on identity
and nationalism, international law, art and politics, human rights and dignity, and sovereignty
and power in relation to Kashmir and beyond.
This liberatory scholarship requires attention to the politics of citation and scholarly produc-
tion. The essays in this handbook engage with recent critical scholarship on Kashmir, which
has foregrounded indigenous Kashmiri histories and advanced feminist perspectives on the his-
tory and present of Kashmir. Keeping in mind the politics of citation, where some academic
voices (mostly Western, Indian, male, and statist) have been historically favored over many other
voices that offer a rich and grounded understanding of Kashmir’s history, society, and politics,
all contributors were quite deliberate about their citational practices, and they considered how
gender, sexuality, caste and other positionalities may factor into and add nuance to larger argu-
ments and claims.
Finally, we would like to extend our deepest gratitude to the editorial team at Routledge,
especially Dorothea Schaefter for inviting us to edit this handbook. Thank you, Dorothea, for
your unconditional support for, and commitment to, this project.
April 8, 2022
xvi
CRITICAL KASHMIR STUDIES
Settler Occupations and the Persistence
of Resistance
The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies signals the increasing significance of Critical
Kashmir Studies within the context of India’s heightened Hindu fascism and policies of settler
colonial displacement, disenfranchisement, and dispossession in Kashmir. Over the past two
decades, the new Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship has emerged, focusing on the implica-
tions of the prolonged settler occupation of Kashmir and the everyday effects of war and mili-
tarization on Kashmir’s society, economics, and politics. This critical approach centers Kashmiri
voices and perspectives to produce a body of knowledge that challenges the conventional statist
status quo and provides new ways of thinking about the past, present, and future of the region.
As a body of scholarship, Critical Kashmir Studies brings perspectives from literary and cultural
studies, feminist studies, cultural anthropology, socio-legal studies, history, and geography into
conversation with settler colonial studies and critical indigenous studies. As exemplified by the
chapters in this handbook, the scholarly field of Critical Kashmir Studies provides new analy-
ses and theories of occupation, resistance, sovereignty, and self-determination, establishing the
scholarly perspectives needed to conceptualize political, legal, and social developments as they
unfold. Our contributors reflect on and open up new possibilities for transnational solidarities
among movements for self-determination, human rights, and liberation. These contributions
resonate beyond Kashmir, inviting scholars and activists more broadly interested in decolonial
approaches to think about the transnational connections that sustain occupations – and generate
resistance against them – in any particular place.
Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship has radically challenged conventional Kashmir scholar-
ship that has focused predominantly on international relations and security studies perspectives
while largely ignoring the indigenous histories of the Kashmiri freedom struggle. Dominant
in South Asian and Western academies since the mid-twentieth century, conventional Kashmir
studies scholarship has approached Kashmir as a bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan,
framing the Kashmiri movement for self-determination as a proxy war, secessionist movement,
and terrorist enterprise within the context of the Global War on Terror. Conventional forms
of knowledge production about Kashmir have sustained the national, regional, and global
power structures that have suppressed the Kashmiri right to self-determination and institu-
tionalized the long-standing legal, military, and political occupation of Kashmir. Through its
research agenda on occupation, settler violence, (post)coloniality, and decolonization, Critical
Kashmir Studies destabilizes the state-centric perspectives of area studies scholarship, located
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-1 1
Mona Bhan et al.
in universities and think tanks across South Asia, as well as US- and UK-based international
relations and strategic studies scholarship. The field of Critical Kashmir Studies departs sharply
from the aims of such area studies centers, fundamentally challenging the area studies model
that has historically organized US-based South Asia scholarship. Against the surveillance and
intelligence-gathering motivations that forged area studies approaches, Critical Kashmir Stud-
ies scholarship does not seek to make Kashmir available for state intelligence, but rather rejects
area studies models that seek to make sense of regions from statist perspectives, whether India,
Pakistan, China, or the United States. Critical Kashmir Studies centers Kashmir in a manner
that calls into question prevailing area studies formations such as South Asia, the Middle East,
Central Asia, and West Asia, compelling us to rethink naturalized categories of nations, bor-
ders, and territories.
Scholarship that represents Kashmir as part of South Asia, for example, erases other geog-
raphies that have shaped Kashmir’s history, as well as people’s long-standing cultural, linguistic,
economic, and aesthetic connections with communities in the region known as Central Asia.
As Siddiq Wahid (2016) notes, Kashmir and the regions of Ladakh, Gilgit, and Baltistan lost
their connections to Central Asia “with the creation of the modern Westphalian Jammu and
Kashmir state in 1846,” when the region “became a colonial political project in the Great Game
rather than the seam of cultural, commercial, and political relationships, even if not always
idyllic, that had prevailed till then.” In dominant Indian scholarship, Kashmir’s geography and
history have been made subservient to Indian historiography, with implications for the inter-
pretations of Kashmir and its syncretic cultures, languages, and politics. Pushing against this
grain, Chitralekha Zutshi’s book Contested Pasts (2014) examines Kashmir’s other geographies
by taking up Kashmiri Persian-language texts that reveal Kashmir’s historical connection to
Central Asia, thus foregrounding its linguistic connections beyond South Asia. While this is a
commendable undertaking, historian Nile Green (2015) critiques Zutshi’s eventual relapse into
a national framework that once again centers on India, framing Kashmir solely in reference to
India and overlooking its linguistic and other connections with, for instance, Afghanistan and
China – regions adjoining Kashmir and also connected to it through the Persian language. As
Green sums up:
This is a pity, because thinking about Kashmir through the rubric of Persian helps us
denaturalize both Indian and Pakistani national claims over its long-contested lands, as
over its long-contested past. There can be no half-way house for writing post-national
histories.
Green’s critique reminds us that in order to complete its critical turn, Kashmir scholars must
resituate Kashmir within multiple and intersecting geographies and histories, within and beyond
South Asia, that shape the region. This move does not entail a simple redefinition of area studies
models. It requires the adoption of placed-based models of scholarship that approach regions
not as anchored to modern states but rather as networks of relationships in which human and
nonhuman actors exist in active, ethical, and non-extractive relation to land.1 We take inspira-
tion here from indigenous studies scholars as well as Palestine studies scholars who have theo-
rized “land” as resisting “fixed conceptions of space” denoted by terms like “territory” (Goeman
2015), and who have drawn attention to indigenous Native American and Palestinian ideations
of land over the cartographic manipulations of powerful occupying nation-states (Abufarha
2008). Our interest, then, is to foster situated understandings of Kashmir that place it within
historical, political, geographical, and ecological lineaments that challenge the reduction of
Kashmir to territory alone. We call on students and scholars writing about Kashmir to consider
2
Critical Kashmir Studies
it instead as a vibrant, alive, and networked place that can ground alternative epistemologies that
may help reconfigure the nature and scale of politics in the subcontinent and beyond.2
Across centuries, Kashmiri poets, artists, and scholars have centered Kashmiri worldviews in
their representations of Kashmir’s history and politics. Kashmir has a rich corpus of poetic and
literary writings that extend back to the fourteenth century and capture the reformist and radical
struggles that people participated in from across axes of class, religion, and gender. The poetry
of Lal Ded, Nund Reshi, Habba Khatoon, and other saints from the fourteenth, fifteenth, and
sixteenth centuries circulated widely through rich and diverse oral traditions, helping to raise
people’s consciousness about regressive social and political norms (Accardi 2018; BBC Sounds
2020; Khanday 2019). Kashmir also saw the birth of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in the
1940s, with poets and writers such as Dina Nath Nadim, Abdul Ahad Azad, and Akhtar Mohi-
uddin, among others, cultivating a tradition of literary criticism and encouraging reformist and
politically radical thought (Khayal 2018). Likewise, the writings of many Kashmiri public intel-
lectuals, many of whom expatriated to Lahore and Amritsar when Kashmir suffered a ravaging
famine under the oppressive Dogra regime, roused the political consciousness of Kashmiri Mus-
lims, prodding them to fight for their rights (Hussain 2021). Building on this tradition of writ-
ing as a mode and expression of liberation broadly conceived, recent cultural productions – in
the form of art, music, poetry, scholarship, and new and alternative online and off-line forums
such as Inverse Journal, Wande, Kashmir Lit, Pe’nd Online, Kashmir Solidarity Network, and Zaanan
Waanan – have enriched Kashmir’s public sphere and contributed to cultivating decolonial per-
spectives from the standpoint of Kashmir.3
Drawing from and contributing to this rich body of work, Critical Kashmir Studies schol-
ars have, over two decades, questioned earlier state-centric formulations of Kashmir’s history
and politics by engaging with critical theories anchored in a range of empirical and textual
research methods such as ethnography, literary criticism, archival studies, and oral histories. This
approach challenges the replication of territorial boundaries that have historically produced
academic silos around various regions of the former princely state: Kashmir Valley, Ladakh,
Jammu, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, and Gilgit-Baltistan. Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship
has been shaped by research on Ladakh (Aggarwal 2004; van Beek 2000; Bhan 2014; Gupta
2013; Smith 2020), Azad Jammu & Kashmir (Ali 2019; Robinson 2013), and Gilgit-Baltistan
(Bouzas 2019; Dad 2020; Sökefeld 2015, 2020) as well as the Line of Control (Aijazi 2018;
Kabir 2009b; Schild 2014, 2015). Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship as a whole foregrounds
Kashmiri historiographies, Kashmiri geographies, and people’s lived experiences of military
siege, while cultivating academic solidarities with the Kashmiri movement for political justice
and liberation. Many Critical Kashmir Studies scholars have directly and indirectly contributed
to local and/or global efforts to promote human rights, justice, and accountability in alignment
with the liberation struggle in Kashmir.
The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies comes at a key moment of transnational
solidarities and new possibilities for international mediation – especially relevant, given the
recent resurgence of United Nations intervention in Kashmir since 2016 and the legal and politi-
cal crisis initiated by India’s revocation of the State of Jammu and Kashmir’s semi-autonomous
constitutional status in 2019. The handbook promotes transformative paradigms in and about
Kashmir by bringing together rising and established scholars from Kashmir and across the global
north and south in the ongoing project of producing interdisciplinary scholarship within a
transnational and intersectional framework, through attention to how structures of occupation
and resistance intersect with gender, caste, religion, race, and class. Taken together, the chapters
advance anti-colonial/decolonial, feminist, anti-occupation, and anti-caste frameworks to desta-
bilize the structures of knowledge production associated with entrenched forms of hegemonic
3
Mona Bhan et al.
power, inside and outside of the academy, that have shaped the field of Kashmir studies for
decades. The chapters question how dominant processes and imaginaries have served institu-
tionalized power and normalized domination, with implications for Kashmiri lives and futures.
As part of a larger network of Critical Kashmir Studies scholars, we share academic and
political commitments to liberation for Kashmiris and other peoples facing dispossession
through occupation and settler colonial violence. Alongside the section editors and contributors
to this volume, we have worked closely with colleagues in the field on projects such as edited
volumes, journals, special issues, and syllabi (#thekashmirsyllabus) to support the creation of
academic space for the legitimization and institutionalization of emergent Kashmir, and espe-
cially Kashmiri, scholarship.4 Such purposeful collaborative endeavors challenge the neoliberal
statist structures of the academy while advancing counter-hegemonic scholarship, especially
from early-career scholars. They also strengthen linkages among critical scholars for effective
public engagement through academic panels, media commentary, and virtual webinars – which
have become especially important means of intervention in the aftermath of the abrogation on
August 5, 2019.
We have challenged ourselves and each other to attend to how our individual locations and
histories of privilege and power have shaped our trajectories as scholars from dominant racial
and caste categories. As a field populated by Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri scholars from South
Asia and beyond, all working to interrogate state power in Kashmir, Critical Kashmir Studies
is necessarily formed through multiple subjectivities and therefore holds within it the tension
of these different subject positions. The politically fraught nature of Critical Kashmir Stud-
ies scholarship demands deep and sustained deliberation on how researchers ethically conduct
research and engage across the network of Kashmir scholars. We privilege the perspectives of
those most impacted by hegemonic political and academic structures. At the same time, we
also believe that the praxis of solidarity must extend beyond identitarian positionalities. Such
work can create pathways for alternative forms of community based on shared visions of justice,
accountability, and radical inclusivity.
Having grown up in a high caste Brahmin Kashmiri Pandit family in Kashmir, Mona Bhan
experienced how Kashmir’s unresolved political status produced deep social and political cleav-
ages between Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims, the majority of whom, unlike the Pandit
community, did not accept India’s presence in Kashmir as rightful and legitimate. Her grandfa-
ther’s commitment to Kashmiri liberation despite his Hindu upbringing was an inspiration for
Bhan who saw up close how the work of political liberation can upend conventional forms of
identity and community. Haley Duschinski grew up with a white middle-class background in
the southern United States, without direct connections to Kashmiri communities or histories.
Her family’s social location and political commitments shaped her critical awareness of the
US military empire, and her undergraduate research on Kashmir in the 1990s led her to value
the potential of public anthropology to fundamentally challenge the hegemonic power of war
machines and security states, at her home and abroad. Deepti Misri grew up in a Kashmiri
Pandit family in Bombay, experiencing Pandit community there as shaped by a sense of both
Brahmanical self-distinction and Islamophobic sense of besiegement, particularly after the Pan-
dit migration of the 1990s. She has sought instead to situate herself through collaborative work
with other Kashmiri and Kashmir scholars in Critical Kashmir Studies, even while marking
how being Kashmiri Pandit remains a privilege that shapes her ability to do this work. Over
time, our scholarly and activist engagements with one another and others have significantly
shaped our relationships to the broader Kashmiri political community and have also shaped how
we negotiate our individual and collective locations, responsibilities, and commitments in our
scholarship on Kashmir.
4
The contributors to this volume have attempted the urgent albeit imperfect work of decolo-
nizing academic scholarship on both Kashmir and South Asia, across a range of adjacent the-
oretical fields. As a major editorial effort featuring 27 chapters, this handbook attempts to
incorporate and magnify perspectives from Kashmir that both contribute to and complicate
scholarship on the global south. We have made a concerted effort to curate work by a wide
range of Critical Kashmir Studies scholars, working closely with junior scholars and with scholars
located in Kashmir, India, and Pakistan in order to decenter Euro-American dominance in some
limited way as a locus of knowledge production. Yet, without a doubt, this handbook remains
constrained by some of the legacies of knowledge production that it attempts to problematize
and transgress. For instance, while publication in an international venue offers recognition for
the work of Critical Kashmir Studies scholars, the handbook’s production under the imprint of
an American trade press also reinscribes hierarchies of knowledge that prioritize and generate
profit for publication networks in the global north. Our chosen publication venue carries the
risk of limiting the circulation of this work by factors of cost and access, despite our commit-
ted efforts to find ways to share this work as widely as possible. At the same time, publication
in this Euro-American press affords the opportunity to advance a field of scholarship that faces
increased criminalization in Kashmir, India, and even the United States, making this project
difficult if not impossible for most Kashmiri and Indian presses to support. Many Critical Kash-
mir Studies scholars, along with Kashmiri journalists and artists, are targeted for their political
and intellectual views. Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship has become difficult and dangerous
intellectual labor, with researchers as well as journalists, activists, and lawyers facing police sum-
mons, raids and interrogations, search and seizure operations, arbitrary and unlawful detentions,
custodial deaths, the application of anti-terror laws such as UAPA, and relentless online trolling.
Long-standing and transnational legacies of differential access to power, knowledge, and
privilege have left their stamp on the editorial composition of this handbook. Editorial labor is
a privilege, particularly in the case of Critical Kashmir Studies, because it provides the oppor-
tunity to shape the emerging intellectual field with political implications in a context of deep
and entrenched structures of occupation and resistance. At the same time, editorial work is a
deeply devalued form of labor in Euro-American academic circuits. Untenured scholars are
often actively discouraged from pursuing editorial work, which is seen as clerical and unoriginal
in contrast to the highly valued production of original and, historically, single-authored scholar-
ship. As feminist scholars, we approach our editorial labor as purposefully curatorial, with the
hope that this volume as a whole will advance the intellectual and political commitments of
Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship.
In recent years, Kashmiri scholars, artists, activists, and journalists have increasingly turned
to the framework of settler colonialism to understand India’s escalating assaults on Kashmiri
sovereignty. Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship has demonstrated how India’s policies to dis-
possess and disenfranchise Kashmiris have become institutionalized through sweeping legal and
administrative changes. These include new land ownership and citizenship and domicile laws;
electoral redistricting interventions that are meant to empower the Hindu state; evictions and
displacements of local populations from forest and state land; and the brazen reallocation of agri-
cultural land, meadows, mountains, glaciers, and bodies of water to sustain India’s occupation
and settler colonial apparatus. Palestinian scholars have recently argued “that a ‘comparative’
approach must attend to the political-economic and juridical formations that subtend coloniza-
tion as a process” through attention to scholarship by indigenous scholar-activists (Bhandar and
Ziadah 2016). These strategies of colonial and settler colonial domination resonate with the
techniques of dispossession operating in other settler jurisdictions such as Canada, Australia,
post-apartheid South Africa, Israel, and the United States.
5
Mona Bhan et al.
Although the vocabulary of settler colonialism is newly ascendant in Kashmir studies,

settler colonialism as state policy and practice has a long history in Kashmir. International
recognition of Kashmir’s contested sovereignty traces back to the founding of the modern
nation-states of India and Pakistan, making Kashmir one of the longest, most militarized, yet
most intensely invisibilized conflict zones in the world. Throughout the second half of the
twentieth century, India’s dominant secular and liberal ideological frameworks cast Kashmir as
an integral part of India, Kashmiri Muslims as a minority population in the Hindu-majority
polity, and Kashmiri struggles for self-determination as a Kashmiri Muslim secessionist move-
ment aided and abetted by Pakistan’s proxy war to claim Kashmir in its entirety as Pakistani
territory. These frameworks justified the domestication of the international conflict across
time, from the constitutional drafting processes in Kashmir and India in the 1950s (Duschinski
and Ghosh 2017), through the resolution of the India-Pakistan War in the Shimla Agreement
in 1972, to the central government’s onslaught of brutal repression through severe counter-
insurgency operations against civilian populations since the 1980s (Bhan, Duschinski and
Zia 2018). Across these decades, India’s settler occupation was maintained through legal and
military infrastructure and spatial regimes (Duschinski 2009, 2010; Junaid 2013, 2020), trade
regulations and land grabs (Saraf 2021; Suhail 2018), central government policies (Kanjwal
2017), culture industries (Kabir 2009a), environmental, ecological, and humanitarian opera-
tions (Bhan 2014; Bhan and Trisal 2016), international treaties that undermined Kashmiri
sovereignty (Lone 2018), and repressive carceral regimes (Ghosh and Duschinski 2020). Indian
occupation and settler violence have shaped everyday life both individually and collectively
through the production of “familial grief ” (Fazili 2016), communal massacre (Rashid 2020),
gendered mourning (Kaur 2020a, 2020b; Malik 2019), cosmopolitan imaginaries (Rizwan
2020), jurisdictional contestation (Hoffman and Duschinski 2020), and affective networks of
alliance and intimacy (Falak 2018). In turn, Kashmiris have consistently, across all of these dec-
ades, rejected Indian rule through mass protests, stone peltings, widespread shutdowns, elec-
tion boycotts, and armed rebellion (Ganie 2019, 2021; Junaid 2018; Kanjwal 2018; Sharma
2020a; Zia 2020a), as well as resistance art and literature, music and poetry, and independ-
ent media (Amin and Majid 2018; Kabir 2016; Kanjwal, Bhat and Zahra 2018; Kaul 2017;
H. Pandit 2020).
These long-standing (post)colonial dynamics of dispossession have reached new heights with
the rise to power of India’s right-wing Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) govern-
ment under Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. As state brutality has escalated, the Indian
state’s adoption of the tactic of disabling Kashmiris compels us to further expand our under-
standing of how both settler colonialism and resistance operate on the ground (Misri 2019; Zia
2019). As a biopolitical strategy, the widespread maiming of Kashmiri protesters with pellet-
firing shotguns allows the state to hobble protest while maintaining a humanitarian face (Misri
2020). As Jasbir Puar argues,
the understanding of maiming as a specific aim [and not a by-product] of biopolitics

puts pressure on the framing of settler colonialism as a project of elimination of the
indigenous through either genocide or assimilation. It asks us to re-evaluate the frame
of biopolitics in relation to the forms of maiming . . . that have gone on for centuries
in settler colonial occupations.
(Puar 2017: 144)
The BJP has intensified counterinsurgency strategies of mass surveillance, criminalization

of dissent, and collective punishment while also pursuing a multipronged military approach for
6
the final and complete annexation of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. On August 5, 2019, the
Indian Parliament initiated a legal and legislative process to dismantle J&K’s special status under
Article 370, which outlined the legal obligations associated with the Instrument of Accession,
and Article 35A, which granted residents rights and privileges that made them stewards of their
own territory, of the Indian Constitution (Ghosh 2019a; Zia, Duschinski and Bhan 2020).
Kashmir scholars argue that the Indian government’s unilateral abrogation of J&K’s special sta-
tus is in serious violation of past UN Security Council resolutions regarding Kashmiri right to
self-determination, and that it irreversibly erases the limited legal recognition and protection of
self-governance, legal autonomy, and citizenship rights for Kashmiris within the territory under
Indian control (see, for example, Ghosh 2019b).
The abrogation is the culmination of the Hindu Right’s long-cherished dream to secure
the full and final integration of Kashmir into India and ensure that the international commu-
nity views Kashmir as a matter internal to India rather than an international territorial dispute
between India and Pakistan. As the state of Jammu & Kashmir was brought into the Indian
federation in 1947 during a period of war and instability on the subcontinent, Articles 370 and
35A were written into India’s new constitution to incorporate the conditional and provisional
nature of the accession and to grant Kashmir’s residents rights and privileges that made them
stewards of their own territory. The Indian parliament’s abrogation of these articles signals an
intent to carry out far-reaching changes to demographic and land-holding patterns by opening
up Kashmir to settlement by outsiders who were previously restricted from purchasing land in
the region. The abrogation enables massive demographic changes that could make Kashmiris
minorities in their own homeland and undermine the territorial attachments that form the basis
of Kashmiri ethnic identity (for more on the abrogation and its implications, see Mushtaq and
Amin 2021; Sharma 2020b; Zargar 2020).
The abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A is the most brutal assault on Kashmiri political
aspirations since the British East India Company sold Kashmiri land, people, and resources to
the Dogra prince Gulab Singh through the Treaty of Amritsar in 1846. Under Dogra rule, land
in Kashmir was considered the property of the Maharaja (Naik 2012). Although Kashmir had
already experienced centuries-long foreign domination under the Afghans, Mughals, and the
Sikhs since the sixteenth century, conceptions of sovereignty underwent a significant shift dur-
ing this period (Rai 2004). Despite their investments in a monolithic and territorially bounded
conception of sovereignty, the British vested in Gulab Singh “personalized” sovereign powers as
a reward for Gulab’s Singh loyalty to the British in the second Anglo-Sikh War, but also a stra-
tegic intervention to curb Afghan influences in the Northwestern frontier regions (Rai 2004:
27). During the Dogra regime, Kashmiris lost all proprietary and occupancy rights over land,
while land became an instrument to foster loyalties to the Dogras and their patronage networks.
Their land policies reinforced preexisting feudal structures while introducing new and stringent
socio-economic hierarchies. Those who rendered civil or military services to the state were
allotted large tracts of land ( jagirs), and the allottees, known as jagirdars, functioned as representa-
tives of the Maharaja who were responsible for collecting land revenues and state tax from their
jagir (Naik 2012: 782, 783). Through their exploitation of Kashmir’s peasants, jagirdars along
with other types of landlords became Kashmir’s “virtual monarch[s]” and wielded extensive
powers over Kashmir’s peasantry while also solidifying discriminatory processes along regional
and religious lines (Naik 2012: 782). The Dogras treated the parceling and distribution of land
to political loyalists as an important step to establish and maintain their control and sovereignty
over Kashmir (Rai 2004) and to ensure that even after land settlement “commenced in the late
nineteenth century and conferred usufruct rights to the princely state’s subjects,” the “owner-
ship remained vested in the monarch” (Saraf 2020).
7
Mona Bhan et al.
Control over land is but one way in which Kashmiri sovereignty has been usurped by colo-
nial forces. Critical Kashmir Studies scholars and Kashmiri activists have called attention to the
role of gender and sexuality in securing settler colonial desires and claims over Kashmiri land
and sovereignty (Falak 2018; S. Malik 2014; I. Malik 2019; Osuri 2018; Zia 2020a). Settler
colonialism is underwritten by a stock set of gender and sexual scripts that posit both Kashmiri
land and women as feminized, desirable, and conquerable (N. Pandit 2020; Kaul 2018). In
the cultural realm, Kashmir has been constructed as a “territory of desire” for Indians, in part
through the construction of the Kashmiri woman as a fetishized object of desire for the north
Indian hero, in 1960s Bollywood romances such as Junglee and Kashmir ki Kali (Kabir 2009a).
Those representations found their echo in more recent articulations of Indian men’s fantasies
following the abrogation of Article 370, as fantasies of land possession in Kashmir by Indian
men were seamlessly coupled with desire for “fair Kashmiri women.” Even as Kashmir itself was
on complete communication lockdown, outside of Kashmir, Google searches for the phrase
“Kashmiri girl” began to spike, and social media sites such as TikTok and Facebook began to
froth with video clips uploaded by Indian men airing fantasies of marrying Kashmiri women.
This surge was driven ostensibly by the erroneous idea that Indian men could now also possess
land by marrying Kashmiri women, whereas previously, so the logic went, Kashmiri women
would have lost access to land ownership by marrying men outside the state. Not only was the
latter a false premise, as Kashmir scholars noted (Ghosh 2019c; Zia 2020b), but also, the fact
that Indians could now purchase land without any conjugal attachments whatsoever appeared
to have simply been forgotten, as an enduring Indian masculinist fantasy bubbled through these
clips, rendering facts entirely irrelevant. While the class and caste locations as well as the pur-
chasing power of the male users who uploaded these videos remains to be studied, what is
notable is their participation in a mass fantasy about both Kashmiri women and land: land as
women, and women as land. The fantasy of heterosexual union with the figure of the Kashmiri
Muslim woman (presumably one who would leave Islam?) became the route through which the
very boundaries between “Indian” and “Kashmiri,” once maintained by Article 370, no matter
how nominally, could be dissolved in a gesture of elimination through assimilation.
Settler colonialism has functioned through another classic strategy by co-opting feminist and
queer rights discourses to present colonialism as modernity. This strategy has proven particularly
effective in the context of Muslim-majority societies like Kashmir, Palestine, Iraq, and Afghani-
stan, since stereotypes of Muslim backwardness are already at hand, against which settler colo-
nization may be easily posited as “progress.” Thus another popular claim about Article 370 was
that it extended the Indian Supreme Court’s ruling decriminalizing homosexuality to Kashmir
for the first time – a perception that circulated notwithstanding the fact that the ruling already
extended to all state high courts, including Jammu’s and Kashmir’s.
Given this long history of land domination, Kashmiri scholars, journalists, and activists have,
since the abrogation of 2019, turned to the settler colonial analytic to name and make sense of
the particularities of India’s policy of total annihilation of Kashmiri society, economy, culture,
and modes of governance as an enduring relational process, a structure rather than an event
(Kauanui 2016). To paraphrase Patrick Wolfe (2006), Indian settlers will come to stay; and to
settle in through a variety of interlocking legal, political, and military processes of assimilation,
containment, removal, maiming, and elimination. The settler colonial analytic sheds light on
these enduring structures by destabilizing liberal secular historiographies that cling to Kashmir
as the key credible instantiation of India’s secular polity, as well as Hindu nationalist political
ideologies that demand possession of Kashmir’s land as an inalienable part of the Hindu Rashtra.
And through its focus on enduring structures, the settler colonial analytic allows reconsideration
of the ways in which Kashmir’s history of colonization predates the formation of both India and
8
Pakistan by rethinking Kashmiri struggles for self-determination as independent of and anterior

to India and Pakistan’s (post)colonial struggles over Kashmiri land and territory. The settler
colonialism framework thus enables the reinterpretation of Kashmir’s political history across
centuries of repressive rule and the reframing of people’s aspirations for freedom as a long-term
struggle for dignity, economic liberation, and political representation.
Settler Colonial Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies

Competing claims of indigeneity have been central to both the consolidation of and resistance
to India’s settler colonial project in Kashmir. Indigeneity is a category of analysis as well as a legal
and political assertion of distinction and difference. The category of indigeneity is frequently
mobilized in the context of Kashmir, often to very different effects. The work compiled in
this handbook, as well as in the larger field of Critical Kashmir Studies, suggests approaching
indigeneity as an analytic rather than merely an identity, “asking how it functions in discourse”
(Arvin 2015: 115). We find it useful here to think with the working definition developed by
Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar Maile Arvin (2015: 121), who writes that “indigene-
ity . . . refers to the historical and contemporary effects of colonial and anticolonial demands
and desires related to a certain land or territory and the various displacements of that place’s
original or longtime inhabitants.” Rather than merely assessing truth or falsity of indigeneity
claims, a critical methodology traces the effects of such claims, approaching indigeneity as a per-
formative rather than an identity category. In the context of Kashmir, this means asking how
indigeneity is invoked in relation to land, in order to track how claims of indigeneity may either
cooperate with colonial strategies of domination via land appropriation; or, alternately, how it
may challenge such claims. To quote Arvin (2015: 121) once again, “indigenous knowledge and
praxis can be either anticolonial or participatory in colonialism.”
In Kashmir, such competing claims to indigeneity are mediated through a multiplicity of
religious, ethnic, and linguistic identities. For instance, Kashmiri Pandits, the minority com-
munity of Kashmiri Hindus who departed from Kashmir at the peak of armed militancy in
the early 1990s, most often claim that Muslims purposefully forced them out of their homes
to carry out Pakistan’s Islamist agenda to disintegrate India.5 The Kashmiri Pandit community,
which is largely allied with the Indian state and views the Kashmiri struggle for freedom as sedi-
tious and illegitimate (Bhan, Misri and Zia 2020), seeks to establish their claim to safe return to
Kashmir by describing themselves with the emotive phrase “original inhabitants of Kashmir” –
a phrase that not only constructs them as displaced indigenes but also implicitly produces the
majority Muslim Kashmiri population as outsiders. Such perceptions echo dominant Hindu
nationalist constructions of Muslims as invaders and outsiders. The claim to indigeneity via the
language of “original inhabitants” has the effect of tapping into dominant Islamophobic senti-
ment across India in order to advocate for Kashmiri Pandit return under conditions that would
further intensify the chokehold on Kashmiri Muslim life within Kashmir – in the form of sepa-
rate townships for Pandit returnees, for instance, or the intensification of militarized presence
not only in the form of “boots on the ground” but also in the form of sainik (soldier) colonies.
Such formulations contrast with alternative invocations of indigeneity that aim to maintain and
secure a relationship to land and protect it from the extractive conditions facilitated by the set-
tler colonial state – in other words, to assert sovereignty over human life and land in Kashmir.
These claims are anchored not only on religion but also on a relationship to land and relations
that make Kashmir Kashmir (Tikoo 2020).
Of course, indigeneity cannot purely be reduced to only a category of analysis, a political
assertion, or a legal claim. Kanaka Maoli scholar J. Kēhaulani Kauanani (2016) points out that
9
Mona Bhan et al.
indigeneity, like settler colonialism, is enduring, first because “indigenous peoples exist, resist,
and persist,” and second because “settler colonialism is a structure that endures indigeneity, as
it holds out against it.” For Kashmiris, land and territory are central issues, such that resistance
takes the form of survival or what settler colonial studies scholar Lorenzo Veracini (2011) terms
“persistence.” Writing on Mohawk struggles for sovereignty, Kahnawake Mohawk anthropolo-
gist Audra Simpson (2014: 11) reframes resistance as refusal, which includes everyday practices of
rejecting externally imposed institutions of settler state sovereignty and asserting “indigenous
political orders” that challenge settler logics of inclusion and multiculturalism. The long history
of boycotting Indian elections in Kashmir exemplifies precisely such a refusal, as did the refusal of
Kashmiris to re-emerge from their homes or return to business after the official suspension of
the curfew imposed in August 2019. Through such actions, Kashmiris have refused to allow
the narrative of normalcy to overwrite their suffering and rage, as they have kept their chil-
dren home from school and kept shuttered the shops that they were forced to close. Simpson’s
exploration of the politics of refusal raises questions about alternative and popular forms of sov-
ereignty, jurisdiction, and legitimacy, urging scholars to attend to the complex ways in which
indigenous people practice sovereignty in their everyday lives. Such everyday expressions of
sovereignty, she argues, enable indigenous communities to assert their presence and contest the
“presumption that the colonial project has been realized: land has been dispossessed; its owners
have been eliminated or absorbed” (ibid.).
The urgent need to preserve and persevere is felt acutely across vast swaths of the Kashmiri
Muslim population at a time when the settler colonial intent of the Indian government is
brazenly clear, and Kashmiris fear the evisceration of their lives and livelihoods. Historically,
Kashmiri Muslim communities were expected to align with India’s secular politics of inclusion
that framed Kashmiri Muslims as a minority within India and misrepresented their struggles
and aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination as either an outcome of their alienation
from India’s national culture, or an outcome of Pakistan-backed Islamic terrorism. India’s secular
regime reduced Kashmiri Muslimness to a problem of difference. The state remained invested in
managing this difference through hollow gestures of inclusion that refused to engage with peo-
ple’s genuine political aspirations. But Kashmiri Muslims viewed Indian secularism as an alibi to
forcibly integrate Kashmir into the predominantly Hindu Indian nation-state. As Iymon Majid
(2020: 1) argues, Kashmir’s Islamist organization, the Jama’at-e-Islami, mobilized “the margin-
alization of Muslims, alongside Islamist rhetorical opposition to the doctrine of secularism, to
counter the political secularism of the Indian state.” He further argues that Jama’at’s opposition
to secularism must be situated in its rejection of secularism’s capacity to provide “moral code
of conduct for the faithful,” but also in the “extraordinary political circumstances of Kashmir’s
disputed accession with India” and the belief that Pakistan was the only “safe haven” for Mus-
lims whose lives and interests were threatened by India’s communal polity (ibid.: 7). Thus, many
Kashmiri Muslims who rejected putatively secular models of Indian democracy and embraced
Islamic piety and morality as guiding principles envisioned different political futures based on
their religious affinity with Pakistan.
Since the 1950s, Kashmiri aspirations for self-determination include imaginaries of freedom
from both India and Pakistan as well as aspirations to merge with Pakistan. But the Congress
party as well as the Hindu Right have both worked to criminalize Kashmiri aspirations for
freedom and affinities with Pakistan, denying Kashmiri claims to independent statehood and
Pakistan’s status as a genuine party to the dispute. Indian political parties, especially the Congress
party, “preached secularism” while actively denying Kashmiris their right to self-determination
(Hussain 2021: 355; see also Kanjwal 2017). Secularism was thus used to silence alternative
visions of nationhood and belonging that had been articulated by Kashmiris since the 1940s.
10
Kashmiris have for long refused to comply with India’s secularity in which Kashmiris themselves
were reduced to tokens of Muslimness in India’s multireligious polity to justify their forced
integration into India. Seen from this perspective, the armed and unarmed struggle of Kash-
miris against India is precisely an expression of this refusal – a concerted resistance to the idea of
being reduced to a problem of difference while being denied the rights to decide their present
or political futures.
Kashmiris’ refusal to align with national scripts of inclusion and recognition, or to capitulate
to the state’s territorial lines and borders, is shaped by a popular consciousness that traces Kash-
mir’s history of colonization through extraction, expulsion, and elimination back to the feudal
rule of Hindu Dogras in the 1930s, and even before to the foreign occupation of their land that
ended Kashmiri autonomy in the sixteenth century. Such forms of indigenous memory and
consciousness constitute what Rowe and Tuck (2017), following M. Jacqui Alexander (2005),
call “palimpsestic time,” in which “the imprint of historical processes provides a ghostly shape
to the present,” while also framing anxieties that exert their shadowy effects into the future (see
also Tuck and Yang 2012). At the same time, as Haris Zargar (2016) suggests, collective memo-
ries of resistance constitute “the crux of Kashmiri national identity,” such that the attainment of
a “sovereign, independent state” is a crucial component of “collective self-preservation.” The
multiple genres of cultural and political production in the form of resistance poetry, art, music,
and satire, as well as mourning rituals, street protests, and hartals and public strikes, point to the
ways in which memories of the past intersect with the conditions of the present to shape the
enduring desire for liberation.
Taken together, settler colonial studies and critical indigenous studies offer emancipatory
analytic frameworks: at once academic practice and political praxis, they strive for liberation and
emancipation within the academy and beyond. Especially since August 5, 2019, rapidly shift-
ing realities on the ground have motivated Kashmiris to draw parallels with liberatory struggles
elsewhere, in places where marginalized people continue to resist their dislocations, displace-
ments, and erasures from their land through struggles for ecological and food sovereignty and
health and environmental justice. Kashmiri struggles have intensified further under the crush-
ing weight of successive lockdowns that began with the announcement of the abrogation in
2019 and intensified with the public health crisis of 2020 and 2021. As Kashmiris continue to
endure unprecedented levels of physical, mental, social, and economic suffering, and figure out
ways to survive and resist oppressive forces designed to eliminate them, experiences and stories
from other settler colonial contexts have expanded Kashmiri notions of self-determination.
Kashmiris are actively asking how their political, economic, cultural, and ecological oppres-
sions might connect with the struggles of indigenous communities elsewhere, and how their
political aspirations for azaadi might resonate with multifaceted struggles of Black and Native
people across the globe. In that sense, settler colonialism has visibilized the Kashmiri struggle
for self-determination in the global arena beyond its political genealogies to more explicitly
include questions of indigeneity, ecological oppression, and land and resource dispossessions
under India’s protracted occupation.
Notes
1 Of course, we cannot assume that all projects of placemaking that invoke human-nonhuman relation-
alities are inherently radical. Hindu supremacist projects are increasingly using notions of Hindu rela-
tionality with non-human natural entities (Longkumer 2020) and representing non-humans as active
participants in the Hindu reclamations of India as a Hindu nation (Bhan and Govindrajan, n.d). We
argue that the politics of such placemaking projects must be closely tracked in order to avoid romanti-
cizing their intended and unintended outcomes.
11
Mona Bhan et al.
2 Following Hayes (2019: 27), we argue that “as a critical component of setting, place is not the stage
upon which events occur but is rather an active participant in those events.” Anjali Arondekar and
Geeta Patel (2016: 152), too, argue how geopolitics reduces places to “exemplars” but rarely views
them as offering epistemological interventions. Such mappings of geographies reduce vibrant, alive,
and networked places to the status of borders and margins, without recognizing their “productive and
theoretical formations.”
3 See for instance the work of Kashmiri artists and writers such as Madhosh Balhami, Farah Bashir, Uzma
Falak, Zeeshan Jaipuri, Huzaifa Pandit, Syed Areej Safvi, Malik Sajad, Mir Suhail, Mirza Waheed, Asiya
Zahoor, and Ather Zia, among others.
4 These curated collections include Bhan and Duschinski 2020; Duschinski and Bhan 2017; Duschinski
et al. 2018; Duschinski and Malik 2020; Kaul and Zia 2018; Osuri and Zia 2020; Zia, Duschinski and
Bhan 2020. Other edited collections on Kashmir include Ali et al. 2011; Kak 2013; Zia and Bhat 2019.
5 For more on Kashmiri Pandits and their histories of departure from Kashmir, see Datta (2017).
Works Cited
Abufarha, Nasser. 2008. “Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange and Olive Trees in Palestine.” Identi-
ties 15(3): 343–368.
Accardi, Dean. 2018. “Orientalism and the Invention of Kashmiri Religion(s).” International Journal of
Hindu Studies 22: 411–430.
Aggarwal, Ravina. 2004. Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Aijazi, Omer. 2018. “Kashmir as Movement and Multitude.” Journal of Narrative Politics 4(2): 88–118.
Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the
Sacred. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ali, Nosheen. 2013. “Grounding Militarism: Structures of Feeling and Force in Gilgit-Baltistan.” In Every-
day Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, edited by Kamala Visweswaran,
85–114. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2019. Delusional States Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Ali, Tariq, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji, Pankaj Mishra, and Arundhati Roy. 2011. Kashmir: The Case
for Freedom. Verso Books.
Amin, Mudasir and Iymon Majid. 2018. “Politicising the Street: Graffiti in Kashmir.” Economic & Political
Weekly 53(14).
Arondekar, Anjali and Geeta Patel. 2016. “Area Impossible: Notes toward an Introduction.” GLQ: A Jour-
nal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22(2): 151–171.
Arvin, Maile. 2015. “Analytics of Indigeneity.” In Native Studies Keywords, edited by Stephanie Nohelani
Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja, 119–129. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
BBC Sounds. 2020. “Lal Ded: Kashmir’s Mystical Poet.” The Forum, August 27. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/
play/w3cszjvt.
Bhan, Mona. 2014. Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and The Politics of Identity in India: From Warfare to Welfare?
London, NY: Routledge.
Bhan, Mona, Haley Duschinski, and Ather Zia. 2018. “ ‘Rebels of the Streets’: Violence, Protest, and
Freedom in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan,
Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood, 1–41. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bhan, Mona and Radhika Govindrajan. n.d. “More than Human Fascism: Cows, Rivers, and the Making
of a Hindu Nation.”
Bhan, Mona, Deepti Misri, and Ather Zia. 2020. “Relating Otherwise: Forging Critical Solidarities
Across the Kashmiri Pandit-Muslim Divide.” Biography 43(2): 285–305.
Bhan, Mona and Nishita Trisal. 2016. “Fluid Landscapes, Sovereign Nature: Conservation and Counter-
insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir.” Critique of Anthropology 37(1): 67–92.
Bhandar, Brenna and Rafeef Ziadah. 2016. “Acts and Omissions: Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine
Studies.” Jadaliyya, January 14. www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32857.
Bouzas, Antia Mato. 2019. Kashmir as a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Con-
trol. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
12
Dad, Aziz Ali. 2020. “Social Contract and Its Discordance in Gilgit-Baltistan.” In Speak-
ing Justice to Power: Kashmir, edited by Ather Zia, Haley Duschinski, and Mona Bhan. Asso-
ciation for Political and Legal Anthropology. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2020/08/25/
social-contract-and-its-discordance-in-gilgit-baltistan/.
Datta, Ankur. 2017. On Uncertain Ground. Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Duschinski, Haley. 2009. “Destiny Effects: Militarization, State Power, and Punitive Containment in
Kashmir Valley.” Anthropological Quarterly 82(3): 691–717.
———. 2010. “Reproducing Regimes of Impunity: Fake Encounters and the Informalization of Every-
day Violence in Kashmir Valley.” Cultural Studies 24(1): 110–132.
Duschinski, Haley and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh. 2017. “Constituting the Occupation: Preventive
Detention and Permanent Emergency in Kashmir.” The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law
49(3): 314–337.
Duschinski, Haley and Bruce Hoffman. 2011. “Everyday Violence, Institutional Denial and Struggles for
Justice in Kashmir.” Race & Class 52(4): 44–70.
Falak, Uzma. 2018. “The Intimate World of Vyestoan: Affective Female Alliances and Companionship of
Resistance in Kashmir.” Economic and Political Weekly 53(47): 76–82.
Fazili, Gowhar Ashraf. 2016. “Familial Grief, Resistance and the Political Imaginary in Kashmir.” Indian
Anthropologist 46(2): 53–74.
Ganie, Tahir Mohd. 2019. “Metaphors in the Political Narratives of Kashmiri Youth.” South Asia: Journal
of South Asian Studies 42(2): 278–300.
———. 2021. “ ‘All I Got is Stones in my Hand’: Youth-led Protests in Indian-administered Kashmir.”
Social Movements 20(1): 115–123.
Ghosh, Shrimoyee Nandini 2019a. “One Nation, One Flag, One Constitution?” Raiot, September 16.
https://raiot.in/dismantling-370-in-kashmir-part-1/.
———. 2019b. “Internal? Bilateral? International?” Raiot, September 19. https://raiot.in/
dismantling-370-in-kashmir-part-2/.
———. 2019c. “Constitutional Lies and the Afterlives of Law in Kashmir.” Raiot, December 20. https://
raiot.in/constitutional-lies-and-the-afterlives-of-law-in-kashmir/.
Ghosh, Shrimoyee Nandini and Haley Duschinski. 2020. “The Grid of Indefinite Incarceration: Everyday
Legality and Paperwork Warfare in Indian-controlled Kashmir.” Critique of Anthropology 40(3): 364–384.
Goeman, Mishuana. 2015. “Land as Life: Unsettling the Logics of Containment.” In Native Studies Key-
words, edited by Teves Stephanie Nohelani, Smith Andrea, and Raheja Michelle H., 71–89. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press.
Green, Nile. 2015. “From Tehrangeles to Kashmir.” LA Review of Books, November 2. https://lareviewof-
books.org/article/from-tehrangeles-to-kashmir/.
Gupta Radhika. 2013. “Allegiance and Alienation: Border dynamics in Kargil.” In Borderland Lives in
Northern South Asia, edited by David Geller, 41–71. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hayes, Ernestine. 2019. “Contemporary Creative Writing and Ancient Oral Tradition.” In Shapes of Native
Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton,
23–30. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Hoffman, Bruce and Haley Duschinski. 2020. “Between Freedom and Justice: Popular Protest and Juris-
dictional Contestation of Militarized Governance in Indian-Controlled Kashmir.” Social & Legal Studies
29(5): 650–678.
Hussain, Shahla. 2021. Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johar, Pushpendra. 2019. “Complementary Identities, Dichotomous Constructions: Navigating Reli-
gious, Sectarian, and Caste Identities in Indian-Occupied Kashmir.” Prabuddha: Journal of Social Equality
3(1): 77–105.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2013. “Death and Life Under Occupation: Space, Violence, and Memory in Kashmir.”
In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, edited by Kamala
Visweswaran, 158–190. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2018. “Epitaphs as Counterhistories: Martyrdom, Commemoration, and the Work of Graveyards
in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia,
and Cynthia Mahmood, 248–277. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2020. “Counter-maps of the Ordinary: Occupation, Subjectivity, and Walking under Curfew in
Kashmir.” Identities 27(3): 302–320.
13
Mona Bhan et al.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2009a. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
———. 2009b. “Cartographic Irresolution and the Line of Control.” Social Text 27(4): 45–66.
———. 2016. “The New Pastoral: Environmentalism and Conflict in Contemporary Writing from
Kashmir.” In South-Asian Fiction in English, edited by Alex Tickell, 199–215. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Kak, Sanjay. 2013. Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Illustrated edition. Chicago,
IL: Haymarket Books.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2017. “Building a New Kashmir: Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad and the Politics of State-
Formation in a Disputed Territory (1953–1963).” PhD Diss. Department of History, University of
Michigan.
———. 2018. “State Violence and Youth Resistance: Perspectives from Indian-held Kashmir.” In Political
Violence in South Asia, edited by Ali Riaz, Zobaida Nasreen, and Fahmida Zaman, 119–135. London
and New York: Routledge.
Kanjwal, Hafsa, Durdana Bhat, and Masrat Zahra. 2018. “ ‘Protest’ Photography in Kashmir: Between
Resistance and Resilience.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 46(3): 85–99.
Kauanani, J. Kēhaulani. 2016. “ ‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity.”
Lateral 5(1). https://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indi
geneity-kauanui/.
Kaul, Nitasha. 2018. “India’s Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender, (Anti) Nationalism.” Feminist
Review 119(1): 126–143.
Kaul Nitasha and Ather Zia, eds. 2018. “Knowing in Our Own Ways: Women and Kashmir. Special Issue
of Review of Women’s Studies.” Economic & Political Weekly 53(47).
Kaul, Suvir. 2017. Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kaur, Bhavneet. 2020a. “Everyday Suffocations, Smells and Sounds of Jung: Ethnography of Tear Gas in
Downtown Srinagar.” Himalaya 40(1).
———. 2020b. “ ‘Politics of Emotion’: Everyday Affective Circulation of Women’s Resistance and Grief
in Kashmir.” Ethnography 22(4): 515–533.
Khanday, Aasif. 2019. “The Story of Kashmir through a Study of its Literature.” Greater Kashmir, March 27.
www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/the-story-of-kashmir-through-a-study-of-its-literature/.
Khayal, Ghulam Nabi. 2018. “On Akhtar Mohiuddin.” Kashmir Life, December 26. https://kashmirlife.
net/on-akhter-mohiuddin-issue-39-vol-10–196247/.
Lone, Fozia Nazir. 2018. Historical Title, Self-Determination and the Kashmir Question: Changing Perspectives
in International Law. The Netherland: Brill.
Longkumer, Arkotong. 2020. The Great India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Majid, Iymon. 2020. “Confronting the Indian State: Islamism, Secularism, and the Kashmir Muslim Ques-
tion.” International Journal of Asian Studies 19(1): 1–14.
Malik, Inshah. 2019. Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir. Switzerland: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
Malik, Shazia. 2014. Women’s Development Amid Conflicts in Kashmir: A Socio-Cultural Study. Gurgaon,
India: Partridge.
Misri, Deepti. 2019. “Showing Humanity: Violence and Visuality in Kashmir.” Cultural Studies 33(3): 527–549.
———. 2020. “Dark Ages and Bright Futures: Youth, Disability, and Time in Kashmir.” Public Culture
32(3): 539–565.
Mushtaq, Samreen and Mudasir Amin. 2021. “ ‘We Will Memorise Our Home’: Exploring Set-
tler Colonialism as an Interpretive Framework for Kashmir.” Third World Quarterly. DOI:
10.1080/01436597.2021.1984877. www.thepolisproject.com/indias-settler-colonialism-in-kashmir-
is-not-starting-now-eliminating-the-natives-is-a-process-long-underway/#.YRL4B4hKhdh.
Naik, Showkat Ahmad. 2012. “Landlords, Peasants, and the Dogra Rule in Kashmir.” Proceedings of the
Indian History Congress 73: 782–793.
Osuri, Goldie. 2017. “Imperialism, Colonialism and Sovereignty in the (Post)colony: India and Kashmir.”
Third World Quarterly 38(11): 2428–2443.
———. 2018. “Sovereignty, Vulnerability, and a Gendered Resistance in Indian-occupied Kashmir.” Third
World Thematics 3(2): 228–243.
Pandit, Huzaifa. 2020. “Translating Loss: Reading Translation as Resistance.” Himalaya 40(1): 92–108.
14
Pandit, Niharika. 2020. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2020/08/05/bollywood-and-the-banality-of-

militarization/.
Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press.
Rai, Mridu. 2004. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Rashid, Iffat. 2020. “Theatrics of a ‘Violent State’ or ‘State of Violence’: Mapping Histories and Memories
of Partition in Jammu and Kashmir.” South Asia.
Rizwan, Rakhshan. 2020. Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan. New
York and London: Routledge.
Robinson, Cabeiri deBergh. 2013. Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kash-
miri Jihadists. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rowe, Aimee Carrillo and Eve Tuck. 2017. “Settler Colonialism and Cultural Studies: Ongoing Settle-
ment, Cultural Production, and Resistance.” Critical Studies – Critical Methodologies 17(1): 3–13.
Saraf, Aditi. 2020. “Care of the Land: Sovereignty and Stewardship.” In Speaking Justice to Power: Kashmir,
edited by Ather Zia, Haley Duschinski, and Mona Bhan. Association for Political and Legal Anthropol-
ogy. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2020/07/30/care-of-the-land-sovereignty-and-stewardship/.
———. 2021. “Trust amid ‘Trust Deficit’: War, Credit, and Improvidence in Kashmir.” American Ethnolo-
gist 47(4): 387–401.
Schild, Pascale. 2015. “Local Politics of Reconstruction along and across Azad Kashmir’s border with
Pakistan.” Contemporary South Asia 23(3): 292–313.
———. 2014. “Struggling for Reconstruction: Houses, Homes and ‘the State’ after the Earthquake in
Muzaffarabad, Azad Kashmir.” Scrutiny: A Journal of International and Pakistan Studies 5/6: 33–51.
Sharma, Sarbani. 2020a. “Labouring for Kashmir’s Azadi: Ongoing Violence and Resistance in Maisuma,
Srinagar.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 54(1): 27–50.
———. 2020b. “Chicaneries of Power and Subterfuge: Constitutional Laws on Kashmir.” In Speaking
Justice to Power: Kashmir. Political and Legal Anthropology Review. https://politicalandlegalanthro.
org/2020/08/05/chicaneries-of-power-and-subterfuge/.
Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Smith, Sara. 2020. Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Sökefeld, Martin. 2015. “Jammu and Kashmir: Boundaries and Movements.” Contemporary South Asia
23(3): 251–265.
———. 2020. “The Power of Lists: IDPs and Disaster Governmentality After the Attabad Landslide in
Northern Pakistan.” Ethnos. DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2020.1765833.
Suhail, Ghulam Nabi Peer. 2018. Pieces of Earth: The Politics of Land Grabbing in Kashmir. India: Oxford
University Press.
Tikoo, Anmol. 2020. ’What About Kashmiri Pandits?’ How to Make This Question Count, Thirty Years Later.
The Wire. www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXu0KUeYKiA.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang 2012. “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Edu-
cation & Society 1(1): 1–40.
Van Beek, Martijn. 2000. “Beyond Identity Fetishism: ‘Communal’ Conflict in Ladakh and the Limits of
Autonomy.” Cultural Anthropology 15(4): 525–569.
Veracini, Lorenzo. 2011. “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies.” Settler Colonial Studies 1(1): 1–12.
Wahid, Siddiq. 2016. “What A Central Asian Sojourn Told Me About Jammu & Kashmir.” The Wire,
June 12. https://thewire.in/uncategorised/a-central-asian-sojourn.
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research
8(4): 387–409.
Zargar, Haris. 2016. “Why Violence in Kashmir Is Getting Worse.” The Diplomat, April 27. https://
thediplomat.com/2016/04/why-violence-in-kashmir-is-getting-worse/.
———. 2020. “Modi Advances Settler Colonial Project in Kashmir.” New Frame, June 15. www.new-
frame.com/modi-advances-settler-colonial-project-in-kashmir/.
Zia, Ather 2019. “Blinding Kashmiris: The Right to Maim and the Indian Military Occupation in Kash-
mir.” Interventions 21(6): 773–786.
———. 2020a. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: Uni-
versity of Washington Press.
15
Mona Bhan et al.
———. 2020b. “The Specter of Gender Discrimination in the Removal of Kashmir’s Autonomy.” Speak-
ing Justice to Power: Kashmir. Political and Legal Anthropology Review. https://politicalandlegalan
thro.org/2020/09/01/the-specter-of-gender-discrimination-in-the-removal-of-kashmirs-autonomy/.
Zia, Ather, Haley Duschinski, and Mona Bhan. 2020. “A Year of Siege: Politics of Annexation and Set-
tler Colonialism in Kashmir.” In Speaking Justice to Power: Kashmir. Political and Legal Anthropology
Review. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2020/07/30/a-year-of-siege/.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2014. Kashmir’s Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagina-
tion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Special Issues and Edited Collections

Bhan, Mona and Haley Duschinski, eds. 2020. “Occupations in Context.” Special Issue of Critique of
Anthropology 40(3).
Duschinski, Haley and Mona Bhan, eds. 2017. “States of Inclusion.” Special Issue of Journal of Legal Plural-
ism and Unofficial Law 49(3).
Duschinski, Haley, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood, eds. 2018. Resisting Occupation in
Kashmir. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Duschinski, Haley and Inshah Malik, eds. 2020. “War and Suffering in Kashmir.” Special Issue of Himalaya
40(1).
Osuri, Goldie and Ather Zia, eds. 2020. “Kashmir and Palestine: Archives of Coloniality and Solidarity.”
Special Issue of Identities 27(3).
Zia, Ather and Javaid Iqbal Bhat, eds. 2019. A Desolation Called Peace: Voices from Kashmir. New Delhi:
Harper Collins India.
Zia, Ather, Haley Duschinski, and Mona Bhan, eds. 2020. Speaking Justice to Power: Kashmir. Political and
Legal Anthropology Review. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/speaking-justice-to-power-kashmir/.
16
SECTION I
Territories, Homelands, Borders

Ather Zia
This section considers various modalities of the Indian state’s interventions in Kashmir and their
implications for the local body politic: undermining native desires and ecologies, appropriating
peasant movements, silencing women’s voices, and producing political imaginaries of abled and
dis-abled bodies in the Kashmir region. Like other postcolonial democracies, India uses colo-
nialism as a strategy to achieve their geopolitical and economic goals and accomplish social and
political objectives. The two chapters by Idrees Kanth and Suvir Kaul offer complementary yet
somewhat different analyses of the complex role of the National Conference party in Kashmir.
The National Conference is today considered a party that paved the way for the Indian mili-
tary occupation of Kashmir, even though for the first few years after 1947, it achieved radical
success in introducing policies such as the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act that gave land to
the tiller. On the other hand, the party and its leaders failed dismally by imposing authoritar-
ian rule, repressing dissent and genuine grassroots movements from taking root. Idrees Kanth’s
chapter addresses the paucity of peasant voices in Kashmir’s archival history, which has suffered
multiple threats of annihilation. Kanth considers how the ideals of “national” and “freedom”
existed in the Kashmiri peasant imaginary before and after 1947 as twin ideals that gave shape
to Kashmiri national consciousness, fueling existing political resistance to India. As he excavates
peasant histories, Kanth analyzes how the hegemony of the National Conference party elided
the alternative histories of some local movements. The hypervisibility of the National Confer-
ence’s narrative enabled a portrayal of Kashmir as far too progressive for a “theologically inspired
Pakistan, which has remained a feudal state at its core.” Kanth concludes that after 1947, the
peasantry remained status quoist rather than seeking rai-shumari (plebiscite) and haq-e-khudiradiat
(self-determination), reasoning that after centuries of subjugation and exploitation, the peasants
experienced some economic relief and gravitated toward stability rather than resistance.
Kaul’s chapter analyzes the Naya Kashmir (New Kashmir) manifesto adopted by the National
Conference party, which ushered in the agrarian reforms that, as Kanth argues, prompted the
status quo orientation of the peasantry. The Naya Kashmir manifesto was a revolutionary docu-
ment that called for universal franchise, women’s rights, freedom of expression, and extensive
land reforms, including ending feudal landlordism, eliminating agrarian debt, and giving land to
the tiller. Kaul explores the ways in which Naya Kashmir is central to the development of con-
temporary ideas of democratic self-determination in Kashmir. He calls the manifesto a weighty
prelude to the idea of azaadi (freedom). For Kaul, the pro-poor politics and progressive vision of
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-2
Ather Zia
the National Conference, as expressed in the Naya Kashmir manifesto, have informed resistance
politics in Kashmir across time.
Alka Sabharwal’s chapter on Changthang in Ladakh focuses on how India has ushered in new
ecological paradigms that promise to provide livelihoods and conserve biodiversity but result in
strengthening military control of people and borders, impacting people as well as flora and wild-
life. In Changthang, the Indian government has expanded the military’s environmental mandate
and made them a “virtuous” ally of the people in biodiversity protection. Thus, the overarching
legitimacy gained by the military undermines local bodies, while ignoring their environmental
footprint. This situation has been exacerbated after India’s abrogation of August 5, 2019. The
Indian government justified its action by saying autonomy had impeded the region’s develop-
ment and gave a host of strawman arguments to support it. Sabharwal concludes that the green-
ing of frontier politics represents the continuity, not the closure, of the Indian nation-state’s
frontier making, ensuring the erasure of Changpa pastoralists.
Khushdeep Kaur Malhotra’s chapter on Kashmiri Sikh women highlights the precarity of
religious minorities, especially the possibility of being weaponized by the nation-state. Her
chapter analyzes the massacre of 35 Sikh men in Chittisinghpora in 2000 through the gendered
optic of Sikh women, including widows of the killed men. Challenging the erasure of Sikh
women’s struggles, Malhotra highlights their agency in navigating their social and political
locations within Muslim majority and Sikh communities. Malhotra illuminates the conflicting
narratives that have surrounded the massacre, maintaining the centrality of the Sikh women
who she claims are “astonishingly absent from these discourses” about the condition of Sikhs
in Kashmir. The erasure of Sikh women’s voices continues, even as the community demands
minority status and an impartial inquiry into the Chittisinghpora massacre. Malhotra explains
that the Kashmiri Sikh community is encouraging young girls to become Amritdhari Sikhnis
to strengthen their religious faith and self-regulation to fight intermarriage and conversions.
She emphasizes how India’s prevailing Islamophobic discourse seeps into the community where
some Sikh community members see interfaith marriages and conversions as a “looming threat.”
Ananya Jahanara Kabir focuses on the gendered and heteronormative aspects of the Kashmir
dispute through “alegropolitics,” or the politics of resistance through embodied joy. She explores
depictions of Kashmiri subjectivity and repercussions of the conflict on female sexuality through
the image of “hortus interruptus,” a garden where spring’s advent is indefinitely stalled. She
focuses on the film Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet written by Kashmiri journalist Basharat
Peer. The film rejects stereotypical Bollywood depictions of Kashmir even though “it ensures
the plenitude of the heteronormative home built on the marital relationship, and ever more
urgently required with the Indian State’s willful destruction of the structures of Kashmiri soci-
ety.” Kabir juxtaposes Haider with Kashmiri poet and filmmaker Asiya Zahoor’s short film Stitch,
which draws on the hortus interruptus to foreground women’s pleasure without capitulating
to heteronormativity. Kabir contends that Zahoor’s alegropolitics in Kashmir make manifest
women’s agency, creativity, and care of the self: “an agency responsive to the ever-present Kash-
miri call for aazadi (freedom).”
Deepti Misri’s chapter approaches themes of precarity, violence, and maiming through the
lens of disability studies. She argues that disability studies scholarship shines light on “how the
experience of ‘preexisting’ disability is shaped by the environment of militarized occupation;
and also how disability is a constant and regular product of this environment.” She reiterates
that the ableist structure of occupation contributes to the configuration of the “able” hero
body of the Indian soldier and the vulnerable, subject Kashmiri body. The optic of disability
allows Misri to analyze how caste and class have been crucial factors in strengthening India’s
occupation of Kashmir. For example, she argues that ableist narratives have contributed to the
18
Territories, Homelands, Borders
dominant ideology of Kashmiri Pandits as intellectually superior, and that this “eugenicist lan-
guage of inborn superiority” erases structures of power that have produced differential access to
education and other services between Pandits and Muslims.
Ultimately, this section sheds light not only on the formations of power and violence that
constitute India’s occupation of Kashmir but also on the instantiations of azaadi that have sus-
tained across multiple communities over time. Kanth seeks to understand the meanings of azaadi
in the peasant imagination, while Kaul interprets it through reference to the Naya Kashmir
manifesto. Malhotra and Kabir locate its complexities in gendered and interfaith bodies and
spaces, while Sabharwal manifests its implications on the frontiers that are forever in flux. Taken
together, these five authors emphasize the importance of azaadi in understanding notions of
Kashmiri identity, belonging, and struggle.
19
1
PEASANT IMAGINARIES AND
“KASHMIRI NATIONALISM”
Idrees Kanth
Introduction
To invoke Shahid Amin, how does one write histories of the unlettered – workers or peasants
who produce goods and services, not documents? Peasants do not write, they are written about.
The speech of the humble folk is not normally recorded for posterity. Historians often latch
on to extraordinary events in the lives of such people or have learned to comb “confessions”
and “testimonies” for their evidence, for this is where peasants cry out, dissimulate, or indeed
narrate (Amin 1995).
In the context of colonial India a brand of historians who designated themselves as Subaltern
Studies collective attempted to resurrect “subaltern” peasant consciousness by focusing on peas-
ant uprisings, asserting that such voices had received very little attention in the elite narratives
that had hitherto dominated Indian historiography. Peasant insurgency was seen as a site that
could help unravel peasant mentality and consciousness. But there was also the counterargu-
ment that an act such as the insurgency was untypical, one that forced the suspension or dissolu-
tion of normal human activity and was therefore unsuitable for this purpose. On the contrary
there was a need to study the everyday life and material conditions of subaltern groups including
the peasantry. But the practical problem with this was, as David Arnold pointed out in a related
context, that much of what the peasants and other subalterns did and thought in their everyday
life had passed unrecorded in any form and was inaccessible. And it was only when, as in a
famine or a rebellion, subaltern activities and beliefs entered elite discourse that some record,
however patchy and partisan, became available (Arnold 1985).
In providing this prefatory statement the question is where does one locate Kashmiri peasant
mentality and how does one conceive its relationship to what is sometimes defined as “Kashmiri
nationalism” (Kanth 2018; Pandey 1982).1 Unlike in colonial India, peasant insurgency and
rebellions were not abundant in Kashmir; apparently there were very few of them (Khan 1983),2
or at least they were not reported or did not get written about. Even if such records may have
existed, they cannot be located in the archives (Kanth 2011). Nevertheless, are insurgencies and
riots the only occasions when the “peasant mentality” expresses itself ? (Ludden 2001).3 What
other sites could be discerned from where peasant consciousness could be distilled?
The peasant question in Kashmir has, in general, received very little attention in the past.
While scholars have written about Kashmiri peasantry, their writings appear to be less engaging
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-3 21
Idrees Kanth
or critical. Using administrative and other official data, these writings (Thorner 1953; Aslam
1977; Lone 2015; Hamdani 2016) invoke a political economy approach from above to under-
score the radical nature of land reforms in Kashmir initiated in the post-1947 period by the
“progressive” National Conference government. However, even when these reforms led to
redistribution of land among the landless Kashmiri peasants,4 as these writings inform us, they
do not seem to say much on the peasants’ own experience of these reforms (Saad 2002),5 other
than assuming that a majority of them were thoroughly empowered. Similarly, other important
questions on why Kashmiri peasants, unlike say the Mappila peasants of Malabar, were less
insurgent or even passive, especially in the pre-1940s, when agrarian conditions in Kashmir
were no better than in other parts of South Asia, need to be investigated.6
The rhetoric of “land reforms” has nonetheless continued to inform public discourse on
Kashmir well into the present times (Devadas 2017; Jain 2019). In this narrative, the National
Conference, a supposedly secular political organization, is claimed to have spearheaded a
“national movement” in Kashmir, in the pre-1947 period, in which traders, artisans, peasants,
and other segments of society are assumed to have participated wholeheartedly to liberate the
region from the clutches of the oppressive Dogra regime (Chandra 1985; Hamdani 2016; Yasin
and Rafiqi 1980; Makhdoomi 1973; Yaqoob 2019).7 Keeping this rhetoric aside, the pertinent
question is whether and how far were the peasants engaged in the “Kashmiri national move-
ment” for freedom, and also and importantly what does “national” and “freedom” signify in
the Kashmiri political discourse/context and more particularly in the peasant imaginary? These
questions pose a challenge to the researcher mainly because of the paucity of material wherein
peasant voice/voices could be discerned and also because there are very few scholarly writings
that attend these concerns, and may have provided a way forward. Realizing these constraints,
the chapter intends to focus on certain events in the 1940s when peasant voices seem to appear
in the records, besides other traces of archives: an informal report and peasant diaries (Smith
1986)8 from the post-1960s, to speak to some of the questions just raised.
While the scarcity of evidence or a fragmentary source could lead to the making of a frag-
mentary narrative, it should not deter us from researching and writing historical narratives
about peasants (Chaturvedi 2008). In fact, a close reading of a relatively small number of texts
or records could, as Carlo Ginzburg points out, be more rewarding than a massive accumulation
of repetitive evidence. What is significant is the quality of the evidence, not the sheer quantity
(Ginzburg 1989). Yet it is relevant here to talk about the loss of historical personal archives in
the context of conflict-ridden Kashmir. In the early 1990s particularly, the phenomenon of
burning personal diaries, family albums, letters, books, portraits, and so on, by local Kashmiri
families due to fear of being identified during police crackdowns cannot be disregarded and
needs to be weighed in. Thus materials or writings that were preserved, while they may provide
us useful insights, should be approached sensitively, keeping in mind the fact that they were
produced in a period when political repression abounded in Kashmir, in the aftermath of 1947.
However, before elaborating any further on the preceding questions, it would be useful to pro-
vide a brief overview on the position and condition of peasants in Kashmir around the 1930s,
a period that has retrospectively gained significance for being the moment when “Kashmiri
nationalism” began to emerge as a political force and movement.
“Kashmiri Peasants” as a Category

Colloquially, the term for the “Kashmiri peasant” is zamindar (Madan 1972; Rai 2004).9 The
administrative reports of the pre-1947 period also employ the term when speaking about peas-
ants as a broad category,10 that is, all those village people who cultivate land and depend on
22
Peasant Imaginaries
its produce for their survival. The zamindar could thus be described as a kashtkar, one who
cultivates land, again a broad term used in administrative records. Other than reflecting the
economic aspects, zamindar also bears a discursive connotation. Zamindar and particularly gamuk
and groos are pejorative terms often used by urban residents to describe the rural peasant who is
seen as crude and unsophisticated.
Around the early 1940s about 73 percent of the population of Jammu and Kashmir was
engaged in or dependent on agriculture (Bhan 1939). At a broader level, one could speak of two
categories of people among these: those who had varying degrees of proprietorships (assamis)
over land and others who were tenants at will (kashtkar). Thus those who had more proprietary
rights over land than others were assamidars. The assamidar who had been empowered through
various land settlements in the past could be defined as a landlord, a revenue farmer, a kind of
a go-between between the state and the actual tenant.11 While the assamidar had the rights of a
proprietor, he had no right of alienation by sale or mortgage, as the state, or more specifically
the ruler of the state, was theoretically supposed to be the real owner of the land (A Handbook
of Jammu and Kashmir State 1947). Transfers were, however, permitted within the municipal
limits of Srinagar city, and in the towns of Anantnag, Shopian, Bijbihara, Pampore, Sopore,
Baramulla, and Muzaffarabad (ibid.). The kashtkar, the peasant cultivator, who could also be
subsumed under the broader category zamindar, “held” land either in haq-i-assami (in the trust of
an assamidar), or as a tenant holding directly under the state. There was also an occupancy tenant
(kashtkar mustaqil), who had a much lower level of proprietorship, if one may use that word here.
The occupancy tenants had the right of occupancy of land under a proprietor. They could not
be ejected without special reasons, nor could rent in the land be altered at the will of the land-
lord. Their right was hereditary and could be sold with the permission of the landlord (ibid.).
In 1933, the Maharaja of Kashmir, Hari Singh, granted more aasami rights to occupancy
tenants in Kashmir Province and the frontier district, as well as to occupancy tenants in Jammu
province, though administrative reports do not often appear to elaborate on these rights, claim-
ing this was done “in order to create in them a greater sense of self-respect and self-reliance”
(ibid.). The reports mention that the Maharaja not only granted proprietary rights to the
zamindars (in this case meaning occupancy tenants) but also waived the condition of payment of
nazarana (premium, a particular tax). This concession we are told, represented in money value
an amount of rupees 20 lakhs ( Jammu and Kashmir 1925–1947 1947). What about the k ashtkars,
who were apparently the majority among the zamindars? The state acknowledged that while
“the status of cultivators of land” was only a “little better than that of serfs” earlier, it had been
improved considerably (ibid.). However, much like the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885, while it
strengthened the position of the occupancy tenants, apparently the non-occupancy tenants did
not gain any rights (Hardiman 1992).
Nonetheless, despite these various levels of proprietorships and occupancies, the state con-
tinued to be the real owner of the land. So does it make sense when scholars, political col-
umnists, and public intellectuals speak of land transfers from the landowners in Kashmir to the
tillers during the reforms initiated in 1948 by the National Conference government headed by
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah? Legally speaking one could say that after 1947, following the end
of princely rule, the ownership of the land had now been transferred to the new Jammu and
Kashmir State. In other words, the so-called landlords: the jagridars, the chakdars, the assamidars
only forfeited their various occupancy rights and it was the state that actually redistributed the
land it owned, and not the other way around.
Moving on from a political economy perspective to a more sociological one, how do we
characterize Kashmiri peasants as a category, or can we?12 And what changed in Kashmir after
1947, as far the peasants were concerned? Have Kashmiri peasants been less insurgent or even
23
Idrees Kanth
passive, and why? To arrive at any meaningful conclusions around these questions let us focus on
different moments and sites where the peasant consciousness seems to manifest itself, either as
a collective peasant consciousness that reflects an insurgent sensibility or everyday peasant con-
sciousness or some other moment when peasants appear to speak. The idea is not to emphasize
a binary necessarily: insurgent versus the everyday, but to try and understand peasant conscious-
ness from multiple perspectives, while keeping the limitations of the available archive in mind.
Nevertheless, the binary may enable a useful comparative analysis across other concerns, which
has a bearing on Kashmir’s contemporary history.
In the first case scenario, the temporal site where a collective insurgent Kashmiri peasant
consciousness appears to manifest itself is around the 1940s when a “national movement” was
supposedly playing out on the political landscape of Kashmir, one that eventually culminated
in the “freedom” of the region from the oppressive Dogra princely rule in 1947. In the case of
everyday peasant consciousness, the narrative is placed around the 1960s and extends into the
early 1980s when the political sentiment in Kashmir was rife with slogans of haq-e-khudiradiat
(right to self-determination) and the call to rai-shumari (plebiscite). The sentiment, perceived by
different scholars and intellectuals (Haksar 2015; Cockell 2000) to be an extension and expres-
sion of “Kashmiri nationalism,” was based on the perception that Kashmiris did not desire to
remain under the sovereignty of India. Those in Kashmir who aspired to these political goals,
claimed that 1947 had not made much difference in their lives and they continued to be an
occupied people (Shah 2013; Chatterjee 2009). What about the Kashmiri peasants? How did they
imagine this divide, or did they? How far and in what ways was the “national” implicated in
Kashmiri peasant consciousness? And can we talk of Kashmiri peasants as a broad social category
in the first place? To be able to provide some meaningful answers to these questions let us return
to those sites where the peasant consciousness appears to unfold itself.
Food Crisis and Peasant Consciousness

The 1930s saw the emergence of organizational politics in Kashmir. Along with other organiza-
tions, much of this activity centered on the Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference, and its
rival, the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (Bose 2003).13 By the 1940s these political
organizations had developed an intricate network of local level committees: the halqa (local
constituency) committees in Srinagar and its peripheries, with Srinagar being the main hub
of political activity. The halqa committees were elected bodies and their members and workers
wielded much authority at the local level (CID 1945–46),14 drawing support from their respec-
tive sympathizers and loyalists in the halqas and mohallas (neighborhoods) who resented each
other very strongly. The acrimony between the two groups and their supporters also appeared
to overlap with other divisions in the community. Broadly speaking, the shrine worshippers,
the pirzadas,15 and others, seemed more aligned toward the National Conference, while those
who were opposed to these religious practices were usually drawn toward the Muslim Confer-
ence (Kanth 2018). Given that these organizations could secure some basic amenities for the
ordinary people, besides being a medium through which people could reach out to the state to
address their immediate and other grievances, the benefits of associating with them were obvi-
ous, particularly around the 1940s when the shortage of essential commodities had hit Kashmir
rather badly (CID 1945).16
The War situation had in fact led to a food crisis in 1942, with the shadow of an approaching
famine stalking the homes of people. Prem Nath Bazaz, the Kashmiri Pandit political activist
and journalist informs us that at the advent of winter in 1942–43, an acute scarcity of fuel was
felt in the Valley, particularly in Srinagar (Bazaz 1954). Though a Food Supplies department
24
Peasant Imaginaries
had already been set up, the soaring prices of foodstuffs and the general food situation in Kash-
mir was causing much anxiety among people ( Jammu and Kashmir 1925–1947). To manifest
their concern, and keen to retain their support base, leaders and speakers across political groups
understandably brought up the issue of the unavailability of firewood, sugar, salt, cloth, and
other essential commodities in almost every other public meeting and gathering they convened
during this period (CID 1945).17
Even though the administration claimed that efforts were being made to redress these con-
cerns, with food grains being made available in deficit areas at low prices ( Jammu and Kashmir
1925–1947 1947), people living in rural areas accused the “irresponsible government” for its
partiality toward the residents of Srinagar, alleging that it had stopped the issue of shali18 rations
to them, while making it available to those living in the city (CID 1945).19
The shortage of foodstuffs thus led to stray protests involving the peasants. In fact, in
July 1945 demonstrations were held in various places, including in Sopore, Baramulla, and
Bandipura, toward the north of Kashmir, threatening that if the Tehsildar (revenue collector)
did not make any suitable arrangements, a march would be undertaken toward Srinagar (CID
1945).20 Given that they approached the Tehsildar and not the immediate revenue collector,
it would seem that those who were demonstrating may have possibly been rather well-to-do
among the peasants (Guha 1974).21 Nevertheless, the scenario appears to reflect what Teodor
Shanin says in the context of “developing societies,” that the solidarity of all peasants against
third parties may outweigh the internal conflicts among them (Shanin 1972), yielding some
sort of a peasant consciousness in which the differentiation within the peasantry is secondary
to the common characteristic of all peasants and their common interest against other groups.
Peasants, as Eric Hobsbawm notes, tended to distrust and dislike all those who were not peas-
ants, because to them most other people appeared to belong to a conspiracy to rob and oppress
them (Hobsbawm 1973). In other words, the peasants, referred to earlier, seem to reveal aspects
of what Partha Chatterjee and others describe as community consciousness. Unlike bourgeois
consciousness, in peasant consciousness people are required to act together because of existing
bonds of solidarity. The community in this respect exists in a relationship of opposition to those
who are not part of the community, even though its boundaries may shift according to context
and circumstance (Chatterjee 1982, 1988).
In September 1944, the National Conference had issued a manifesto, Naya Kashmir, (New
Kashmir) to provide what they claimed to be a blueprint for the future of the state: “a charter for
socio-economic independence” (Chandra 1985). In his introductory essay to the manifesto,22
Sheikh Abdullah remarked that the goal of the National Conference was to fight the imme-
morial poverty of the peasant and the artisan, and the unmitigated helplessness of the worker
(Abdullah n.d.). Employing a rhetorical tone, the document emphasized that no real progress
was possible until the state’s collective and economic structure was not organized afresh, because
“exploitation and independence cannot go side by side” (New Kashmir 1944). However, the
“independence part,” especially in terms of Kashmir’s political future, was not sufficiently spelled
out, giving an impression that the question was not addressed enough or perhaps left deliber-
ately ambiguous. In any case, the “New Kashmir” plan appeared a tall order even on paper,
never mind in practice, and it seems it was promulgated by the National Conference to recover
its ebbing influence, and to boost its flagging popularity among Kashmiris (Zutshi 2004).23
While it is apparent that Kashmir was porous to political ideas and was influenced by the
nationalist project being constructed in British India (Ramusack 2004), its leaders and politi-
cians like in other princely states, used these resources differently, selectively, and primarily
for local purposes (Stern 1978). As a sentiment-resource for mass consumption, “nationalism”
appears to have had a considerably smaller market in the princely states than it had in British
25
Idrees Kanth
India, and was likely to be used, as in Kashmir, as an other-than-sentiment resource, a means

to an end other than the mobilization of mass sentiment (Stern 1978). For an overwhelming
majority of people in Kashmir, their involvement in political activities in the 1940s was hardly
inspired by the so-called national sentiment, but rather by other motives that were informed by
local concerns, perhaps reflecting the political culture of the society at large (Hardiman 1981)24
and the specificities of the time.
The “Insurgent” Kisan Committees

The control on essential commodities by those responsible for its distribution, made the condi-
tion of the peasantry even worse in the latter half of 1945. In particular, in the Anantnag tehsil
in South Kashmir, the situation was purportedly bad. The workers of the National Conference
who were supposed to supply essential commodities to the peasants through the agency of co-
operative stores sold them in the black market, causing resentment among the peasant circles.
To remedy the situation to some extent and to find a way out of it, the more respectable among
the peasant ranks decided to call a meeting sometime in mid-July. In the meeting it was agreed
that an organization be formed to protect the interests of the peasants across the state. The meet-
ing elected Abdus Salam Yatu, a young educated peasant, as the president of the organization.
A written document recording the proceedings of the meeting was also drawn up, signed by all
the members present over there (Bazaz 1954). Sometime later it was also decided to convene a
conference to “represent the grievances of kisans to His Highness the Maharaja Bahadur” (CID
1945).25
From these activities one can infer that the idea was not just to find a quick remedy to
address the immediate issues of the peasantry, but that the peasant leadership was also concerned
to attend to other broader problems that weighed on the peasant classes, indicating that their
resentment against the authorities was not recent and that they were made frequently aware of
their subalternity and their oppression by the minorities of non-peasants, whom they did not
trust (Hobsbawm 1973). The shortage of commodities just about created a situation in which
their subaltern consciousness became more reified, expressing itself relatively openly.
Following the initial spur, kisan committees began to be formed in the big villages of Anant-
nag, and soon around 45 such committees had sprung up in a relatively short period of four
months. The kisan leaders were of the opinion that the city-based leaders had done nothing
for the village people and never pleaded the cause of the peasants. In their estimation, all the
misfortunes of the peasantry could be attributed to the malice of city dwellers and the city lead-
ership. The real well-wishers of a people, as one peasant leader noted, “did not enjoy luxuries
in magnificent bungalows,” a seeming reference to Sheikh Abdullah. It was imperative thus, the
leader felt, that the peasants “should organize so that one of them may become a minister, and
plead their case” (CID 1945).26
While the National Conference had initially ignored the movement, soon they began to
anticipate the kisan committees as their rivals and made it known that they did not approve of
any peasant movement outside its confines and control. However, the peasants were advised
not to mind the opposition of the National Conference. Thus while the National Conference
workers continued to attack the peasant gatherings, the kisan leaders also continued in their
criticism of the National Conference. Speaking to a gathering of peasants in Anantnag on
September 8, 1945, the leaders denounced the “New Kashmir” manifesto completely: “they
preached that land should belong to the tillers but were purchasing land themselves” (ibid.).27
To warn the peasants against participation in the movement, senior leaders and workers of
the National Conference were dispatched to Anantnag on the Eid day (Bazaz 1954).28 When
26
Peasant Imaginaries
they tried to question the legitimacy and motives of the movement, calling the peasant leader-
ship illiterate, they were taken apart by the assembled crowd but just about managed to escape.
The next day, 16 leaders of the movement including its president were charged by the police for
taking part in a riot (ibid.). Further, the National Conference affiliates tried to bribe the peas-
ant workers, appeal to their religious sentiments, and even resort to open violent methods to
suppress the movement but apparently nothing helped (ibid.). On the other hand, kisan leaders
advocated Hindu-Muslim unity, soliciting the rural community to muster under the banner of
the kisan committees against the town and city people, who were represented to be contemptu-
ous toward the village people (CID 1945).29
However, despite the challenges, the peasant leaders continued to make provisions to hold
the proposed conference in May 1946, but with the anticipation that National Conference
workers may use violence and force to thwart the program. To meet this emergency the kisan
leaders decided to form a volunteer corps of their own and within a couple of days no less than
500 well-built peasants were readied for the purpose, as the preparations for the conference
continued (Bazaz 1954).
On May 11, 1945, the scheduled conference was inaugurated at Kabamarg, a tiny village in
the south of Anantnag. More than a hundred delegates had arrived from various parts of the
Valley to speak to a congregation of around 20,000 peasants. While the National Conference
hooligans made attempts to disrupt the proceedings they did not succeed. Over the course of
the next three days of the conference peasant songs were played, crackers fired, and resolutions
passed demanding the end of exploitation and landlordism in Kashmir. Bazaz, who was also
part of the delegation, was very impressed to see what he described as a real parliament of peas-
ants and workers – a revolt against the National Conference. Appearing overtly optimistic in
his assessment, Bazaz credited the unity of peasants and intellectuals for ensuring that the high
headedness of the National Conference was met with failure, while hoping for the emergence
of a new era in the political, economic, and social life of Kashmir (ibid.).
In this rather short-lived “Kashmiri peasant movement,” while the voices and opinions of
the leadership seem to speak more to us than the poor peasants themselves (Hardiman 1992),30
nevertheless, it is apparent that the peasantry trusted leaders from its own ranks more than those
of the National Conference who claimed to represent them. Perhaps their material conditions
forced them to shift their loyalties toward the kisan committees guided by the moral justification
that the workers of the National Conference were manipulators who did not care to address
their needs. These committees were locally inspired and protested against local grievances, seek-
ing economic and ritual changes that were relevant to their particular conditions (Ramusack
2004). However, this is not to suggest, as would be already evident, that peasant protest can be
explained only in terms of immediate economic hardship (Hardiman 1984), but that peasant
political consciousness is also informed by other non-economic factors. Yet one ought to be
careful not to valorize the peasant imaginary and agency as completely autonomous and self-
informed.31 A bipolar elite-subaltern model, as David Ludden says, creates a compelling, dra-
matic motif that obliterates the complex social world of caste, kinship, class, patron–client ties,
and, above all, production relations (Ludden 2001). Only through a close attention to historical
specificity can the complex interactions of elites and subalterns be unraveled and the dialectical
and developing nature of their exchanges be adequately understood (Arnold 1984).
Aside from these observations, what is significant in the context of this particular peasant
uprising is that it barely finds any mention in the popular and academic writings that have
informed the so-called Kashmiri national movement of the 1940s. We are repeatedly told that
the Kashmiri peasantry, workers, and women rallied behind their leader Sheikh Abdullah and
the National Conference in the struggle for Kashmir’s freedom against the Dogra rule. The
27
Idrees Kanth
authority and influence of this “master narrative” is such that no other version of the 1940s is
admissible or even finds a place in the historical memory and representation of the period. The
amnesia around these “other” accounts may be explained by the fact, to borrow from Amin’s
portrayal of the Chauri Chaura incident, that they would fit awkwardly and even inconvenience
a neatly woven pattern, leaving no scope for interrogation of narrative strategies by which a
people get constructed into a “nation” (Amin 1995), in this case the putative Kashmiri nation,
subsumed within the larger Indian nation-state. The obvious extension of this narrative is that
eventually, in post-1947 Kashmir, the National Conference empowered the peasants through
initiating the promised land reforms. It may be that Kashmiri peasants were empowered through
these reforms, which they apparently were, but more than the peasants it is the Indian state
and its intellectuals who have used this signifier as a metaphor to continue to justify Kashmir’s
accession to India. In their estimation not only did Kashmir represent an extension of a secular
India given its familiar traditions of religious tolerance, but also and even more than the Indian
state, Sheikh Abdullah and his administrators allowed progressive policies to inform their agen-
das (Patnaik 2019), unlike a theologically inspired Pakistan, which has remained a feudal state
at its core.
Austin’s Peasants
Granville Austin (Baxi 2014), the American academic who went on to become a noted scholar
of the Indian Constitution, was travelling in Kashmir in August-September 1965 at just about
the time when India and Pakistan had gone to war over the disputed territory. This was a sce-
nario wherein most peasants, if not all of them, were now the owners of their land. During
his time in the Valley, he wrote an informal report (Austin 1965) describing his exchanges and
experiences with people from diverse backgrounds across Srinagar and other parts of Kashmir.
Austin notes that while many Kashmiris, particularly those in Srinagar, espoused a strong pro-
Pakistan sentiment recognizing the Pakistani “infiltrators” as liberators, the peasants considered
them as outsiders who ruffled the calm of their lives with danger and possible violence. Even
when peasants harbored and fed them and even helped them, more often they gave them away
to the police. While Austin feels that the peasants acted partly out of fear of police retribution
and partly because they did not want to become involved, in his opinion they mostly wanted to
be left alone to get on with the more important business of raising enough food to live (ibid.).
Austin describes some interesting conversations he had in the countryside and claims that he
never heard praise for the government or even mild support. This was the time when Sheikh
Abdullah was facing imprisonment, and India had tightened its leash over Kashmir through a
local administration, controlled from the power center in Delhi.
Here is how he describes a typical conversation with the peasant, following an hour of talk
about crops, taxes, and local conditions (ibid.):
Austin: What do you want for Kashmir? The peasant: Freedom.

Austin: What is Freedom? The peasant: Freedom to govern ourselves.
Austin: What does that mean? The peasant: No India, no Pakistan.
Austin: Who will be your leader? The peasant: Abdullah. Sheikh sahib is a great man.
What language would the peasant and Mr. Austin have employed to speak to each other? What
was the peasants’ imagination and idea of freedom? The peasant, it appears, had a deeper sense
of connection and belonging to the land, more than his city counterpart, who unlike him
was somewhat of an itinerant and who possibly sustained a memory of travelling over in the
28
Peasant Imaginaries
pre-Partition days to what later became Pakistan, a memory that may well have continued to
inform his political imagination and political preferences. The peasant was, however, much less
mobile, and certainly more strongly tied to his land. The land produced for him, sustained him,
and thus reproduced him and his life in the process, a feeling that would have been a constitutive
part of his very being and consciousness.
Yet there were others in the peasant ranks that Austin spoke to who would say that they
wanted Kashmir to be a part of Pakistan. And when Austin would probe them on “what is
Pakistan,” their answers revealed that it was a glorious dream of no fixed content, “emerald
green grass on the other side of the fence.” From Austin’s conversations it appears the peas-
ant thought of Pakistan as good, only because he was opposed to the bad aspects of Indian
domination (ibid.). The “bad aspects” may have had to do with the peasants’ perception of the
Indian state as an oppressor for having jailed its leader Sheikh Abdullah of whom the peasant
was deeply enamored, recognizing that it was only due to the Sheikh’s intervention that he was
now the owner of the land. The peasants’ perception of Abdullah was shaped by his own beliefs,
expectations, and material culture (Amin 1984), and may not have perhaps correlated with the
political program that Abdullah was apparently espousing at that moment: the political cause
of Kashmir. Like Gandhi, Abdullah was able to develop a charismatic link to large numbers of
people, and in turn people attributed to him, as they did to Gandhi, “special powers that they
used to explain extraordinary events, what we might call miracles, events that shaped local poli-
tics” (Breuilly 2011).32
Austin’s peasants appear to be more status quoist, inclined to build on their material well-
being and safety. They do not seem to be categorically invested in the “national.” Their engage-
ment in the political life of Kashmir is rather non-ideological, and framed through their lived
and everyday relationship to land, and so on. The everyday peasant consciousness reveals some
of these tendencies, as reflected in the diaries of a Kashmiri peasant reviewed in the next section.
The Everyday Peasant

This section is focused on the idea of the everyday to reflect on peasant consciousness in Kash-
mir. The concept of “the everyday” is one of the concepts employed to express an analytical
interest in exploring the social and political significance of what some have referred to as “little
nothings.” The concept mostly implies bringing into the analysis particular kinds of sites, arti-
facts, temporalities, or subjects that are qualified as ordinary, banal, or little rather than extra-
ordinary, exceptional, or big (Guillaume and Huysmans 2019). Everyday life events are repeated
and not unique. Sometimes they are even cyclical, rhythmic, turning into routines. Everyday
life is usually localized in space and often flows unreflexively, following habits and routines of
which the actors are not fully aware (Sztompka 2008).
In the present case where does one locate “the everyday” or the quotidian to be able to speak
about peasant consciousness? The diaries of Master Ghulam Mohammad, a “Kashmiri peasant,”
may offer us a window into “peasant mentality” to some extent. The immediate question that
beckons an answer though is whether and to what extent an individual narrative of a Kashmiri
peasant would allow us to draw inferences on Kashmiri peasant mindsets at large. While these
limitations need to be acknowledged, nevertheless, the diaries, as would become evident, reflect
an agrarian ecosystem, a social world, which may not come across as unfamiliar to the wider
Kashmiri peasant community, given the commonalities that define “peasant life” in the Valley.
The economic empowerment of the Kashmiri peasantry in the post-1947 period, through
successive land reforms, has created a situation wherein the possibilities of thinking about peas-
antry as a distinct category in the region are better served when approached from a mentalities
29
Idrees Kanth
(Andrea 1991)33 perspective than political economy alone. Kashmiri peasants are mostly inde-
pendent smallholders or capitalist farmers, to use Hamza Alavi’s categorization, and not often
farm laborers (Alavi 1965). Meaning to say that economic differences across peasantry are com-
paratively less, and that they are economically less distinct than they are socially as a class, even
when the economic may inform the social, a social that appears to have had a bearing on their
political imaginary. Considering this fact, we may talk of a “peasant way of life” in a broader
social sense, through invoking categories like peasant behavior or peasant time, and so on
(Hobsbawm 1973; Thompson 1967; Smith 1986; Bourdieu 1963).
Master Ghulam Mohammad, the peasant diarist, lived all his life in Zoohama, a village
approximately 20 kilometers outside of Srinagar, located to the southwest of the city. Zoohama,
with an area of about 1.6 km2 constitutes one of the hundred odd villages in the Chadoora tehsil
(a municipal headquarter, a sub-district/division) of the Budgam district.34 Beginning some
time around the early 1960s, Ghulam Mohammad continued to write diaries (in Urdu) well
into the 1990s. Two of these dairies, of the years 1969 and 1981, apprise our narrative here.
While he would essentially perceive himself as a peasant in the social sense, he was also a pri-
mary school teacher in his village, a not very uncommon thing among independent smallhold-
ers in Kashmir who would take up other ordinary vocations to augment their family incomes.
A disciplined man, he makes entries in his diary almost every single day of the year. It
appears every “visit to Srinagar” is made note of, perhaps indicative of his attachment to the
local agrarian community he feels himself a part of, and perhaps the distance and the divide he
experiences while travelling to the city. He also frequently mentions the darje-hararat (tempera-
ture) of the day, regularly updating on local weather conditions, a routine he is habituated to,
but one that may be revealing of his peasant instincts, since the produce from the land is quite
dependent on the seasonal weather. Throughout the year he is constantly engaged on his fields
while continuing to monitor the weather conditions. Aaj bhi badal jaghay (clouds rose up again
today), badal chaal mai rahe (clouds are hovering around); these are regular entries in the diaries.
In fact the reference to weather is so frequent that it easily reinforces Ludden’s emphasis on the
synchronization of agrarian social life with nature, which among other things would refer to
weather and seasons, and their impact on peasant cosmologies. The synchronization means that
big decisions must take the season into account and decisions can affect the future drastically.
The seasonal calendar is marked by festivals, astrological signs, and natural phenomena, which
articulate agriculture with a vast array of social activities (Ludden 1999) that are common to the
peasants. However, this is not to imply that the Kashmiri peasant lacked an individual mental
life and all that is there of it is collective rather than personal (Mitchell 1990).
Despite that he is politically aware and very alive to news around him, including the Apollo II
spaceflight to the Moon, and the burning of the masjid-i-Aqsa in Jerusalem in 1969, which, as
he reminds himself, has been under the control of the Jews for many years, there is very little
reference to India or any anti-India sentiment visible in his diaries. It appears that his sense of
self is largely shaped by his desire to be a good Muslim. Hasbe mamool panchon waqt ki namaz
padi, khudaya qabool farma (as usual, offered my five prayers for the day and hope God accepts my
prayers) concludes almost every other page of his 1981 diary.
The notion of a specific peasant time is very evident in his diaries. May and June made a
hectic season of harvesting rabi crops, like mustard, and sowing kharif crops like rice, keeping
him busy in his fields, as he absents himself from his school duties. In any case very few stu-
dents attend school around this time of the year, a fact noted in the diary. He also mentions
the fasli taivhar (the crop festival), which the peasant community often celebrates like Eid with
rivaiti shaan (traditional gaiety), around the first week of August when the sowing of crops and
the process of nende (weeding of rice crop) has already been completed. Toward the end of
30
Peasant Imaginaries
September, the rice crop is usually ready to be harvested. Master Ghulam Mohammad is again
busy in his fields, besides lending a helping hand to the extended family in their fields. The
next day it is their turn to help Ghulam Mohammad to assemble shali from his farm. This is an
established custom in the peasantry; people in the neighborhood help each other at the time of
sowing and harvesting, creating a sense of a local community. Around early October, Ghulam
Mohammad’s family cooks the newly harvested rice: is saal ke naye chawal pakaiye, indicating the
beginning of the new agrarian year.
He appears to have immense regard for Sheikh Abdullah, referring to him as Sher-i-Kashmir
or Sheikh sahib, like many other people in the Valley. On his visits to the Hazratbal shrine in
Srinagar for Friday prayers, he often makes it a point to stay back to listen to Abdullah’s taqreer
(speech), a small testimony of his affection and admiration for the man. Sometimes, he also
attends political rallies like the salana ijlaas (annual convention), of the National Conference,
providing him more opportunities of listening to Abdullah, as he speaks to a large gathering of
attendees. He is also close to the local politician of his area, a well-known National Conference
man, besides other local workers of the party. However, the relationship does not appear to be
instrumentalist in its manner and manifestation. He genuinely seems to pay fealty to them, but
he expects their intervention and support in matters involving his daily situations, including a
job for his son, a practice approved by the local and even the wider community. Nevertheless,
despite his broader awareness of matters political he never makes any mention of haq-e-khudiradiat,
rai-shumari, or azaadi in his diaries. He does not disclose any favorable sentiments toward Paki-
stan or reveal any visible or perceptible anti-India feelings either.
In general, he barely alludes to any political activity of significance in Kashmir, though he
is educated and aware of news around him. This is not to suggest that rural life in Kashmir
was inward looking, but to indicate that the Muslim peasantry in Kashmir was not effortlessly
integrated into the political life that emanated out of Srinagar, even as there were a variety of
connectivities that bound the urban life with the rural. It seems that for Ghulam Mohammad
such political concerns as rai-shumari were less significant.
The Kashmiri peasant appears to have been more status quoist, perhaps less drawn to imagine
a distant future, while hoping to become increasingly self-reliant, as Master Ghulam Moham-
mad’s diaries appear to indicate. Questions surrounding the broader political future of Kashmir
did not engage him, at least such concerns did not show up in his diaries. His attachment to his
piece of land is predominant and enduring, and constitutes an essential part of his very being,
and his life. He depends on its produce to sustain his livelihood. Other concerns seem relatively
unimportant.
Land for the peasant is not to be apprehended simply as a raw material, as crude stuff need-
ing to be exploited. The notion is that it is alma mater, the nourishing earth, it demands its due,
and will exact compensation for the bad treatment inflicted upon it by the hasty greedy peasant
(Bourdieu 1963). The experiential make-up of the Kashmiri peasant may be compared with the
Algerian fellaheen, of whom Pierre Bourdieu remarks that their experience of time, their con-
ception of the future, is part and parcel of a total relation to the natural world, and particularly
the productive earth, in which the Kabyle peasantry submit to, and are part of, the vagaries and
vigor of the land and the seasons. Of course Bourdieu is keen to indicate that this should not be
taken to mean that the Algerian peasant lived in a present that was nothing more than an imme-
diacy, divorced from a future that was any further away than an easily imaginable tomorrow
(Bourdieu 1963; Jenkins 2002). It may be argued that at least until recently the Kashmiri peasant
was less drawn to think about the political and political institutions in a certain way, or that he
had a different sense of political life and his place in it, one that did not necessarily partake of
the rai-shumari sentiment or the “national” politics that appeared to emanate out of Srinagar,
31
Idrees Kanth
and a few other places across the Valley of Kashmir. Also, given their standing and position, the
“Kashmiri peasant” may not have sufficient purchase as a distinct economic category that rep-
resents the underclass. Economically speaking, the Kashmiri peasants are well-to-do. In other
words the Kashmiri peasants may have receded as an economic category, especially following
the post 1990s, but can be approached as a broad social class that has maintained a certain way
of life, a mentality, that has significantly shaped their political imaginary.
Conclusion
Other than the agrarian question around land reforms, peasant studies or debates around peasant
consciousness have remained marginal within academic scholarship on Kashmir. From the avail-
able material it appears that while sections of Kashmiri peasants may have rallied behind Sheikh
Abdullah, they did so less out of any “national” sentiment but more out of a personal loyalty
and devotion toward him. For many of them, Abdullah was a paternal figure who empowered
them economically. Much like Bengali Muslim peasant subjectivity, which was not molded by
a separatist Muslim identity, the Kashmiri peasant subjectivity does not appear to be have been
easily informed by a perceptible anti-India sentiment that sought Kashmir’s accession with Paki-
stan or desired an independent state of Kashmir (Ali 2017). Not until recently. Part of it may be
explained by the fact that during the 1950s and onward Kashmiri peasants began experiencing a
semblance of material prosperity, and it is reasonable to assume that they would have desired an
element of stability in their lives to be able to build on it further. Kashmiri peasants thus come
across as mostly status quoist, particularly at a time when rai-shumari and haq-e-khudiradiat were
familiar slogans on the political landscape of Kashmir. The idea, however, is not to emphasize
the autonomous mentality of the peasantry nor to ignore the complexity and ambiguity of
changing social environments as external to historical agency and mentalities (Ludden 2001),
but to underscore the point that the political imagination of Kashmiri peasants was shaped by a
set of concerns that were more familiar and significant to them than the sentiment of rai-shumari.
Nevertheless, speaking more generally, as a political sentiment but more so as a political blue-
print, the “national” in Kashmir appears to have been insufficiently imagined.
Notes
1 On the complicated question of “Kashmiri nationalism,” see Idrees Kanth’s (2018) PhD thesis, “Seek-
ing Futures, Shaping Pasts: The Fragmented Nature of the Political in Kashmir.” On the relationship
between peasants and nationalism in South Asia, see among others Pandey (1982).
2 According to Ishaq Khan (1983), while class conflicts animated Kashmiri society there was neverthe-
less a notable lack of peasant movements in the pre-1930 period. Khan claims that peasants were tied
to the custodians of mosques and shrines (Sayyids and Pirzadas), who had forged a close alliance with
the ruling class in view of which peasants working on the fields of these custodians were not seized
for forced labor (begar) of any kind by the officials. In other words, ties of obedience informed by a
religious consciousness that in turn offered some nominal protection to the peasants were in Khan’s
estimation important factors that explain the lack of peasant movements in Kashmir.
3 As Ludden (2001) writes, [for Guha], “insurgency seems to be the only effective expression of a peas-
ant’s real identity, and it remains disconnected from the rest of peasant social existence. It seems to be
virtually an animal drive, and in fact Guha calls insurgency ‘necessary.’ ”
4 The story around land reforms in Kashmir seems more complex than is usually acknowledged or por-
trayed. As Thorner (1953) observed in his informal little essay: “It has done the least for petty tenants
and landless laborers, these two categories being the largest in the countryside.”
5 Saad (2002) writes in the context of agrarian reforms (Islah) implemented by Gamal Abdel Nasser in
Egypt shortly after the revolution in 1952 and informs us on how the Egyptian peasants of ‘Izbet Imam’
village imagined these reforms.
32
Peasant Imaginaries
6 In the case of Mappila peasants, while Islam provided, as Conrad Wood (1992) argues, a means of
solidarity in a region of poor communications and isolated settlements, with the mosque providing a
rallying point, such possibilities for mobilization also existed in Kashmir but did not lead to peasant
insurgencies.
7 A left-leaning Indian scholarly journal, Social Scientist has constantly reinforced uncomplicated notions
on Kashmir. In her paper for the Social Scientist, Asra Hamdani (2016) claims that “Agrarian reforms
in post-independence Kashmir were carried out against the backdrop of the Quit Kashmir movement
(a non-violent movement under the leadership of Sheikh Abdullah launched against the Maharaja).
The movement drew its main strength from the oppressed peasantry. . . [that] rallied behind a leader-
ship which provided the first expression of people’s demands and aspirations.” Many other articles and
book titles published during the 1970s and 1980s and earlier lend credence to this narrative including
(Yasin and Rafiqi 1980), (Makhdoomi 1973) and more recently (Yaqoob 2019).
8 The idea of a peasant diary may not be easily conceivable. Peasants are generally seen as illiterate and
certainly not expected to maintain diaries. However, scholars have been able to use such diaries to
write about peasant consciousness and other issues. Writing in the context of peasant diaries main-
tained by a nineteenth-century Japanese peasant, Smith (1986) writes: “We get a realistic, as opposed to
a theoretical or cautionary, view of the use of time in the diary for 1867 of the head of a family named
Ishikawa, who lived in the hilly country west of Edo.”
9 Unlike in North India, in Kashmir, zamindar has been often used as a generic term for all those village
people who earn their living by cultivating land, whether self-owned or leased in, or of both types.
Within the Kashmiri population, the Muslims were mostly the ones engaged in cultivating land. The
non-agricultural artisan groups in the village are designated nangar: those in search of bread. Nangar
generally account for one-third to one-half of all Muslim households. They never seem to outnumber
the zamindar (Madan 1972). While Madan is writing around the 1970s, or in other words in the con-
text of post 1947 Kashmir, even in the pre-1947 period zamindar held a meaning different from other
parts of the Indian subcontinent and the term did not denote an intermediary class of revenue collec-
tors but the cultivators themselves (Rai 2004). However, even then there was a certain impreciseness
around the term zamindar, and it was used in a general sense. The zamindar also connotes someone who
is lowly, particularly in the imagination of those who are comparatively well to do, socially speaking.
While describing his fieldwork in the village of Utrassu-Umanagri in South Kashmir, Madan says he
saw a Muslim servant (a zamindar) press the feet and legs of his Pandit master, adding that in the village
half a dozen Pandit households employ Muslim servants, the latter are all zamindars (Madan 1972). In
short it is important to bear in mind that zamindar as an economic term has carried various meanings
over time, nevertheless, it often signifies someone who cultivates land or engages in agriculture.
10 See for example, A Handbook of Jammu and Kashmir State 1947.
11 Assamidar may be a general term. The other terms for revenue farmers were jagirdar, chakdar and zaildar
depending on their position in the hierarchy. Even zamindar could be a small revenue farmer.
12 Peasantry is a multidimensional phenomenon that can be defined in different, and essentially comple-
mentary, ways (Bernstein et al. 2018). Eric Hobsbawm (1973) writing around the early 1970s, places
peasants somewhere on a continuum between two extreme ideal types: those who operate in a frame-
work of bourgeois institutions and law, especially property law, most likely as individual commodity
producers or commercial farmers, forming an aggregate of small individual enterprises without any
strong interrelationships, and others, whom he describes as traditional peasants. The characteristic of
traditional peasants as Hobsbawm notes is a much higher degree of formal or informal (mostly local-
ized) collectivity, which both tends to inhibit permanent social differentiation within the peasantry
and to facilitate, or even impose, communal action. While the strength of the “community” may vary
enormously, it is nevertheless difficult to conceive of a “traditional” peasantry, outside certain very
special situations, without this collective element.
13 The Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was founded in 1932, but in 1939 it renamed itself
as Jammu and Kashmir National Conference. However, in 1941, a group led by Chaudhry Ghulam
Abbas broke off from the National Conference and revived the old Muslim Conference (Bose 2003).
14 Among other privileges, National Conference workers had obtained depots for the sale of sugar and
kerosene oil. While they were often criticized by common people for being self-serving and ignor-
ing their needs for essential commodities, it partly explains why people may have associated with the
organization (CID Diary: July 5, 1945).
15 Pirzadas are those who claim the status of upper castes in the Kashmiri Muslim community. This claim
is made on the assumption that their family genealogy: shajr-e-nasb connects them to the family of the
33
Idrees Kanth
Prophet Muhammad, hence the special status. Pirzadas have generally been the mujawers (custodians)
of shrines in Kashmir.
16 (CID Diary: July 12, 1945).
17 (CID Diaries: July 20, 21, 26; August 1, 1945).
18 Rice, unhusked rice.
19 (CID Diary: August 31, 1945). Perhaps the concerns of peasants were not totally ill found. Ishaq Khan
informs us that since the establishment of the Dogra rule, the government had sold rice to the people
of Srinagar at rates far below the cost of production (Khan 1983).
20 (CID Diary: July 4, 1945).
21 Perhaps like in Bengal where Ranajit Guha (1974) shows how the grievances of the poorer peasants
were used by various superordinate peasant classes to press their own demands.
22 Published in September 1944, The ‘New Kashmir’/Naya Kashmir was supposed to be a blue print for the
future of the State: a comprehensive plan for economic, social, political, and cultural reconstruction of
Kashmir, with a socialist manifesto, including education of women.
23 With the revival of Muslim Conference in 1941, National Conference had begun to lose its promi-
nence to some extent (Zutshi 2004).
24 In his work on the Kheda district in Gujarat, David Hardiman reflects the significance of political
culture in a peasant society and how it informs their political activity (Hardiman 1981).
25 (CID Diary: September 21, 1945).
27 Ibid.
28 In 1945, Eid-ul Azha [Bakr-Eid] was celebrated on November 16 (Bazaz 1954).
30 Much like in in Bengal, the Kashmiri intelligentsia sought to establish themselves as the true friends of
the peasants and thus their legitimate political representatives. In all of this, the peasants’ own voice was
largely ignored, and perhaps in the end they gained little from the struggle (Hardiman 1992).
31 The tendency is evident in Subaltern Studies particularly in essays like Gyan Pandey’s, “Peasant Revolt
and Indian Nationalism.”
32 While conducting fieldwork in the peripheries of Srinagar city in 2008, a particular interviewee, who
was rather old recollected that years ago a particular cow in the neighbourhood had stopped producing
milk until Sheikh Abdullah placed his hand over its body and invoked some prayers. The incident, one
of many, reflects the attribution of miraculous powers to Abdullah by Kashmiri people and thus one of
the reasons for his popularity and his grip over people.
33 The idea of mentalities invoked here draws from the work of people like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
Natalie Zemon Davis and Jacques Le Goff.
34 The district of Budgam was created in 1979. Before that Chadoora was part of the Srinagar district.
Apparently, there are about 480 odd villages in Budgam district [1981 census]. Chadoora is the most
populous sub-district of Budgam, with about 104 villages ( Jammu and Kashmir: 50 Years 1998).
Works Cited
Abdullah, S. M. n.d. “Towards New Kashmir.” In New Kashmir: The Political and Economic Manifesto of J&K
National Conference. Delhi: Kashmir Bureau of Information.
Alavi, Hamza. 1965. “Peasants and Revolution.” Socialist Register 2: 241–277.
Ali, Tariq Omar. 2017. “Agrarian Forms of Islam: Mofussil discourses on Peasant Religion in the Bengal
delta during the 1920s.” Modern Asian Studies 51(5): 1311–1339.
Amin, Shahid. 1984. “Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2.” In Subaltern Studies
Vol. III, edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 1995. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press.
Andrea, Alfred J. 1991. “Mentalities in History.” The Historian 53(3): 605–609.
Arnold, David. 1984. “Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 11(4):
155–177.
———. 1985. “Famine in Peasant Consciousness and Peasant Action: Madras, 1876–8.” In Subaltern Stud-
ies Vol. III, edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Aslam, Mohamed. 1977. “Land Reforms in Jammu and Kashmir.” Social Scientist 6(4): 59–64.
34
Peasant Imaginaries
Austin, Granville S. 1965. History Past and History Present: Report on Kashmir. New York: Institute of Cur-
rent World Affairs.
Bazaz, Prem Nath. 1954. The History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir. New Delhi: Kashmir Publishing
Company.
Baxi, Upendra. 2014. “Granville Austin: A Tribute.” Journal of Indian Law and Society 5: 173–190.
Bernstein, Henry, Harriet Friedmann, Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, Teodor Shanin and Ben White. (2018).
“Forum: Fifty Years of Debate on Peasantries, 1966–2016.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(4): 689–714.
Bhan, Radha Krishna. 1939. “The Economic Potentialities of Kashmir.” The Asiatic Review XXXV.
Bose, Sumantra. 2003. Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace. Cambridge and London: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1963. “The Attitude of Algerian Peasant Toward Time.” In Mediterranean Countrymen:
Essays in the Social Anthropology of the Mediterranean, edited by Jesse Pitt-Rivers. Paris and The Hague:
Mouton.
Breuilly, John. 2011. “Max Weber, Charisma and Nationalist Leadership.” Nations and Nationalism 17(3):
477–499.
Chandra, Prakash. 1985. “The National Question in Kashmir.” Social Scientist 13(6): 35–56.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1982. “Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–1935.” In Subaltern
Studies I, edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 1988. “For an Indian History of Peasant Struggles.” Social Scientist 16(11): 3–17.
Chatterjee, Ram Rattan, ed. 2009. Kashmir: Freedom Thoughts, Struggle and Tyranny. New Delhi: JK Offset
Printers.
Chaturvedi, Vinayak. 2008. “Peasants against Gandhi: Rethinking Criminality and Nationalism in Colo-
nial India.” Historische Anthropologie 16(3): 373–394.
Cockell, John G. 2000. “Ethic Nationalism and Subaltern Political Process: Exploring Autonomous Dem-
ocratic Action in Kashmir.” Nations and Nationalism 6(3): 319–345.
Criminal Investigation Department (CID) Diaries, 2 July 1945 to 13 May 1946, Accession no: 135/1954,
Srinagar State Archives.
Devadas, David. 2017. “Radical Land Reforms Were Key to Sheikh Abdullah’s Towering Influence on
Kashmir.” The Wire, December 8.
Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Gough, Kathleen. 1974. “Indian Peasant Uprisings.” Economic and Political Weekly 9(32–33–34): 1391–1412.
Guha, Ranajit. 1974. “Neel-darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror.” Journal of Peasant
Studies 2(1): 1–46.
———. 1983. “The Prose of Counter Insurgency.” In Subaltern Studies Vol. II. edited by Ranajit Guha.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 1999. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Guillaume, Xavier and Jef Huysmans. 2019. “The Concept of ‘the Everyday’: Ephemeral Politics and the
Abundance of Life.” Cooperation and Conflict 54(2): 278–296.
Haksar, Nandita. 2015. The Many Faces of Kashmiri Nationalism: From the Cold War to the Present Day. New
Delhi: Speaking Tiger.
Hamdani, Asra. 2016. “Marginalization of Reforms: A Historical Study of Land Reforms in Jammu and
Kashmir (1931–1988).” Social Scientist 44(11/12): 37–57.
A Handbook of Jammu and Kashmir State. 1947. Jammu: The Ranbir Government Press.
Hardiman, David. 1981. Peasant Nationalists of Gujarat: Kheda District, 1917–1934. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
———. 1984. “The Roots of Rural Agitation in India, 1914–47: A Comment on Charlesworth’s Reply.”
The Journal of Peasant Studies 11(3): 118–121.
———, ed. 1992. Peasant Revolt in India, 1858–1914. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Hobsbawm, E. J. 1973. “Peasants and Politics.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 1(1): 3–22.
Jain, Shinzani. 2019. “Land Reforms and Development in J&K.” Newsclick, August 20.
Jammu and Kashmir: 1925–1947. 1947. Jammu: The Ranbir Government Press.
Jammu and Kashmir: 50 Years. 1998. New Delhi: The Directorate of Information, Jammu & Kashmir
Government.
Jenkins, Richard. 2002. Pierre Bourdieu. London and New York: Routledge.
Kanth, Idrees. 2011. “Writing Histories in Conflict Zones.” Economic and Political Weekly 46(26/27): 30–32.
35
Idrees Kanth
———. 2018. “Seeking Futures, Shaping Pasts: The Fragmented Nature of the Political in Kashmir.” PhD
diss., Leiden University.
Khan, Mohammad Ishaq. 1983. Perspectives on Kashmir: Historical Dimensions. Srinagar: Gulshan Publishers.
Lone, Suhail-ul-Rehman. 2015. “Land Reforms in Kashmir (1948–1953): An Analysis.” Proceedings of the
Indian History Congress 76: 332–343.
Ludden, David. 1999. An Agrarian History of South Asia. The New Cambridge History of India, IV. 4.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2001. “Subalterns and Others in the Agrarian History of South Asia.” In Agrarian Studies: Synthetic
Work at the Cutting Edge, edited by James C. Scott and Nina Bhatt. New Heaven and London: Yale
University Press.
Madan, T. N. 1972. “Religious Ideology in a Plural Society: The Muslims and Hindus of Kashmir.” Con-
tributions to Indian Sociology 6(1): 106–141.
Majumdar, Rochona. 2015. “Subaltern Studies as a History of Social Movements in India.” South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies 38(1): 50–68.
Makhdoomi, Pir Mohd Afzal. 1973. “The History of Freedom Struggle in Kashmir.” The Aina (weekly),
May 17.
Mitchell, Timothy. 1990. “The Invention and Reinvention of the Egyptian Peasant.” International Journal
of Middle East Studies 22(2): 129–150.
O’Malley, Pat. 1979. “Social Bandits, Modern Capitalism and the Traditional Peasantry. A critique of
Hobsbawm.” The Journal of Peasant Studies 6(4): 489–501.
Pandey, Gyan. 1982. “Peasant Revolt and Indian Nationalism: The Peasant Movement in Awadh, 1919–
22.” In Subaltern Studies Vol. I, edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Patnaik, Prabhat. 2019. “Kashmir: Land Reforms, Low Rural Poverty and Role of Article 370.” Newsclick,
August 16.
Rai, Mridu. 2004. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir. New Delhi:
Permanent Black.
Ramusack, Barbara. 2004. India Princes and their States. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Saad, Reem. 2002. “The Two Pasts of Nasser’s Peasants: Political Memories and Everyday Life in an
Egyptian Village.” In History and the Present, edited by Partha Chatterjee and Anjan Ghosh. New Delhi:
Permanent Black.
Shah, Fahad, ed. 2013. Of Occupation and Resistance: Writings from Kashmir. New Delhi: Tranquebar Press.
Shanin, Teodor. 1972. The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of Peasantry in a Developing Society, Russia
1910–1925. London: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Thomas C. 1986. “Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan.” Past & Present 111: 165–197.
Stern, Robert W. 1978. “An Approach to Politics in the Princely States.” In People, Princes and Paramount
Power: Society and Politics in the Indian Princely States, edited by Robin Jeffrey. New Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Sztompka, Piotr. 2008. “The Focus on Everyday Life: A New Turn in Sociology.” European Review 16(1):
1–15.
Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present 38: 56–97.
Thorner, Daniel. 1953. “The Kashmir Land Reforms: Some Personal Impressions.” The Economic Weekly
5(37): 999–1002.
Wood, Conrad. 1992. “Peasant Revolt: An Interpretation of Moplah violence in the Nineteenth and
Twentieth centuries.” In Peasant Revolt in India, 1858–1914, edited by David Hardiman. New Delhi:
Yaqoob, Gowhar. 2019. “In Pursuit of a Nation: Conflicting Formulations of Nationalism in the Princely
State of Jammu and Kashmir (1930–1940).” Inverse Journal (March 16).
Yasin, Mohammad and A. Qaiyum Rafiqi, eds. 1980. History of the Freedom Struggle in Jammu & Kashmir.
New Delhi: Light & Life Publishers.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2004. Languages of Belonging, Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. New
Delhi: Permanent Black.
36
2
ON NAYA KASHMIR
Suvir Kaul
Introduction
Today, in a moment when the government of India is doing all it can – militarily, constitu-
tionally, juridically – to deny the people of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir their
political and civil rights, it might be quixotic to turn to the Naya Kashmir document1 to see
how its concerns and plans might still contribute to a better future for the citizens of the state,
including for those Kashmiris who work toward an independent nation.2 The document was
initiated by Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the head of the National Conference party and
the first Prime Minister of the state after its accession to India in 1947.3 Naya Kashmir was
an extraordinarily progressive manifesto of change; its acute diagnosis of the impoverished
lives of the peasantry, by far the majority of the population, was as bracing as its revolution-
ary vision of the future. It demanded an end to the exploitation and oppression that defined
Maharaja Hari Singh’s kingdom, and mandated transformative constitutional, political, social,
and economic changes. In 1944, it must have made startling reading; even today, elements of
it hold out the promise of a future more egalitarian, communitarian, even feminist than those
imagined by any other political party. However, after 1947, when the National Conference
came to power, its modes of governance repeatedly failed the promise of its own manifesto,
but the vision, hope, and resolve enshrined in this text remain potent reminders of the work
to be done.
Naya Kashmir spoke, as constitutions and manifestoes often do, in the voice of a territorially
defined collectivity:
WE, THE PEOPLE OF JAMMU, KASHMIR, LADAKH AND THE FRONTIER

REGIONS, INCLUDING POONCH AND CHINANI ILAQAS – commonly
known as JAMMU AND KASHMIR STATE – in order to perfect our union in
the fullest equality and self-determination, to raise ourselves and our children forever
from the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and superstition, from medieval
darkness and ignorance, into the sunlit valleys of plenty ruled by freedom, science and
honest toil, in worthy participation of the historic resurgence of the people of the East,
and the working masses of the world, and in determination to make this our country
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-4 37
Suvir Kaul
a dazzling gem upon the snowy bosom of Asia, DO PROPOSE AND PROPOUND
THE FOLLOWING CONSTITUTION OF OUR STATE:
(Constitution, 12)
This is very much an announcement of democratic idealism and thus a categoric refusal of Hari
Singh’s privilege and power. However, it did not locate itself in the anti-monarchy movement
alone, though it was anchored there (“to perfect our union in the fullest equality and self-
determination”). It understood itself as part of the internationalism of anti-colonial activism
in the mid-twentieth century – “the historic resurgence of the people of the East” – and of
working-class solidarity across the globe.4 It saw the new nation (“our country”) to be part of
Asia, located in its very “bosom,” this bodily metaphor a reminder that its historic trading and
cultural ties extended across Afghanistan and Iran to the west, as they did into Central Asia to
the north, across the Tibet plateau into China to the east, and into India to the south. Its con-
ception of the future was expansive, too, at once poetic and committed to modernization, for
it promised to move from “the abyss of oppression and poverty, degradation and superstition,
from medieval darkness and ignorance, into the sunlit valleys of plenty ruled by freedom, sci-
ence and honest toil.”
If some rhetorical flourishes here sound familiar from other contexts, that is not surpris-
ing, for this manifesto is understood to be the compilation of opinions and ideas submitted by
members of the National Conference, all reshaped by B.P.L. Bedi, a friend of Sheikh Abdul-
lah and a communist. (B.P.L. Bedi and his wife Freda Bedi were among several non-Kashmiri
communists who spent time in Srinagar contributing to Abdullah’s attempts to free the state
from monarchical rule.) Andrew Whitehead, based upon his interviews with other contempo-
rary political figures, believes that “Bedi was responsible for the greater part of the forty-four-
page manifesto, perhaps in collaboration with prominent CPI members in Lahore.” Whitehead
writes that one of his interlocutors, Pran Nath Jalali, thought that “apart from the introduction,
there wasn’t much writing to do, because the manifesto was ‘almost a carbon copy’ of docu-
ments issued in Soviet Central Asia” (Whitehead 2010: 148). To be sure, the Soviet Union pro-
vided an inspiring example for a great many progressive anti-colonial politicians in this period,
and Sheikh Abdullah was no exception. He made that clear in his Introduction to Naya Kashmir,
“Towards New Kashmir”:
In our times, Soviet Russia has demonstrated before our eyes, not merely theoretically
but in her actual day-to-day life and development, that real freedom takes birth only
economic emancipation. The inspiring picture of the regeneration of all the difference
nationalities and peoples of the USSR, and their welding together into the united
might Soviet State that is throwing back its barbarous invaders with deathless heroism,
is an unanswerable argument for the building of democracy on the cornerstone of
economic equality.
(Abdullah 1944: 8)
However, Abdullah was also emphatic that his progressive political and socio-economic ideas
were shaped by the poverty and feudal exploitation that he observed in his life and travels. In a
later interview with the journalist Prem Shankar Jha, thinking back to his intellectual develop-
ment, Abdullah noted that
Muslims are very much downtrodden in Kashmir. They are a huge majority – 95%.
So naturally my first contact was with them and I was influenced by their distress and
38
On Naya Kashmir
the injustices they suffered at the hands of officialdom. So I had the idea that they were
suffering on account of their religion. But later when I had had an opportunity to
travel around and tour the whole State I came across other people belonging to other
religious communities – Hindus and Sikhs, receiving the same, and in places even
worse treatment than Muslims. So I came to the conclusion that the real fight was not
between two religions but between “haves” and “have nots” oppressed and oppressor.
(Abdullah 1968: 2)5
Abdullah’s vocabulary was socialist (if not communist), as when he spoke for centralized plan-
ning of the economy: “In the economic sphere, we have gone on the principle that planned
economy is of the essence of progress, and that without it there can be no raising of the standard
of living of the masses of the State.” The manifesto looked backward into history and forward
into a promising future, its gaze centered upon the exploited citizens of the state:
Throughout the lean centuries of history, the poor and exploited sons of Jammu and
Kashmir have been the palanquin bearers of Hindu monarchs and Buddhist rulers and
Moghul emperors. The peasant sons of the valleys and the mountains have scratched
only nine inches of top soil and eked out a bare existence. Now that time has come
when they must dig deep into the bowels of the earth, and yoke the technique of
modern science to the task of getting for themselves a bigger and better morsel of
daily bread.
(Abdullah 1968: 8)
A “bigger and better morsel of daily bread” – this phrase sums up the challenges ahead, given
the immiseration of the large mass of people in the state.
The Relevance of Naya Kashmir Today

Before I turn to the body of the Naya Kashmir manifesto I want to address briefly why anyone
in Kashmir or elsewhere should pay attention to this document now. The primary reason is his-
torical: even if Kashmiris today are not in sympathy with Sheikh Abdullah or the National Con-
ference and see in him and the party the collaborators who linked Kashmir’s future (along with
that of Jammu and Ladakh) to India, it is still important to build a robust understanding of all
those moments when a Kashmiri leader or intellectual or political organization developed a pro-
gram of action centered on the people of the state. Proponents of azaadi very appropriately call
attention to the massacre of Kashmiri Muslims by the Maharaja’s forces in 1931 (now observed
as Martyr’s Day) as an important milestone in developing anti-feudal political consciousness,
or indeed the 1865 Shalbaf (shawl weavers) agitation, when the Maharaja’s troops killed 28
shawl weavers who were protesting against the miserable conditions of their employment, but
these are occasions that did not result in, and indeed were not the result of, considered politi-
cal mobilization. The Naya Kashmir manifesto was the product of a decade or more of active
anti-feudal politics that began in 1924 with the meetings of the “Fateh Kadal Reading Room
Party,” which comprised young, educated Muslims, including Sheikh Abdullah, who gathered
to discuss political possibilities (the name of this group is an ironic reminder that early in the
century, the Maharaja had banned Muslim political organizations).6
The 1930s saw much concerted political activity, particularly because Kashmiri Muslims
began to demand redressal of their historical exclusion from government jobs. Given that they
were a small minority of the population, a disproportionate number of Kashmiri Pandits, as
39
Suvir Kaul
well as non-Kashmiri Muslims, had been appointed to these positions by the Maharaja, who
depended on his co-religionists and Muslims from the Jammu province (as well as from the
Indian mainland) for administration, policing, and revenue extraction (Mridu Rai provides a
detailed and well-modulated account of political developments in this period in Rai 2004: 253–
279). This is thus a crucial period in the growth of anti-feudal politics in the state of Jammu and
Kashmir, and the Naya Kashmir manifesto, while being very much the platform of the National
Conference, represents that larger political and cultural awakening.7 It crystallized anti-monar-
chical politics, and for that reason alone can be considered the foundational script of the “Quit
Kashmir” movement launched by Sheikh Abdullah in 1946, which demanded the abrogation
of the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar (a treaty that had finalized the British East India Company’s sale
of the land and peoples of Jammu and Kashmir to the Dogra general, Gulab Singh). In these
ways, the Naya Kashmir manifesto is central to the development of ideas of democratic self-
determination in Kashmir, and thus a weighty prelude to the ideal of azaadi today.8
The Constitution of a State, and of a Nation

The document is divided into two sections: Part I, The Constitution of the State, and Part II,
The National Economic Plan (in what follows, I will provide extensive details from the mani-
festo, if only because it is not easy to come by anymore). It is important to note that the unit of
political organization envisaged here is the “nation” rather than a provincial state that is part of
a larger country. “A single State citizenship” was to be made available to all those who lived in
“Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh and the Frontier Regions, including the Poonch and Chinani ilaqas,”
and this citizenship brooked no internal distinctions:
The equality of the rights of all citizens, irrespective of their nationality, religion, race,
or birth, in all spheres of national life – economic, political, cultural and social shall
be an irrevocable law.
Any direct or indirect restriction of these rights, or conversely the established of
direct or indirect privileges for any citizens or class of citizens on account of national-
ity, religion, race or birth, as well as the propagation of national, racial or religious
exceptionalism or hatred and contempt, shall be punished by law.
The law existed both to enable shared, equal citizenship and to disable any attempts to deny
equality – principles that are bracing reminders that constitutions are meant to safeguard the
shared lives, and the civil and confessional rights, of a multireligious, polyglot, ethnically diverse
national collectivity.
Freedoms of speech, of the press, “of Assembly and Meetings,” “of Street Processions and
Demonstrations,” are “guaranteed by law.” In addition – and this sentence makes heartening
reading, for it encourages the growth of political consciousness – people are encouraged to
combine “in public organizations: trade unions, co-operative societies, women’s and youth
organizations, sport and self-defense organizations, political parties, and cultural, scientific, and
technical societies.” The manifesto is no idealist tissue of promises though, as it moves quickly
to a pragmatic declaration of the authority of the Law: while the “Inviolability of the person
shall be ensured to all Citizens,” arrests and detentions will follow decisions of “a Court of Law”
or other competent authorities. Similarly, we are told that the “privacy of homes and secrecy
of correspondence shall not be violated except in accordance with Law.” Article 7 is concerned
with the “defence of the Motherland,” asks every Citizen to “train himself [sic] to use” arms,
and states that “Universal compulsory military service will be established by law.”
40
On Naya Kashmir
At this point, the manifesto reveals its socialist concerns and ideas, speaking of a planned
national economy, in which
All Citizens have the right to work, that is, the right to receive guaranteed work with
payment for their labour in accordance with its quantity and quality, subject to a basic
minimum and maximum wage established by law. In the absence of the provision of
employment, Citizens are entitled to security of the necessaries of decent existence for
themselves and their families by universal social insurance.
This theme is revisited in Article 16, which is a simple restatement of the right to, and dignity
of, labor: “Work in the State of Jammu and Kashmir shall be an obligation and a matter of hon-
our to all citizens capable of work.” Where there is the obligation to work, there must also be a
mandate to rest from labor, and Article 9 states simply: “All Citizens shall have the right to rest.”
The poignant power of this straightforward declaration becomes visible particularly when we
keep in mind the prevalence of begar (forced, unpaid labor), but also the precarity that marred
the lives of peasants across the state. The Maharaja’s rule had denied most people access to edu-
cation and health care, and poverty was rife. As the Madhav Godbole report stated,
In 1947 Jammu and Kashmir was one of the least developed states, which was reflected
in the abysmal mass poverty, deprivation, hunger, disease, and ignorance. In 1950 the
state had a per capita income of Rs 208 (at 1960–61) prices. The rate of literacy was
5%. Agriculture which was the dominant sector was stagnant. Industrial development
was almost negligible. Infrastructure bottlenecks crippled the state economy.
( Report of the Committee 1998: 3; quoted in Wani 2019a: 45)
Given this state of affairs, it is moving to read Article 9 as it goes on to describe the forms of
the promised “rest” for workers:
This right shall be ensured by the reduction of the working day to eight hours maxi-
mum, the establishment of annual vacations with pay for workers and employees and
the provision of a wide network of sanitoriums, rest homes and clubs for the accom-
modation of working people.
This is one moment though when the socialist utopia promised is at odds with the reality of
individual lives and social structures: rather than recognize the family as the basic unit within
which workers find their rest and care, it advocates more impersonal institutions. The state is to
address the problems of ill health and the insecurities of old age, and thus promises social insur-
ance, free medical care, and health resorts, but without any appreciation of the functional reality
of life in the communities that comprise the nation.
Articles 11 and 12 turn to education and the rights and status of women, and in each case
we see that elements of all that was imagined here did in fact shape state policy after 1948. “All
Citizens shall have the right to education,” we read, and learn that this
right shall be ensured by universal compulsory elementary education, free of charge.

In addition, a wide system of States scholarships shall be provided for poor students
in the higher schools and universities. The mother tongue shall be the medium of
instruction.9 Free vocational, technical and agronomic education shall be organized
for adult workers in the fields and factories.
41
Suvir Kaul
The condition of women is addressed in a forthright and categoric assertion of their equality:
“Women citizens shall be accorded equal rights with men in all fields of national life; economic,
cultural, political and in the state services.” Further,
These rights shall be realized by affording women the right to work in every employ-
ment upon equal terms and for equal wages with men. Women shall be ensured rest,
social insurance and education equally with men. The law shall give special protection
to the interests of mother and child. The provision of pregnancy leave with pay and
the establishment of a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens
shall further secure these rights.
Everywhere in this document, the language is of “rights” – not of custom or tradition – but of
a future of opportunity anchored in law, citizenship, and the right to labor and earn wages, on
terms equal with men. This “equality of opportunity” was to be extended to all children “born
in the State . . . irrespective of accidents of birth and parentage.” Children would in fact embody
not just the hope behind, but the motivation and legitimation of, all state policies: “In all ques-
tions of administration or legislation, medical, educational, domestic, municipal or industrial,
the interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration.”
Article 15, which pledges to respect the right to personal and inherited property, includes
one noteworthy qualifier: property rights are “protected by law within the limits of the planned
economy of the State.” No absolute right to property then – in effect this article was an early
announcement of the “land to the tiller” policies that reshaped the agricultural hinterland in
Kashmir and elsewhere in the state.10 No matter how unevenly these policies were implemented
in the 1950s, their impact on landless peasants was incalculable: it allowed many of them to
own land, and even when their parcels of land were not large enough to support their families,
it shifted their perception of themselves. No longer did they need to think of themselves as
virtually the serfs of jagirdars and big landlords, but – however uncertainly and haltingly – as
property-owning citizens, in greater control of their destinies than before. It is no wonder then
that large landowners, particularly those possessed of land titles from the Maharaja, did all they
could to destabilize these reforms, including by portraying them as an effort to seize Hindu land
and hand it over to Muslims. All of this social ferment followed from the seemingly innocuous
phrasing of Article 15: “The right of personal property of citizens, as well as the right of inher-
itance of personal property of the Citizens, is protected by law within the limits of the planned
economy of the State.”
In the penultimate article of this section, the manifesto turns away from internal affairs to
think of those elsewhere and makes a declaration of intent that rings true today, given the anti-
immigrant, anti-asylum policies being put into place across the globe: “The State of Jammu and
Kashmir grants the right of asylum to foreign citizens persecuted for defending the interests of
the masses, for their scientific activity, or their struggle for national liberation.” Today, when
some Kashmiris, in exile from the depredations of the Indian security apparatus, are themselves
asylum seekers in different countries, it is energizing for us to remember a moment when the
Kashmiri political horizon was expansive enough to welcome those in retreat from persecution
in their own homes. Even more remarkable perhaps are the grounds on which asylum seekers
are to be admitted: “for defending the interests of the masses, for their scientific activity, or their
struggle for national liberation.” The typical reasons for which asylum seekers fled their homes
then – religious and ethnic persecution, war, famine – are here recast. Protection is offered to
anti-colonial and revolutionary activists, and those in trouble for espousing “scientific” beliefs
that interrogate traditional beliefs and practices and threaten the structures of power they sustain.
42
On Naya Kashmir
The National Assembly

This section lays out the terms under which citizens were to elect representatives to the “high-
est legislature of the State, the National Assembly.” There are few surprises here, including the
stipulation that any “Deputy” elected to the assembly “shall not be prosecuted or arrested with-
out the consent of the National Assembly, and in the period when the National Assembly is
not in session, without the consent of the Speaker of the National Assembly.” Article 23 makes
clear that, for all its socialist and democratic foundations, the Naya Kashmir manifesto does not
envisage a republic, for it defines the functions of the National Assembly (including its control
of “exterior relations,” the defense of the state, economic planning and the budget, the legal sys-
tem) to be “Subject to the general control of HH the Maharaja Bahadur.” The model here is that
of a democratic, constitutional monarchy, where the Maharaja would remain the titular head of
state and oversee the work of the “Council of Ministers” who were tasked with administration
and governance. Article 27 specified the tasks of the “Ruler of Jammu and Kashmir,” which was
to convene two regular sessions of the National Assembly each year, as well as any extraordinary
sessions that were required, to conduct referenda when necessary, to declare “general or partial
mobilization,” to ratify international treaties approved by the Assembly, and to authorize the
formation of the Ministry by summoning the leader of the largest elected party in the Assembly.
The “Electoral System” is defined next (universal adult franchise), with some reservation of
seats for minorities (“during the transitional period, Sikhs, Kashmiri Pandits and Harijans shall
be provided with two reserved seats each, and for this purpose they shall exercise the right of a
second vote”). “Justice: The Courts and the Advocate General” are defined in the next section,
with one surprising element:
The High Court of Jammu and Kashmir is elected by the National Assembly for
period of five years. The lower courts are appointed by the High Court for a period of
five years, with the exception of the People’s Courts, which are elected by the People’s
Panchayats for a period of five years.
The plan for a High Court elected every five years by the deputies in the Assembly imagines a
court much more responsive to the will of the people as expressed by their elected representa-
tives; this pledge was of course never implemented. In parallel fashion, “Local Administration”
was meant to be under the purview of “People’s Panchayats,” to be elected every five years.
These Panchayats (rather than a centralized bureaucracy) were to be the “organs of State power
in Districts or the Tehsils, Cities and Villages.” In these cases, the guiding principle seems to
have been that of participatory democracy, where even executive administrators (appointed by
the elected members of each Panchayat) would be responsible to the local communities for
whom they worked.
The National Economic Plan

Part II of the Naya Kashmir document addresses the National Economic Plan, with its particu-
lars following from this directive:
The economic life of the State shall be determined and directed by the National Eco-
nomic Plan for the purpose of increasing public wealth, of ensuring a steady rise in
the material and cultural level of working men and women, and of consolidating the
defense capacity of the State.
43
Suvir Kaul
I will not go into the details it offers of such centralized planning, but will call attention to those
elements that resonate with our concerns. Today, when Kashmir is integrated into a wider, even
global, consumer economy, one which features deep inequalities of consumption, it is bracing
to read ideas that recognized high levels of poverty, the lack of developed resources and train-
ing, and shortages of most basic commodities, and pledged to remove inequalities and boost
production by emphasizing cooperation rather than competition. The planned economy is to
ensure “work for all able-bodied citizens,” but also to ensure “the elimination of parasites from
the state economy,” a now quaint turn of phrase, but one which here clearly indicated feudal
landowners who lived off the labor of peasants. (In a later section, “The Peasants’ Charter,” the
connection is made clear, for we are told that “when social parasitism is abolished,” all “land
which at present belongs to the landlords will revert to the peasant.”) The attention to those
who labor is also emphasized when we read “that whereas brain work will be recognized as a
form of socially necessary labour, it will not be allowed to become a means of social exploita-
tion, or be remunerated out of all proportion to its worth.” In a land where levels of literacy
were abysmally low, this was a reminder of the state’s priorities: those who had possessed learn-
ing had put their “brain work” to use in the service of an exploitative monarchy and to further
their own self-interest, and that unfortunate history is to be remedied in the future.
The National Economic Plan addressed six areas: Production (Agriculture and Industry),
Transport, Distribution, Utility Services (Public Health, Education, Housing, Cultural Organi-
zations and Social Insurance), Currency and Finance, and the Women’s Charter. The first step
in the reorganization of Agriculture was to be the
Abolition of landlordism; because such a step would be the pivot of all progress. So
long as a privileged class exists, itself doing nothing, but living on the labour of others,
there can be no equitable distribution of the products of the soil.
Further, land was to be given to the tiller, for “after the abolition of the landlord class, it will
be possible for the first time to satisfy, the land hunger of the landless peasant, and ensure the
efficient working of the land.” Food security was paramount:
it is a criminal betrayal of the toiling masses of Kashmir to export grains and foodstuffs
which are needful for the people of the State. No exports shall be permitted, unless
the needs of the State have been provided for, both immediate needs and the needs of
a healthy reserve.
The Naya Kashmir document was also clear that in this forest-rich region, people must control,
and benefit from, the forests and their produce: “the efficient central administration of forests
must be supplemented by the daily supervision of the People’s Panchayats, in order to ensure
that the people of the locality derive the fullest benefit from forest land, consistent with their
genuine needs.” The aim of all this centralized planning was categoric: “national self-sufficiency
in essential foodstuffs and crops,” the simplicity of this claim being a reminder that such self-
sufficiency could not be taken for granted.
There are further details about the National Agricultural Council that is to be set up, but
the document’s priority is the bettering of the difficult lives of the “poor and exploited peasant
of Jammu and Kashmir State.” It therefore includes “The Peasant’s Charter,” which specifies the
“rights” of a peasant. First is the right to work on the land, land made available by the redistri-
bution of acreage now owned by parasitic landlords. The “right of the peasant to maintenance
from village produce” will accompany the abolishing of all “feudal dues, levies and forced
44
On Naya Kashmir
labour,” as well as the release of peasants from debt-bondage (“Rural indebtedness had been
the millstone of the peasantry of the State,” we are told). The Charter includes provisions to
improve and extend the lives of peasants, all of which derive from the sense that this region is
largely agrarian, and that historically, the large mass of peasants have suffered egregious exploita-
tion. This socialist program of change extends into plans for the remaking of Industry. The “big
private capitalist” is to be abolished because the “exploitation of national labour and resources
for a private profit motive means suffering and hardship for the working population.” The state
will own and manage all “key industries,” and no private monopolies, “whether formal or
virtual,” will be permitted. All forest resources “basic to industry and mineral deposits” will be
worked only by the state, for which a National Industrial Council will develop plans.
The organization of industrial work is based on “The Worker’s Charter,” which postulates
that every “citizen has the right to work consistent with his honour and self-respect in a free
and democratic State, which postulates the abolition of all exploitation of man by man.” The
Charter ratifies the worker’s “right to association and expression through his [sic] own trade
union,” to work no more than eight hours a day, and six days a week, with a two-week paid
annual vacation, and “to receive equal wages for equal work, without racial distinction or sex
discrimination.” Child labor is forbidden, and women workers are to receive special protections
as specified in the Women’s Charter. This Charter concludes the Naya Kashmir document, and
I will list some of its core concerns and promises here. First, women over 18 are entitled to
vote in all elections, as well as to be elected to all elective bodies. They also have the right to
“entry into all State services.” The Charter protects the economic rights of women, insisting on
a woman’s right to “enter any profession or trade or do any kind of work of which she herself
considers she is capable,” and to be paid equally for equal work. It seeks laws to end their sexual
trafficking and exploitation, as well as molestation. Legal protections are promised for
1 every woman’s right to consent to her own marriage

2 the abolition of the dowry system and the selling of women in marriage
3 the right of divorce and alimony
4 that women be given equal rights and responsibilities in the upbringing of children, and
the right of custody of children if the innocent party in divorce
5 the right of women to own and inherit property, this right not to be prejudiced by marriage
6 the right of special women lay-judges to be present during the trying of cases affecting
women and children
7 the right to humane and intelligent treatment of women prisoners in jails, taking into
account their psychological and biologic necessities. (54)
These protections, many still not available, make the Women’s Charter a forward-looking,
egalitarian document for its time, and for ours. Finally, while law and the judicial system must
do its work, full emancipation is to come from education, and the document seeks to guarantee
1 Compulsory free primary education for women. Travelling schools to be provided for
nomad women, boat schools for boat women, and other special arrangements to be made
for other classes of women who find it impossible to attend ordinary schools.
2 Equal educational rights and privileges in liberal and technical education, women’s study
to be encouraged by the grant of special scholarships at every stage.
3 Separate colleges for women, liberal and technical and domestic, to be established. Women
also to be given the right to join men’s colleges.
4 Recognition of the special needs of women in the drawing up of educational curriculums.
45
Suvir Kaul
5 Schemes for adult education among women to be put forward, these schemes to include
not only the three R’s but also hygienic and elementary child welfare. (55)
Some of these ideals did in fact become the basis of public policy, and were responsible for sig-
nificant advances for women, particularly in urban areas.
Naya Kashmir and the Compromises of Governance

Commentators have noted the ways in which the ideals of the Naya Kashmir document were
curtailed to suit the imperatives of governance once the National Conference came to power
in 1948. Before and after it formed the government, the National Conference was opposed by
the Muslim Conference and by other groups unhappy with the growing links between Jammu
and Kashmir and the Indian Union, links that this party, and the Naya Kashmir document, were
seen to foster. Many of the government’s policies met with opposition because they challenged
the hold of landlords, socio-religious institutions, and clerical leaders all across the state. For
instance, the “state-sponsored feminism” of the Naya Kashmir document was anathema to a
great many Muslim and Hindu patriarchs, which made it an important statement of change,
particularly given that none of the opponents of the National Conference government were
known to be votaries of women’s emancipation. However, as Hafsa Kanjwal points out, state
institutions devoted to the education and advancement of women also inhibited the possibility
of other non-state forms of women’s empowerment (Kanjwal 2018).11 Kanjwal argues rightly
that in Kashmir,
there was no indigenous women’s movement to speak of, or even one that was depend-
ent on the state. The state was the movement. Furthermore, the state had no interest in
cultivating a new Muslim woman as in Pakistan, but rather a new Kashmiri woman that
could implement the state’s socialist programme for Kashmiri society.
(Kanjwal 2018: 5)
Graduates from the Women’s College in Srinagar travelled everywhere, including into villages
where they taught other women about hygiene, health care, and the education of children, and
on field trips to other parts of the state and India. All of these activities were in keeping with the
state’s vision that “the new Kashmiri woman, much like the new Kashmiri man, was educated,
progressive, and a secular nationalist.” The obverse of such an education was the continuing
repression of all student opinions that were pro-Pakistan or even pro-plebiscite, and Kanjwal
provides examples of such repression.
In short, that was the paradox of the Naya Kashmir manifesto: its commitments to freedom
and emancipation warped under the pressures faced by the National Conference once it came
to power. The tensions of the India-Pakistan rivalry rendered independence of thought and
practice impossible, and in any case the secular socialism of its ideals was not an easy fit for the
varied forms of Kashmiri orthodoxy. It is possible to argue that this gap between the idealistic
vocabulary and plans of the manifesto and the realities of Kashmiri lives was a measure of the
incapacity of progressive ideologues to generate political programs tailored to the needs or
capacities of the people of the state, and that this idea of “Naya Kashmir” was doomed from the
start. In “How New was the New Kashmir (1948–53)?” a chapter of his searching study, What
Happened to Governance in Kashmir? Aijaz Ashraf Wani celebrates the Naya Kashmir manifesto as
“the first ever endeavour of its kind in the subcontinent,” lists the multiple challenges faced by
the first National Conference government, which took office on March 5, 1948, and tabulates
46
On Naya Kashmir
its achievements and failures (Wani 2019a: 67–137). I have space only to quote his judicious
summary comment here: “the hopes of the people were belied when the new government
became a dictatorship of the National Conference party, party and administration rolled into
one.” All “voices other than the voice of the government were muzzled,” and “a reign of terror
and tyranny” was unleashed by party cadres who were also appointed government officials (Wani
2019a: 112). Sheikh Abdullah’s attempts to maintain the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir so
discomfited the Indian government that, on August 9, 1953, he was dismissed and imprisoned
in a party coup engineered by other National Conference politicians backed by New Delhi.
Even though the party stayed in power in the years to come, patronage politics and widespread
corruption made sure that the revolutionary idealism of Naya Kashmir dwindled into a fond
memory, a bright blip in a business-as-usual scenario. As I have suggested here, though, there
is much in the pro-poor politics and progressive vision of this manifesto that might usefully
inform resistance politics, today and in the future.
Notes
1 This document was titled CONSTITUTION and OUTLINE ECONOMIC PLAN for the State of
JAMMU AND KASHMIR, including Ladakh and the frontier regions and the Poonch and Chinani “ilaqas”
and was published in 1944.
2 Maknoon Wani (2020) has recently debunked Narendra Modi’s pledge that the revocation of Article
370 on August 5, 2019, was necessary to allow the Indian government to build a “naya Jammu and
Kashmir and naya Ladakh.” The fact that Modi returned to this term is a testament to its enduring
power and promise.
3 In recent years, many Kashmiris have turned against Sheikh Abdullah and his political legacy; his mau-
soleum in Srinagar has for years been guarded to prevent desecration (Raina 2019). Now, the Indian
government is also doing what it can to erase his memory by removing his birthday from the list of
official holidays. Bashaarat Masood writes that “Many people see this as an effort to erase the role of
Sheikh Abdullah, and J&K’s Muslim assertion” (see Masood 2020).
4 The internationalism of this vision originated in the 1939 separation of the National Conference and
the Muslim Conference, which, as Altaf Hussain Para argues, “ushered in an era of anti-British politics
in the Kashmir Valley. No longer was the Kashmir movement simply against the government of the
maharaja; it had also assumed the status of an anti-imperialist movement in favor of the larger inde-
pendence of the Indian subcontinent.” Those who remained with the Muslim Conference disagreed,
thus generating “contesting voices and narratives both within the National Conference and in Kashmir
politics” (Para 2019: 97).
5 Interview with Prem Shankar Jha, published in the “Weekend-Review,” reprinted in Sheikh Moham-
mad Abdullah, Speeches & Interviews, Volume 2, page 2 (pp. 1–14). [Srinagar(?), 1968]
6 For a very useful account of the growth of political consciousness, particularly among Muslims, in early
twentieth-century Jammu and Kashmir, see Mohammad Ishaq Khan 1998. Gowhar Yakoob reminds
us that the Maharaja’s censorship attempted to curb the growth of political awareness by restricting the
publication of magazines and newspapers. Yakoob then points to the importance of the weekly maga-
zine Hamdard, which was designed to “reject communal schism; to bring Hindus and Muslims together
and lay down the vision for the political freedom for Kashmir,” and which was the first magazine to be
edited jointly by a Kashmiri Muslim and a Kashmiri Hindu (Yakoob 2019: 51).
7 See Fazili 1980: esp. 69–131. Fazili argues that the popular songs and poems of Peerzada Ghulam
Ahmad “Mahjoor” and Abdul Ahad “Azad” were crucial to the dissemination of revolutionary ideas
amongst Kashmiris.
8 In a recent essay, Shahla Hussain argues that the idea of azaadi is not a “recent construct,” but has a long
lineage in Kashmir, one that suggests that it is a “concept informed by human dignity, economic equity
and social justice.” She makes clear that this lineage in no way precludes the idea of political freedom
(Hussain 2018: 90).
9 Kashmiri was taught in schools between 1948 and 1953, when the Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad gov-
ernment shifted to Urdu. Kashmiri was reintroduced into the curriculum in 2008, but is compulsory
only until the 8th standard.
47
Suvir Kaul
10 For an early account of the impact of these policies on village landholdings, see Thorner 1953.
Thorner’s evaluation, which he makes clear is based on limited conversations with villagers, is that
“Land reform in Kashmir has clearly done away with the jagirs, and has weakened the position of all
the great landlords. It has distinctly benefited those individuals who, at the village level, were already
the more important and substantial people. It has done the least for petty tenants and landless labourers,
these two categories being the largest in the countryside.” A good summary of all that was at stake in,
as well as contemporary responses to, the “Big Landed Estates Abolition Act,” which came into effect
on October 17, 1950, is available in Wani 2019b.
11 Kanjwal turns to a memoir written by one of the upper-class (khandani) women who benefited from
these initiatives, Shamla Mufti’s Chilman se Chaman, to detail the impact of women’s education, and
notes in summary that the “shift in just a few years, in societal perceptions of women’s education and
role in society was notable.” Shamla Mufti, Chilman se Chaman, in Urdu, Srinagar: Meezan Publishers
(1994). Kanjwal translates the title as “From Darkness to Light.” A more literal translation is “From (a)
Screen to (a) Garden,” which suggests the movement of women from pardah and enclosed domestic
spaces to public arenas.
Works Cited
Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammed. 1944. “Towards Naya Kashmir.” In CONSTITUTION and OUTLINE
ECONOMIC PLAN for the State of JAMMU AND KASHMIR, Including Ladakh and the Frontier regions
and the Poonch and Chinani ‘ilaqas’. Lucknow: Sitaram Gunthey at the National Herald.
———. 1968. “Interview with Prem Shanker Jha.” In Speeches & Interviews, Vol. 2, 1–14. Srinagar: G.M.Shah.
CONSTITUTION and OUTLINE ECONOMIC PLAN for the State of JAMMU AND KASHMIR,
including Ladakh and the Frontier regions and the Poonch and Chinani ‘ilaqas’. 1944. New Delhi: K. N.
Bamzai, The Director, Kashmir Bureau of Information.
Fazili, Manzoor A. 1980. Socialist Ideas and Movements in Kashmir (1919–1947). New Delhi: Eureka
Publications.
Hussain, Shahla. 2018. “Kashmiri Visions of Freedom: The Past and the Present.” In Kashmir: History,
Politics, Representation, edited by Chitralekha Zutshi, 89–112. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2018. “The New Kashmiri Woman – State-led Feminism in ‘Naya Kashmir.’ ” Economic &
Political Weekly 53(47).
Khan, Mohammad Ishaq. 1998. “Kashmiri Muslims: Social and Identity Consciousness.” In Islam, Com-
munities and the Nation: Muslim Identities in South Asia and Beyond, edited by Mushirul Hasan, 201–228.
New Delhi: Manohar.
Masood, Bashaarat. 2020. “Explained: The Two Holidays Scrapped in Jammu and Kashmir.” Indian
Express, January 2. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/what-were-the-2-holidays-scrapped-
in-jk-6195271/.
Mufti, Shamla. 1994. Chilman se Chaman (Urdu). Srinagar: Meezan Publishers.
Para, Altaf Hussain. 2019. The Making of Modern Kashmir: Sheikh Abdullah and the Politics of the State. New
York: Routledge.
Raina, Muzaffar. 2019. “Sheikh Abdullah’s Sad Inheritance.” The Telegraph, August 15. www.telegraphin-
dia.com/india/sheikh-abdullahs-sad-inheritance/cid/1697912.
Report of the Committee on Economic Reforms for Jammu and Kashmir. 1998. Srinagar: General Administration
Department.
Thorner, Daniel. 1953. “The Kashmir Land Reforms: Some Personal Impressions.” Economic and Political
Weekly 5(37): 999–1002.
Wani, Aijaz Ashraf. 2019a. What Happened to Governance in Kashmir? New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
———. 2019b. “Costly Land Reforms.” Kashmir Life, July 17. https://kashmirlife.net/costly-land-reforms-
issue-16-vol-11–215417/.
Wani, Maknoon. 2020. “Naya Kashmir is a Century Old.” Inverse Journal, April 23. www.inversejournal.
com/2020/04/23/naya-kashmir-is-a-century-old-by-maknoon-wani/.
Whitehead, Andrew. 2010. “The People’s Militia: Communists and Kashmiri Nationalism in the 1940s.”
Twentieth-Century Communism 2: 141–168.
Yakoob, Gowhar. 2019. “Print, Politics, and the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir (1935–1940).” Stud-
ies in Humanities and Social Sciences 22(1): 48–66.
48
3
CLOSING THE FRONTIER?
EXTRACTION, CONTESTED
BOUNDARIES, AND THE
GREENING OF FRONTIER
POLITICS IN LADAKH
Alka Sabharwal
Introduction
Throughout its history, from a busy pashm1 entrepot’ in the precolonial era to a lucrative colony
for the British and Dogra rulers and now a wildlife sanctuary juxtaposed on the disputed
national border, Changthang has been subjected to the incursions by outside forces that framed
the region as a frontier. Earlier scholarship on frontiers has located them at the edges of the
existing states and labelled them as unpopulated regions expecting to be included into the state
by means of settlement (Turner 1994). There is a risk in applying the notion in such an overly
contracted sense where the transformation of these “wild spaces” into spaces of civilization is
considered as desirable, following a linear teleological pathway. In the recent literature on the
subject, this settler-oriented perspective on frontiers has been widened to include the frontiers
as capitalist resources with exploitable commodities (Tsing 2005). Geiger in a more enlighten-
ing take on the concept defined them to be “areas remote from political centres which hold strategic
significance or economic potentials for human exploitation and are contested by social formations of unequal
power” (Geiger 2008: 78, italics in original).2 This definition, while echoing parts of Tsing’s
(2005) conceptualization of frontier as an exploitative resource, also complimentarily highlights
the “strategic significance” or the political dimension of state control. Geiger’s concluding allu-
sion to “social formations of unequal power” reiterates the focus on economic and social dif-
ferentials of communities that interact in frontier contexts.
The scholarship on Kashmir and Ladakh has contested the prevalent perceptions about these
regions as being India’s isolated regions inhabited by the ‘backward’ or ‘suspect’ communities
(Aggarwal 2004; Fewkes 2009; Mathur 2014; Van Beek and Pirie 2008). Ethnographic stud-
ies have attempted to present Ladakh from a perspective that is much more than a physical/
territorial marker of the limits of Indian sovereignty. Scholars have focused on the everyday
political subjectivities ubiquitous in the everyday life and how they regulate the economic,
social, physical, and cultural movements and interactions (Aggarwal 2004; Aggarwal and Bhan
2009; Vogel and Field 2020). Aggarwal (2004) and Bhan (2008) have examined how everyday
political struggles of the border communities, be it their everyday cultural performances or the
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-5 49
Alka Sabharwal
customary labor practices, are essential in constituting, shaping, and maintaining India’s territo-
rial sovereignty. Focusing on key economic activities in Ladakh such as tourism and trade, Vogel
and Field (2020) have explored how restricted access through inner-line permits shape common
perceptions and experiences of the borders while reinforcing national boundaries. Through
underscoring such everyday practices, the scholarship has reiterated how the Ladakh borderland
is produced and structured by both state and society. In echoing the South Asian contested bor-
derlands processes, these ethnographic investigations have developed an analytical optic to see
how places such as Ladakh are very much implicated in working out the postcolonial politics
of nation and state and are central to both imaginations and understanding of South Asia (see
also Cons and Sanyal 2013). The chapter thus views the Changthang region in Ladakh not as
a neutral, bicultural borderland of passive give and take but rather as a contested physical space
that has been shaped by an active historical agency.
These valuable scholarly insights on frontier research have advanced a less monochromatic
picture of the frontiers. Sanjib Baruah (2003: 921), for instance, has argued that in the North-
east frontier regions of India, “the routine practices that reproduce the consent of the governed
in modern democracy” are present only to a degree. From an absence of a full-blown civil
administration to the justified militarized governance/occupation ( Junaid 2013; Hoffman and
Duschinski 2020), scholars have observed that the governance of India’s contested borderlands
is of an entirely different quality. The parallel governance structures in these borderlands ensure
that strategic decisions remain with those establishments that guarantee the paramountcy of
“national security” over other policy objectives (Aggarwal and Bhan 2009; Bhan 2014). As the
demarcations between legality and illegality, violence and law, are so blurred and dynamic, some
authors have pronounced frontier governance as paradoxical: the authorities claim to protect
those least in need of protection although no institution demonstrates a more blatant disregard
for the policy than sometimes the state itself (see Aggarwal and Bhan 2009).
A groundswell of democratic transformations all over the globe in the late 1980s and new
ideas about economic development and resource consumption introduced the discourse of
nature conservation in government policies. Seen as the most conspicuous force for change in
frontier politics, the new green wave, many claimed, had the capacity to even out the power
disparities by improving the frontier governance. Casting Changthang into a gazetted Protected
Area in the late 1980s and implementing a reformist ecological agenda in recent times indicated
that such interventions might ultimately close the frontier by democratizing and balancing the
power disparities among frontier inhabitants and settler groups. Yet, unpredictably the green-
ing of Changthang politics has also created new types of boundaries prescribing different types
of extraction and conditions for transformed relations between the frontier inhabitants and the
settlers, while also attracting a new “community” of occupiers.
My chapter aims to sequentially trace the historical processes of frontierization such as set-
tlement, extraction, control, and conservation in Changthang. I analyze how Changthang
has intersected the various imperatives of succeeding states – from its precolonial status as a
minor periphery to its current status as a foci of wildlife conservation. The chapter specifi-
cally sketches how different opportunities to exercise agency among its constituent actors have
varied throughout the historical trajectories of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods.
Grounded in the ethnographic inquiry of the three pastoral settlements in the Rupshu plains of
Changthang, the chapter argues to re-evaluate the reformist ecological agenda for the Changth-
ang frontier as it demonstrates not a reversal of the long-standing inequalities in resource access,
but how the power relations embedded in the conservation agenda further implicates the local
Changpa pastoralists unfavorably.
50
Frontier Politics in Ladakh
Pashmina Trade Through Deference and Distance and Begar: The

Precolonial Period
Rather than being a Turnerian frontier where the role of the sovereign remained conspicuously
absent, the Changthang frontier was set into motion by the connivance of the Ladakhi rulers in
the lucrative pashm trade from Tibet. However, the royal pashm interest was inevitably linked
and dependent on the local labor obligations, intrinsic to the tax and tribute system throughout
the Himalayan hill states, including Tibet and Kashmir (Bray 2008). Along with making provi-
sions of obligatory transport and paying livestock tributes to the Ladakh monarchs, the Changpa
pastoralists also acted as the cordon sanitaire and guarded and protected the distant Ladakhi
territory from territorial conflicts that so often accompany frontier expansion. As a frontier of
extraction as well as of control, Changthang had represented more mutuality and negotiations,
manifested in the social and political relations during the precolonial times.
Being the portal of raw pashmina trade from Western Tibet, Changthang’s Rupshu region,
extending from Chebzi (south, and now in Tibet) to Lanak La (east) and Phalongdanda (west)
to Mahe bridge (north) was a critical border territory for the Ladakh realm (Rizvi 1999: Bray
2018).3 But with no permanent army of its own, the monarchs relied on the leadership of Rup-
shu gowa4 to act as the “territorial spearhead of the state” and safeguard the territorial interest
of Ladakh on the borders with Tibet (Sheikh 1999; see also Geiger 2008: 124; Nugent 2019).
Other than being the cordon sanitaire of the Ladakh realm, under the terms of Treaty of Temis-
gang5 (gTing.mos.sgang), the Rupshu pastoralists also carried obligations to provide corvee labor6
(porterage) to the “palace/state traders” by virtue of residing along the pashm trade routes (Bray
2008; Rizvi 1999). During his visit to Rupshu in 1871, Drew (1875: 288–289) witnessed that:
The tea-merchants of Lhasa – a shrewd eager set of men – yearly come this way with
their venture of brick tea for Le’; their merchandise is carried free by the Rupshu
people, according to an old arrangement between the authorities of Lhasa and of Le’.
Such forms of corvee labor, or begar, no doubt was a manifestation of the social hierarchy at the
local level, but its more encompassing political relevance could not be ignored. For instance,
the Ladakhi and Tibetan rulers organized special pashm trade missions of lo-phyag7 and zhung
Tsong or cha-pa every year to strengthen the cultural and religious ties between the two regions.
These official trade missions, as scholars have argued, were critical in recognizing the legitimacy
and status of Ladakh and Tibet and had remained dependent on the provisions of the Changpa’s
obligatory transport (Bray 2018; Grist 1994). Therefore, the significant role of the Changpa
pastoralists in seizing the far-flung Ladakhi outposts and operating the pashm trade8 rendered
Changthang a “loosely administrated space” in the precolonial times, with a discreet presence
of the Ladakhi state. Ladakhi state defined its power as flowing from being the overall owner of
the Changthang land and a distant administrator of the pashm trade whereas the Rupshu gowa’s
power derived from operationalizing the pashm trade by exercising an effective physical occupa-
tion of the land, which was eternally vulnerable to the neighbor’s invasions (see Rizvi 1999).
Changthang, in this way, depicted a kind of “duality of power patterning” (Whitten 1984)
where two different, yet interlinked, power spheres existed side by side in the precolonial times
(see also Srinivas 1998). Thus, one can say that the precolonial times characterized Changthang
frontier to be a place defined more by deference and distance rather than by domination and
resistance (see also Pirie 2006) where Changpa pastoralists were in a position to set limits to the
ruler’s ability to freely access the frontier resources.
51
Alka Sabharwal
Trade Expansion, Res and Resistance, and the Civil Hunting

Practices: The Colonial Period
From the year 1841, the onset of the colonial rule in Ladakh not only redefined Changthang
into a renewed frontier of pashm extraction through the Treaty of Leh in 1842 and Amritsar in
1846 but also opened it to the new commercial traders having entitlements to the Changpa’s
obligatory transport, indicating how trajectories of extraction and control moved hand-in-hand
during this time. However, such frontier interactions do not live up to the historical inquiry
that establishes the Dogra and British colonists trying to exercise friendly administrative control
of the Changthang frontier.
With frontier expansion to be at the center of the colonial rule, it is well-known that the
Dogra rulers who incorporated Ladakh into the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir had also
decided to continue with the customary lo-phyang tributes to Tibet, albeit keeping a low politi-
cal profile (Bray 2018). Captain W.F. O’Connor writes in 1904 that:
Lopchak [lo-phyang] mission has now (whatever may have been formerly) no political
significance. It is simply a commercial enterprise sanctioned by treaty and old cus-
toms, whereby certain officials and traders of both countries make large profits by the
exchange of commodities, carriage free between Leh and Lhasa.
(quoted in Bray 2018: 71)
Drew (1875) witnessed that Rupshu as a result had become the prominent trade route in those
times, especially for the Punjabi traders, making its way from the lower towns of British India.
The colonial government steadily introduced a system of res where a particular village or group-
ings of villages along the pashm trade routes became bound in taking turns to supply labor and
transport at fixed rates (Bray 2008). A rise in the number of private traders from places such as
Amritsar came to gainfully employ the Changpa and claimed to have benefited their pastoral
occupation (Drew 1875), but the system of res had also introduced labor exploitation. It is said
that before Changthang could be pacified, begar also had become a resentful duty amongst
Ladakhis and led to, if not out-migration or appeals to higher authorities, then to the covert
strategies of resistance such as “sabotage, deception or refusal to understand instructions, feign-
ing to be sick, community withdrawal, tough bargaining and work stoppage” (Bray 2008: 64).
It is important to note that begar presumably was also a less crucial aspect to colonial finances
in comparison to much sought-after pashm taxes, as British officers made consistent efforts to
abolish the practice by calling it unfair and exploitative (Rizvi 1999: 65; see also Nugent 2019).
Therefore, contrary to what Scott’s (1998) reading might suggest, the power of the colonial state
in Changthang could not be absolute during these times. Rather than removal or pacification of
the native population, the colonial state preferred to make labor arrangements with their sub-
jects and used the tools of negotiations to exercise its authority. For instance, Changpa provided
labor in rearing the livestock of the Maharaja of Kashmir on their pastures but it is also argued
that as part of the mutual arrangement they benefited by owning all the offspring born to the
royal stock (Rizvi 1999: Personal communication 1994, 2009). Similarly, it is well documented
historically that providing autonomy to the chieftains had been a deliberate colonial policy for
Northwestern British India as it facilitated effective colonial governance of far-flung regions
(Bodley1990).
However, not all went unchallenged in the relationship between the colonists and the
Changpa pastoralists. British administrators in their travelogues reiterated in different ways that
Changpa people were somehow below the civilizational threshold as they had yet to learn a
52
sedentary lifestyle (Drew 1875: 212; see also Jina 2002: 59). This was established by creating the
usual frontier myths of Rupshu being an uninhabited and underpopulated part of Ladakh, wait-
ing to be put into production and then civilized (Drew 1875: 286–289). Known as a “personal
adaptive strategy” (Little 2001: 219) of the Britishers where they occupied the civilizational top
while keeping indigenous people at the lowest order, to be considered as creatures of “nature”
requiring help to be domesticated and incorporated into the expanding society (see Lopez
1986: 108). The colonial politics of culture and civility became more apparent with the intro-
duction of Kashmir Game Preservation Department (KGPD) projecting British men as better
game hunters then Changpa pastoralists. For instance, it was claimed that British hunters would
give their quarry a fairer chance of escape by dispatching it with a “clean shot” (Rangarajan
2001: 48), whereas the “native” hunter have engaged in slaughter and butchery by driving the
game into a trench along with their dogs. Hussain quotes Stone’s (1896) documentation of the
colonial hunting practices in Ladakh:
In severe winters, when the snowfall is heavy and animals cannot escape, they are sur-
rounded by gangs of villagers, driven into deep snow, and then clubbed to death; a
few years ago, when there was an unusually severe winter, the slaughter was immense.
(Hussain 2010: 120)
Thus KGPD failed to portray Changpa’s hunting practices as sustainable or as legitimate tradi-
tional practices. The monopoly over the game hunt was also justified through a tainted code of
conduct advocating “fairness in hunting” while hiding the masculine principle of “mastery over
nature” of the colonists (Hussain 2010: 113).
Colonial period in Changthang thus reflected a commercial expansion of the pashmina trade
by breaking the pashm monopoly of the Ladakh kings, and by characterizing the Changthang
frontier as being available for private traders. However, rather than involving the removal or
extermination of the native population, the hybrid combinations of frontiers of control and
extraction were often dependent on the continued presence of “active engagement” between
the colonial state and the Changpa pastoralists (see Pirie 2006: 78). The local resistance to the
encapsulation by the colonists did not last long, and the larger stakes in pashm gave way to regu-
lar albeit incomplete administrative control. Therefore, the issue of agency and accountability is
rather a complex one and defies broad generalizations for Changthang in this period. Becoming
a frontier of conservation further complicated the frontier dynamics as the government inter-
vened to preserve civil hunting practices of the colonist and not that of the Changpa.
“Politics of Nationalization of Space” and State Development

Agenda: The Postcolonial Period
With the British colonists eventually leaving India in 1947, the colonial Dogra rulers ceded
Ladakh to the new Indian state.9 This event marked a distinctive moment in the history of
Changthang. With the inclusion of Ladakh in a nation-state and a subsequent closure of the
borders with Tibet, the monarchs and nobles were replaced by the Indian state and Changthang
in due course experienced a vast deployment of military on its pastures and lakesides. After
the war between India and China in 1962, it was not only the “paramountcy” of the military
for the spatial control10 that relegated the leadership role of Rupshu gowa but it was also the
Indian nation’s sovereign desire to control its disputed territory in Changthang. Therefore,
despite a ripened possibility to close the frontier after the demise of the cross-border pashm
trade, the state’s skepticism in continuing with the traditional Rupshu gowa institutions and the
53
Alka Sabharwal
onset of unfriendly development policies (see Baruah 2003) led to a large scale out-migration
of Changpa pastoralists from their homes, continuing thereby the nourishment of the frontier
dynamics. Formation of these “living borders” (Little 2001: 106) thus re-inscribed a new rela-
tionship between the Changpa pastoralists and the modern nation largely influenced by the two
state projects, that is, nationalizing space and an ill-fitted development model.
In order to “nationalize” or homogenize the political practice (Baruah 2003), the Jammu
and Kashmir governments insisted on routine uniform practices in the hope of generating core
areas of body politic in Changthang. The inherent idea of such nationalization process was to
consolidate central powers in Changthang and gradually incorporate Changpa leadership into
the national politics. It was after 1962 when the centralized election system compelled the
locally accountable juridicial systems of Rupshu gowa to give way to a new democratic system.
Diffusing of such national institutions on the borders is also seen as intended to act as a surveil-
lance tool to dissuade enemy state (see Little 2001). However, with no precedence of the new
nationalized institutions in the local tradition, Changpa were caught up in using their more
familiar gaming practice of chollo11 or throw of the dice to fulfill the need to elect their local
headman, that is, gowa. The ex-gowa Angchuk in 2009 shared with me how the new system
makes them circle the government offices in Nyoma and Leh, much more than what they are
actually required to do, that is, an active participation in pastoral decision making and conflict
resolutions. Guha (1999) believes that Tibetan Refugee settlements in Changthang after 1959
show similarities to the strategic settlement of the Punjab farmers in the Northeastern states.
Goodall (2007) in her field-based research on out-migration of Changpa pastoralists concludes
that new settlements of Tibetan Refugees in Rupshu prompted the process of “integrated dis-
placement” (Lopez 1986) for several Changpa families, in turn changing Changthang into new
national frontiers. Similarly, an increased border military deployment across the habitat of the
endemic wildlife species such as Tibetan gazelle and Black-necked crane (Fox et al. 1994) also
remained undetected for a long time. Endorsing national over the local priorities only meant
that the local government often acted like a “shadow state” where on the surface all the formal
democratic institutions were present in Changthang but the real decision making remained
non-local (Baruah 2003; see also Van Klinken 2002).
The state’s “developmentalist” model adopted by the Jammu and Kashmir government
believed in the idea of an infinite economic growth for Changthang. The state programs had
promoted the economic importance of pashmina goats to capitalize on the persisting demand of
raw pashm by the Kashmir shawl industry. Responding to government’s goat breed productivity
program however was an immense local challenge for Changpa as they had only reared sheep,
yaks and horses in the past. The rising goat numbers also gradually became a cause of concern
for the conservationists who argued its negative impact on the endemic Wild Ungulate popula-
tion in Changthang due to an increased competition on the pastures (Bhatnagar 2007; Fox et al.
1994). While government promoted nomadism through pashmina goat programs, it also dis-
couraged and even stigmatized Changpa’s mobile lifestyles through its other policies (Cameron
2006; personal communication 1994, 2009, 2010). The inherent contradictions among various
governmental policies reached an apex when the Jammu and Kashmir Wool board forbade
the export of pashmina hair outside the state and pushed Changpa pastoralists chase wool pay-
ments from one government department to another (Bhadauria 2015). Changpa people often
lamented how the government focused on goats when the local people had always been the
sheep breeders, and in doing so, how the government actually bypassed Changpa cultural and
traditional practices (Ahmad 2002).
As a result, the government policy promotion of goat rearing had introduced a very high
livestock mortality rate, especially during the cyclic winter snowstorms, increasing Changpa’s
54
economic vulnerabilities. An introduction of mandatory inner-line area regulations on these

national borders further restricted Changpa access to coveted pasturelands and encouraged new
trends of distressed out-migration for casual work such as portering, road construction, menial
jobs in the hotels, and military outposts. However, by the 1980s it became difficult the world
over to justify the dire control and extraction of the lands and lives of the marginalized people
as principles of sustainability and citizens’ participation took centerstage. For Changthang, such
a shift arrived in the form of a notification of about 4000 km2 of Changthang into a wildlife
sanctuary under the Indian Wildlife Act. Such new reformist state agenda for Changthang also
coincided with the declaration of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Council in 1995, signaling a
hope that oppressive frontier politics could not continue in an untrammeled manner in the years
to come.
Greening of Changthang Frontier: BCRLIP, Military

Environmentalism, and the Home Stays
By moving away from the economic model based on pashmina goat rearing, the new ecological
agenda by the state expected Changpa pastoralists to adopt a new role of being environmental
guardians, balancing their livelihood needs with the prerequisites of wildlife conservation. In
contrast to the conventional human – free conservation, the implementation of a more enlight-
ened World Bank sponsored the Biodiversity Conservation and Livelihood Improvement Pro-
ject (BCRLIP) aimed to build local capacities to strive for state accountability and ultimately
help pacify the region’s frontier politics. However, on the grounds, such a reformist ecological
agenda failed to initiate a noticeable shift in the social and political relations for the Changpa
pastoralists.
The new utilitarian principles of conservation embedded in the Biodiversity Conservation
and Livelihood Improvement Project (BCRLIP) assumed that the role of environmental guardi-
anship could transpire a balance between the Changpa livelihoods and the wildlife conserva-
tion in Changthang. The project believed that the repositories of practical knowledge instilled
within the Changpa culture could be used to operationalize environmentally friendly suste-
nance such as Home Stays (Anand, Chandan and Singh 2012). Home Stays, which have also
been otherwise termed as “unsuccessful development alternatives” (Dove 1993), promote a way
of life characterized by “limited material needs and desires,” in which increased production and
prosperity are apparently low priority (Li 2003). To pursue such a livelihood-conservation bal-
ance schema, a particular local imagery of Changthang was foregrounded that has aligned well
with Changpa’s (limited) income needs and traditional lifestyles. During my fieldwork, it was
quite evident how the local tour operators themselves wanted to market Changthang tourism
experiences as those of pristine “primitive culture” overlapping with ancient tales of “nomadic
adventure.” At least the local elite in Korzok knew that the conservationist’s imagery of simple
“natural” people makes Changpa eligible beneficiaries of Home Stays, therefore the imagery
was often propagated through cultural and religious performances by wearing traditional dresses
or being photographed with pashmina goats. Such valorization of Changpa pastoralist’s culture
or a stress of reformist ecological agenda on tradition, subsistence, or sustainability only ended
up implying that for Changpa “marginality is an elected way of life” (see also Li 2003: 271).
Similar to Tsing’s (2005) observation, the onset of resource conservation policies also
attempted to transform Changthang into a salvage frontier. In Changthang one could witness
how the destruction and salvation of resources became gradually mixed up with care and con-
servation, conveniently overlapped with the continual damage to wildlife habitats. By 2009, the
final notification of Changthang as a wildlife sanctuary also coincided with the need to expand
55
Alka Sabharwal
and upgrade the border road networks. While sidelining the endemic ecological value of the
cold desert wildlife habitat, the Ministry of Environment and Forest took a decision to allow
border road construction inside the sanctuary. The irreconcilability of a wildlife sanctuary on a
disputed border further evolved into a systematic inclusion of nature conservation in the official
mandate of the border military forces too. The green gesture or “good will gesture” (Aggarwal
and Bhan 2009) by the stationed military although reflected an eclectic context where the
disparate elements such as military and environmentalism, already riven with tensions and
unwieldiness, come together to improve the frontier conditions. Military’s plantation drives of
fast-growing trees, helicopter sorties for wildlife census, wetland protection, and so on, pre-
sented the armed forces as virtuous allies in the struggle to halt resource exploitation (Times of
India 2014). The military’s apparent role in protecting the Changthang ecology helped further
justify the inner-line restrictions on the local Changpa movements despite the inner-line policy
overriding the sanctuary rules and regulations (Chandan et al. 2007). Similar to Kalimantan, the
military’s environmental programs showcased how the care and conservation could conveni-
ently co-exist with new helipads, sentry posts, and trenches in and around the wildlife sanctuary
(Gurung 2019).
There are also glaring illustrations across Changthang where state-espoused environmental-
ism has also degenerated into a strategy of local displacement in a usual frontier mold. While
Jammu and Kashmir Department of Wildlife Protection has erected a concrete lockable fence
inside the sanctuary restricting the pasture access for Changpa on conservation grounds, a mili-
tary post in the same location continues to expand its premise along the endangered avifaunal
habitat with no conservation sanctions (see also Bhan and Trisal 2017). The civil administration
consistently justifies the expansion of military’s premise by giving a reference to the looming
Chinese threat, and thus ignoring the increasing marginalization of the local Changpa pastoral-
ists on their own traditional ancestral land. Given such unevenness of the enforcement of the
Protected Area laws, for Changpa the new ecological paradigm does not make all that much of
a difference, except that it has further intensified the familiar frontier exploitation while trivial-
izing the conservation aims.
Therefore, rather than an expected taming of the frontier, the rise of ecological paradigm
in Changthang appears to have come to merely add an “environmental twist” in the existing
frontier politics. The frontier continuities are visible in the form of a new kind of extraction
and control turning Changthang almost into a “salvage frontier” where extraction, settlement,
and conservation co-exist (see Tsing 2005). The reformist ecological agenda expected to raise
Changpa’s chances to successfully assert themselves in local conflicts, yet the balance of power
of the Changthang frontier seems to show a different picture. Greening of frontier politics
represent continuity instead of change in frontier politics, as unequal social relations between
the Changpa pastoralists and the outsiders remains integral to the current frontier expansion of
Changthang.
Notes
1 The animal-hair fiber forming the undercoat of the special breed of Changthangi goats.
2 Geiger reiterates this definition on page 99 of the same work, and also provides the more succinct gloss
“frontiers are loosely-administered spaces rich in resources, coveted by non-residents” (Geiger 2008:
78). He acknowledges that his definition derives from the fuller specification of Hvalkof (2008) in an
essay later in the same volume.
3 Bray (2018: 45–46) writes “Ladakhi kings fought a series of wars on their eastern front in 1636 and
1642 and how “King Sengge Namgyal (Seng ge rnam rgyal, r. 1616–1642) repulsed invasions of Guge
by the Mongol leaders Chokur and Gushri Khan (Petech 1977: 46–47).” In this way, Changthang was
56
at the center of Ladakh and Tibetan historical wars, where in 1671 (before the Treaty of Tenmisgong),
Ladakh had lost major part of western Tibet to the Tibetan rulers (Bray 2008). Also, Changthang was a
well-known place for facing depredation by the bandits which seems to have precluded for instance the
wealthy merchants to embarking on the trade journeys (Rizvi 1999: 175). Similarly, the technical and
political challenges of boundary demarcation created sources of confusion about the precise location of
boundary markers and how they still continue to persist in contemporary maps (see Bray 2018).
4 The Rupshu legends also have it that Tsering Tashi Namgyal, the ancestral Rupshu gowa, had astounded
the Ladakhi monarchs about four centuries ago by his might and immense physical strength. Discern-
ing him fit, the Ladakh rulers had invited Namgyal to be his living defense against the Tibetan powers
and had handed him large tracts of Rupshu land.
5 In 1677, “Ladakh took Bhutan’s side in a further war against Tibet. The consequence was that Tibetan
army invaded Ladakh, defeated Delegs Namgyal and forced him to cede territories of Guge, Rudok
and Purang (now located in the Ngari prefecture of the Tibetan autonomous region of China) in
Western Tibet to the Dalai Lama under the terms of the Treaty of Temisgang in 1684” (Bray 2008).
6 Obligatory labor in Ladakh is understood as of “communal benefit, for example the repair of roads,
bridges and temples, as well as carriage of goods for senior political and religious figures” (Bray 2008: 41).
7 Lo- year; phyang- salutation -The official triennial mission of tribute and respect from Ladakh to the
Dalai Lama’s government at Lhasa. Lophyang was an important vehicle of trade and diplomatic com-
munications between Ladakh and Tibet (Rizvi 1999; Bray 2018).
8 At times, scholars have also argued that Changpa pastoralists in the Rupshu region did not directly
operate pashm trade but had remained subsidiary to Ladakh-Tibet pashm trade.
9 At the time of India’s partition in 1947, “princely States in India were given the option to affiliate
with one nation or the other. Due to variety of factors, the Maharajah of Kashmir signed the Instru-
ment of accession, whereby Ladakh and the rest of Jammu and Kashmir came under the jurisdiction of
India” (Aggarwal and Bhan 2009: 521) as a temporary political arrangement. However, the provisional
instrument of accession enshrined in the Article 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution providing an
autonomous status to the Jammu and Kashmir state was abruptly abrogated on August 5, 2019, while
separating Ladakh region from the State of Jammu and Kashmir.
10 Also see Bhan (2014) and Visweswaran (2013)
11 A local gambling board game.
Works Cited
Aggarwal, Ravina. 2004. Beyond Lines of Control: Performances and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh,
India. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Aggarwal, Ravina and Mona Bhan. 2009. “Disarming Violence: Development, Democracy, and Security
on the Borders of India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 68(2): 519–542.
Ahmed, M. 2002. Living Fabric: Weaving Among the Nomads of Ladakh Himalaya. Bangkok: Orchid Press.
Anand, A., P. Chandan, and R. B. Singh. 2012, “Home Stays at Korzok: Supplementing Rural Liveli-
hoods Supporting Green Tourism in the Indian Himalayas.” Mountain Research and Development 32(2):
126–136.
Baruah, S. 2003. “Nationalising Space: Cosmetic Federalism and the Politics of Development in Northeast
India.” Development and Change 34(5): 915–939.
Bhadauria, S. S. 2015. “Changthang to Srinagar: The Pashmina Trade.” New Man International Journal of
Multidisciplinary Studies 2(4).
Bhan, Mona. 2008. “Border Practices: Labour and Nationalism Among Brogpas of Ladakh.” Contemporary
South Asia 16(2): 139–157.
Bhan Mona. 2014. Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity in India: From Warfare to Welfare?
London and New York, NY: Routledge.
insurgency in India-controlled Kashmir.” Critique of Anthropology 37(1): 67–92.
Bhatnagar, Y. 2007. “Perceived Conflicts Between Pastoralism and Conservation of the Kiang Equus kiang
in the Ladakh Trans-Himalaya, India.” Environmental Management 38(6): 934–961.
Bodley, John. 1990. Victims of Progress. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company.
Bray, John. 2008. “Corvee Transport Labour in 19th and Early 20th Century Ladakh: A Study in Con-
tinuity and Change.” In Modern Ladakh: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuity and Change, edited by
Martijn van Beek and Fernanda Pirie, 43–66. Leiden: Brill.
57
Alka Sabharwal
Bray, J. 2018. “Ladakh’s Lopchak Missions to Lhasa: Gift Exchange, Diplomatic Ritua, and the Politics of
Ambiguity.” In Commerce and Communities: Social Status and the Exchange of Goods in Tibetan Societies,
edited by Jeannine Bischoff and Alice Travers, 43–90. France: Centre De recherché sur les civilsations
de I’Asie orientale & Universitat Bonn.
Bryant, Raymond L. 2001. “Minding Frontiers or Frontiers of the Mind? Burmese and Philippine Explo-
rations.” IIAS Newsletter 24: 10–11.
Cameron, D. 2006. Imagining Backwardness: The Impact of Formal Education on the Chang-pa nomads of Ladakh.
SIT Tibetan & Himalayan Studies, June 24, 2012. http://kellogg.nd.edu/ford/newsevents/hdc2010/
cameron.shtml.
Chandan, P., A. Chatterjee, and P. Gautam. 2007. Management Planning of Himalayan High Altitude Wetlands.
A Case Study of Tsomoriri and Tsokar Wetlands in Ladakh, India, WWF-India.
Cons, Jason and Romola Sanyal. 2013. “Geographies at the Margins: Borders in South Asia – An Intro-
duction.” Political Geography 35: 5–13.
Dollfus, P. 2013. “Transformation Process in Nomadic Pastoralism in Ladakh.” Himalaya, The Journal of the
Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 32: 61–72.
Dove, M. R. 1993. “A Revisionist View of Tropical Deforestation and Development.” Environmental
Conservation 20(1): 17–25.
Dove, Michael, Marina Campos, Andrew Mathews, Laura Yoder, Anne Rademacher, Suk Rhee, and Dan-
iel Smith. 2003. “The Global Mobilization of Environmental Concepts: Re-Thinking the Western/
Non-Western Divide.” In Nature Across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-western
Cultures, edited by Helaine Selin and Arne Kalland, 19–46. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Drew, Frederic. 1875. The Jummoo and Kashmir Territories. New Delhi: Oriental Publishers.
Fewkes, J. H. 2009. Trade and Contemporary Society along the Silk Road: An Ethno-history of Ladakh. London:
Routledge.
Fox, J. L., Chering Nurbu, Seema Bhatt, and Alok Chandola. 1994. “Wildlife Conservation and Land-Use
Changes in the Transhimalayan Region of Ladakh, India.” Mountain Research and Development 14(1):
39–60.
Geiger, Danilo. 2008. “Turner in the Tropics: The Frontier Concept Revisited.” In Frontier Encounters:
Indigenous Communities and Settlers in Asia and Latin America (IWGIA Document No. 120), edited
by Danilo Geiger, 77–215. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Swiss
National Centre of Competence in Research North-South.
Goodall, S. K. 2007. “From Plateau to Urban Fringe: Sedentarization of Nomadic Peoples.” PhD thesis.
Adelaide: University of Adelaide.
Grist, Nicola. 1994. “The Use of Obligatory Labour for Porterage in Pre-independence Ladakh.”
In Tibetan Studies. Proceedings of the 6th Seminar of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, edited by
P. Kvaerne. Oslo: Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture.
Guha, R. 1999. Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin, His Tribals and India. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
Gurung, Shaurya Karanbir. 2019. “India Increases Troops, Patrolling along India-China Border.” Economic
Times, October 24. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/india-increases-troops-
patrolling-along-india-china-border/articleshow/71727552.cms?from=mdr.
dictional Contestation of Militarized Governance in Indian-Controlled Kashmir.” Social and Legal Stud-
ies 29(5): 650–678.
Hussain, Shafqat. 2010. “Sports-hunting, Fairness and Colonial Identity: Collaboration and Subversion in
the Northwestern Frontier Region of British Indian Empire.” Conservation and Society 8(2): 112–126.
Hvalkof, Sóren. 2008. “Colonization and Conflict on the Amazon Frontier: Dimensions of Interethnic
Relations in the Peruvian Montana.” In Frontier Encounters: Indigenous Communities and Settlers in Asia
and Latin America (IWGIA Document No. 120), edited by Danilo Geiger, 219–286. Copenhagen:
International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research
North South.
Jina, P. S. 2002. Development of Ladakh Himalayas. New Delhi: Kalpaz Publications.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2013. “Death and Life under Occupation: Space, Violence and Memory in Kash-
mir.” In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, edited by
K. Visweswaran, 158–190. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Li, Tania. 2003. “Engaging Simplifications: Community-Based Resource Management, Market Processes
and State Agendas in Upland Southeast Asia.” World Development 30(2): 265–283.
58
Little, Paul. 2001. Amazonia: Territorial struggles on Perennial Frontiers. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins
University Press.
Lopez, Maria. 1986. “The Palawan: Land, Ethnic relations and Political Process in a Philippine Frontier
System.” PhD thesis. Cambridge: Harvard University.
Mathur, Shubh. 2014. “Memory and Hope: New perspectives on the Kashmir Conflict – An Introduc-
tion.” Race and Class 56(2): 4–12.
Nugent, Paul. 2019. Boundaries, Communities and State Making in West Africa: The Centrality of the Margins.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Petech, Luciano. 1977. The Kingdom of Ladakh: c. 950–1842 A.D. Rome: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed
Estremo Oriente.
Pirie, Fernanda. 2006. “Legal Autonomy as Political Engagement: The Ladakhi Village in the Wider
World.” Law and Society Review 40(1).
Rangarajan, Mahesh. 2001. India’s Wildlife History. New Delhi: Permanent Black.
Rizvi, Janet. 1999. Trans-Himalayan Caravans: Merchant Princes and Peasant Traders in Ladakh. New Delhi:
Oxford University of Press.
Scott, J. C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Sheikh, A. G. 1999. “Economic Conditions in Ladakh During the Dogra Period.” In Ladakh: Culture, His-
tory and Development between Himalaya and Karakoram, edited by MartijnVan Beek, K. B. Berielsen, and
Poul Pedersen, 339–349. Oxford: Aarhus University Press.
Srinivas, Smriti. 1998. The Mouths of People, the Voice of God: Muslims and Buddhists in a Frontier Community
of Ladakh. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Stone, J. S. 1896. In and Beyond the Himalayas: A Record of Sport and Travel in the Abode of Snow. London:
Edward Arnold.
Times of India. 2014. “Army Initiates Green Drive in Ladakh.” May 8. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.
com/india/Army-initiates%20green-drive-in-Ladakh/articleshow/34836878.cms.
Turner, Frederick J. 1994. “The Significance of the Frontier in American history.” In Rereading Frederick
Jackson Turner, edited by John Mack Faragher, 31–60. New York: Henry Holt.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Van Beek, Martijn and Fernanda Pirie 2008. “Introduction.” In Modern Ladakh: Anthropological Perspectives
on Continuity and Change, edited by Martijn van Beek and Fernanda Pirie, 1–29. Leiden: Brill.
Van Klinken, G. 2002. “Indonesia’s New Ethnic Elites.” In Indonesia: In Search of Transition, edited by Henk
Schulte Nordholt and Irwan Abdulla, 67–105. Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar.
Visweswaran Kamala. 2013. “Geographies of Everyday Occupation. In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing
Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, edited by Kamala Visweswaran, 1–28. Philadelphia: Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania Press.
Vogel, Birtie and Jessica Field. 2020. “(Re)constructing Borders through Governance and Trade in Ladakh,
India.” Political Geography 82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102226.
Whitten, Norman. 1984. “Toward a Conceptualization of Power in Amazonian Ecuador.” In The Prospects
of Plural Societies: Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, edited by Stuart Plattner and David
Maybury-Lewis, 49–63. Washington, DC: American Ethnological Society.
59
4
KASHMIRI SIKH WOMEN
AND THEIR EXPERIENCES
WITH CONFLICT
Making Space for Sikh Women in Kashmiri Discourses

The rays of the sun momentarily lit up Geet Kaur’s melancholy face as she recalled the fateful
night her 35-year-old husband – along with 34 other Sikh men – was gunned down by armed
assailants in Chittisinghpora, the largest of the 14 Sikh villages located in the Anantnag (or
Islamabad) district of South Kashmir.1
Unbeknownst to anyone, the assailants entered the village at 7:30 pm on March 20, 2000,
as the day’s religious services were being concluded at the two main gurdwaras, Gurdwara
Samundri Hall and Gurdwara Shaheed Niwas, located just meters across from each other. As
the congregants left the gurdwara premises, the “commanding officer” of these gunmen – who
everyone recalls as wearing a military uniform – announced a Cordon and Search Operation
(CASO).2 On the pretext of checking their identity cards, they lined up 18 men in front of
each gurdwara and assured them they would be let go, only to shoot them dead moments
later. No one knows who perpetrated the kaand3 but almost everyone wants to believe it was
the handiwork of Indian state “agencies”4 intended to project to then American President
Bill Clinton, who was visiting India on that very day, the “Islamic extremism” problem in
Kashmir5 – a Muslim-majority region in the Indian Union – and that in the Valley,6 minorities
were unsafe.7
Geet broke down almost instantly as she recalled those moments, her heartache still fresh
from 20 years ago. “Upon hearing gunshots, my brother-in-law rushed to the scene. They
told me that he had been shot, his legs had been shot, and he’d been taken to the hospital.
They knew he was dead, that he had died.”8 But no one had the heart to tell her this. In tears,
she asked whoever cared to listen, “He isn’t home yet, where is he?” Her brother-in-law kept
repeating what he had told her already, that her husband had been shot, and he had been taken
to the hospital and would be back by morning. Night turned into day, but her husband was
still not home.
At around 4am in the morning, they asked me to come see for myself what happened.
Little did I know what I was going to witness. There was just a pile of bodies laden
with gunshots and left for dead – goliyan maar ke te sutt gaye.
60 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-6
Kashmiri Sikh Women
An uncomfortable silence followed, punctuated only by Geet’s sobs, her petite frame against
the wooden window in her living room and the faded salmon-pink paint on its walls painting a
portrait of grief that Kashmiris are all too familiar with.
Geet Kaur’s story is the story of thousands of Kashmiri women who have in its long struggle
for “azaadi” (freedom) borne irreparable losses, of partners, children, homes, and above all their
dignity and rights. Where both the warring states of India and Pakistan have routinely glossed
over the impacts of this unending conflict on Kashmiri lives, critical scholarship on Kashmir
has done an excellent job of refocusing attention from statist narratives to people’s experiences
living with violence: documenting historical events, critiquing Kashmir’s armed occupation by
India, recording deaths, disappearances, and everyday injustices, and retrieving oral histories of
times past and present.
Kashmiri women’s stories, which have long remained an important lacuna in our under-
standing of their experiences vis-à-vis this conflict, written by Kashmiri women scholars, have
lately been brought to the forefront of scholarship in Critical Kashmir Studies. Although wars
may be “fought by men, with and against other men, towards the achievement of male-defined
purposes and ends” (Sangra 2018: 29), it is often women who are left to deal with the fallout.
As equal stakeholders, Kashmiri women have confronted the dually oppressive forces of mas-
culinity and militarism, forcing us to rethink “narratives and impacts of occupation” (Kaul and
Zia 2018: 33), while holding together “the last vestiges of community” (33), as they watch their
men disappear, die, or be imprisoned. Yet, while the focus on Kashmiri women’s experiences in
this scholarship has enabled them to begin reclaiming their rightful positions in history, its scope
remains limited to Kashmiri Muslim (and to some extent Hindu) women.
Although Chittisinghpora earned its fair share of attention in the media, there has been surpris-
ingly little academic engagement with this horrific event. Media narratives revolving around the
massacre, and Sikhs in general, focus on the Sikh “plight” in Kashmir, their demands for a minority
status and their desire for an impartial inquiry into Chittisinghpora to identify and punish the per-
petrators; other stories importantly highlight, but remain limited to, Sikh-Muslim co-existence.9
Stories of Kashmiri Sikhs, especially Sikh women who have gone on living with conflict and who
in the everyday shoulder its implications, are astonishingly absent from these discourses.
In this chapter, I attempt to begin addressing this gap by retrieving the unheard stories of
Kashmir’s Sikh women, tucked away for long in the vestiges of its geographic and historical
memory. By recovering these stories, my aim is not only to prevent the erasure of Sikh women’s
struggles and challenge the passivity to which their experiences and their lives are relegated, but
to “foreground” them as “political experiences” with which they navigate their social positions
in conflict (Kaur 2000).
Engaging with the stories of two groups of women – the widows who lived through the
violence and the young women who bear its generational aftermath – I show how the blurring
of the “home-outside binary” in a militarized Kashmir, where conflict has pervaded the combat
ground to enter the safe spaces of people’s homes (Mushtaq 2018: 54), genders their experiences
in diametrically opposite ways. While young Kashmiri Sikh women are encouraged to become
more visible through dress or participation in religious practices, the women widowed in Chit-
tisinghpora find themselves invisibilized in the massacre’s aftermath. Rather than their experi-
ences, what produces and reproduces Chittisinghpora in the public imagination are carefully
preserved narratives of ambiguity surrounding the perpetrators, and the shaheedi (martyrdom)
of the massacred Sikhs.
Although a much needed and welcome departure from the male centrism that has come
to define the Khalsa, the underlying patriarchal practices and sometimes Islamophobic
61
discourses – especially those on intermarriage – accompanying young women’s increased par-

ticipation in Sikhism continue to reproduce the masculinity of the Khalsa and do little to return
agency to Sikh women.10 Ultimately, as Mahmood describes in her seminal study of Muslim
women’s piety movement in Egypt, they ensure that women’s subordination to male authority
remains the key condition for their participation in “male-defined spaces” (Mahmood 2011).
Placing the Sikhs in Kashmir

Scattered across all ten districts, the approximately 60,000 Sikhs of the Valley (a mere 2 percent
of Jammu and Kashmir’s population), have lived peacefully in Kashmir for generations11 and
consider themselves “equal stakeholders” in the region. As one Sikh gentleman pointedly told
me on the question of Sikh belonging, that having witnessed all its trials and tribulations, any
decisions of Kashmir’s future would not be made without taking Sikh (and Hindu) interests into
consideration.
Known as shaheedan da pind (village of the martyred), Chittisinghpora is settled by nearly
400 Sikh and 80 to 100 Muslim families living in close geographic proximity and connected by
strong economic but sparse social ties. Never before the target of violence in all the years of the
militancy, the attack came as a shock to both Sikhs and Muslims alike. Although the question of
migration, the subject of my larger inquiry, did arise in the days after the massacre, the bulk of
the community ended up staying.12 In almost all interviews, respondents from Chittisinghpora
and other villages alluded to the fact that while the community wanted to migrate en masse, Sikh
“leaders” decided after talks with central government ministers that migration would not be in
the best interest of the community. Some allege corruption, and express regret, complaining
that had they too migrated at the time, they would also have received jobs, homes, and other
benefits “like the Pandits.” Others say that it was simply too much to think about, they had
nowhere else to go, or lands they could not leave behind and were too attached to.
In the days after the massacre, Geet told me, “Keda keher peya kuch nahin pata” (the turbulence
that came I cannot know), as she described the chaos that followed. Deepa Kaur, whose hus-
band was himself a retired fauji (officer), says, “Halat saddi ki si? Jis tarah o mar gai si, asi vi mare
de saan. Tin saal tak sanu sojh ni si ki bahar horeya hai, ki ni horeya hai” (What was our condition?
We were dead too, just like they were. For three years, we didn’t know what was or wasn’t hap-
pening outside).13
More than 1000 people poured in to attend the cremations the day after the kaand (BBC
News 2000). Prominent political leaders from the BJP, Shiromani Akal Dal (SAD), Congress
(I), and Kashmir’s National Conference (NC) party too, visited the village promising fair and
impartial inquiries. The same day, Indian security forces apprehended one Mohammad Yaqoob
Wagay14 from Chittisinghpora, whom they suspected of being involved with the perpetrators
hiding in the forests of Panchalthan village and a day later, India’s national security adviser
officially blamed the massacre on the “Pakistan backed” terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba15 with
Pakistan in return blaming the Indian Army. Five days later, on March 25, 2000, Indian forces
reported killing the Chittisinghpora perpetrators in the forests of Panchalthan village, but as
inquiries later revealed, these were not “Pakistani terrorists” but rather Kashmiri locals from
the Gujjar community who were picked up from nearby villages and killed by Indian forces.16
The Kashmir conflict, wrote reporter Barry Bearak, “has a way of boiling truth into vapor.
Every fact is contested, every confession suspect, every alliance a prelude to some sort of
betrayal” (Bearak 2000). In the months that followed, the Chittisinghpora story, too, became
complicated by a web of contradictions, which still remain unresolved, with affected families
fighting with little hope of any justice. Not knowing who perpetrated the massacre or why
62
Kashmiri Sikh Women
creates a situation of deliberate ambiguity and naturally makes the Sikhs fear for their safety.
Despite this, the Sikh position on the ongoing conflict has been one of “neutrality,” necessary
for ensuring the community’s survival in Kashmir. That is, they typically speak neither against
the militants nor the Indian state.
Describing the situation of Asians who remained in Idi Amin’s Uganda when the majority
were exiled between 1972 and 1979, Hundle (2013: 166) writes,
Visible and vulnerable, Indians could become “big men” within specialized economic
niches; or conversely, fairly powerless and dependent. They were visible in times of
relative security and necessity; and at other moments, in hiding, exile, or confinement.
Thus, Indian presence during the 1970s can be described as tenacious and imperiled.
Because the majority are substantially landed, owning anywhere from 10 to 180 kanals of agri-
cultural land not including orchards, Kashmiri Sikhs too can wield significant economic power
in Sikh-Muslim transactions, but can also be simultaneously powerless, given their small num-
bers and lack of any significant political power. Describing this precarity of Sikh existence,
62-year-old Nanak Singh (real name), the sole survivor of the massacre, lamented that “no one
can do anything. The militants will say the government did it, the government will say the mili-
tants did it. We are scapegoats.”17 Expressing his frustrations at the lack of an impartial inquiry
even two decades later, he added that at this time, the Kashmiri Sikh is helpless. “Whenever
they need us, they will sacrifice us,” implying that for either side, Sikhs are disposable pawns in
this ongoing battle.
A Militarized Pind
It was this precariousness of the Sikhs that led to the transformation of Chittisinghpora and
other minority villages into militarized spaces with military and paramilitary forces stationed
inside them for protection. According to then Director General of Police Gurbachan Jagat,
pickets were installed in 115 villages where Sikh families resided, which are to this day manned
by a combination of JK Police and CRPF (Rediff 2000).
In Chittisinghpora, there are three paramilitary posts inside the village. The first, a Central
Reserve Police Force (CRPF) post, directly overlooks Nanak Singh’s home and the second (also
CRPF) is at the back entrance of Gurdwara Samundri Hall, the gates to which were locked, and
can be seen from a primary health center located in the premises.18 One part of the gurdwara,
behind the façade of what was once a Khalsa (Sikh missionary) school, had been converted into
residential quarters for the paramilitary staff and was forbidden to civilians. Covered by olive
green tarps and barbed wire, the gurdwara’s sangat (attendees) and I could only see armed men
come and go through a small makeshift door in the ground. But we were always under their
gaze. The third post, deep inside the village in the premises of the third gurdwara, Baoli Sahib,
is manned by Jammu and Kashmir Police ( JKP).
Effectively transforming home into a frontier, Chittisinghpora’s militarization, a marker of
the massacre, also marked the women: both as wives of the “martyred” and as widows. Nain
Kaur and her sister-in-law Shanno were both married only a few years when they lost their
husbands on the night of the massacre. Their home directly overlooks the second massacre site,
Gurdwara Shaheed Niwas, a constant reminder of that ill-fated evening. An oversized bed filled
the room in which we sat down to talk, its only adornments being a faded Kashmiri carpet and a
photo of Nain’s husband on the wall. Her gentle voice betrayed her frustration, as she explained
that with their husbands, their apple orchards died too. When I asked if she contemplated selling
63
them, her frustration turned momentarily to anger and she replied forcefully, “Who (which
Muslim) will buy here in the middle of the Sikhs?”19
Nain and Shanno explained that the lands of the other widows also suffered the same fates,
as there was little time left to tend to them (the mostly Muslim labor no longer wanted to work
in the orchards), while fulfilling the added responsibility of working for an income (both tasks
left traditionally to men) and taking care of the children. Although aid came in the immediate
aftermath in the form of money from the government in Punjab, the only Sikh-majority state
in India that is considered their peka (maternal residence) by many Kashmiri Sikhs, Nain and
Shanno alleged that the money was laundered by “Sikh leaders” and after an initial sum, they
hardly received anything. Explaining their predicament, Nain said, “We were just young girls,
what did we know?” As I pressed her to describe what help they received from the local Sikhs,
Nain became angry as she described the alienation the widows faced at the hands of the village
sardars (a term meant to refer to the more powerful, and older, Sikh men in the village), stat-
ing forcefully that the sardars didn’t speak to them. When I asked why, she replied, “Randian
nu kaun puchda hai?” (Who cares about us widows?) Taken aback at her words, I asked her to
clarify what she meant. Somewhat uncomfortable, she replied, “Randi ohi, jida ghar wala nahin
honda. Phir kaun izzat karda hai unna di?” (Randi is one who doesn’t have a husband. Who
respects such women?). Nain’s use of the Hindi word randi, which means prostitute, is an abuse
in Punjabi, and reflects the lens of morality through which society continues to view widows
(Haripriya 2018). This view, not uncommon across India, signals society’s “anxieties about
widowed women slipping into prostitution” (268) and consequently its need to regulate their
sexuality. In her view, the widows became a liability, not worthy of others’ respect or engage-
ment, as the sardars’ behavior signified to her, even if their husbands were accorded the status of
martyrs in Sikh history.
At its 21st commemoration held on March 20, 2021, a renovated Gurdwara Samundri Hall
was inaugurated, with a museum in the works to give Chittisinghpora’s martyrs their rightful
place in history. Ten of the 35 widows who were in attendance sat huddled at the back of the
gurdwara in one corner, while village elders, the gurdwara gyani (head preacher) and members
of its governing committee (only some of whom had lost their loved ones in the massacre) took
center stage, making speeches and explaining to a lackadaisical crowd the urgency of preserving
this history. In the middle of the ceremony, a local media outlet arrived, taking these gentlemen
outside the prayer hall to make statements, which they do year after year with great enthusiasm.
Neither the men nor the media outlet invited the widows to speak, the only exception being
Nain who insisted that the world hear her story. The crowd that had gathered to hear the men
make their statements earlier thinned out, leaving Nain standing alone to speak, her nephew
and I the only ones standing by her side.
Replete with markers of their martyrdom, Chittisinghpora, like the “Widow’s Colony”
neighborhood in Delhi’s Tilak Vihar where women widowed in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom
were resettled (Arora 2017), continues to be produced and reproduced in public memory by
discourses of martyrdom around the massacre. The attention the massacre continues to receive,
although largely limited to local memory, has brought substantial transformation to the vil-
lage, “too much development” as some call it. Yet as was evident from the commemoration,
the struggles of the women – also devoutly Sikh – who continue living with its physical and
emotional scars in the everyday, remain abjectly missing from the massacre discourses. One
is forced ask why, despite their difficulties, the quam has failed to rally behind these women
to demand justice, unlike in other instances of anti-Sikh violence such as the 1984 Delhi
pogrom, which has unfortunately seen the widows themselves become the political project
(Arora 2017).
64
Kashmiri Sikh Women
Repairing Ruptures and Building Solidarities

Twenty-one years later as they still await justice, there is little speculation about who com-
mitted the massacre. Everyone, Muslim or Sikh, has accepted the pervasive narrative: that it
was the work of the Indian state, intended to communalize Sikh-Muslim relations and trigger
yet another minority’s mass exodus from Kashmir. Yet my questions about why were always
answered with, “Asi ki kahiye” (what can we say?) or “asi kuch ni kehe sakde” (we cannot say
anything).
Immediately after the massacre, the Sikhs believed that this was the work of “Pakistan backed
terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba.” But the narrative changed after visits from Sikh leaders, who
apparently convinced the people that it was in their interest to not point fingers at the militants
if they were to continue living in Kashmir. Of this “tactical ambivalence” Bearak (2000: 26)
writes,
But within days of the massacre, there had been a retreat from much of this finger-
pointing. Doubt was now emphasized. Maybe the killers had been militants, maybe
the army, maybe neither. This newly avowed uncertainty was a result of counsel from
some of India’s leading Sikhs. They believed that if their people were to stay in the
Kashmir Valley, good relations had to be maintained with the surrounding Muslim
majority, which – while exhausted by the endless violence – was largely sympathetic
to the militants.
What is the “truth” of the Chittisinghpora massacre? As Paul Brass (1997) shows in his ethnog-
raphy, there is never a “final” truth, but rather “multiple truths” that emerge from the study of
political violence in India. Asking why some events gain national prominence, while others do
not, he finds that those events that serve a political purpose achieve national prominence and are
“magnified, distorted, and manipulated for external use in wider political arenas” (ibid.: 178).
Although it may be true that Chittisinghpora, unlike the Pandit exodus, failed to gain “national
prominence” or at least sustained national prominence because the Sikhs are not a politically
expedient constituency in Kashmir, the limited attention has certainly facilitated control of the
narrative by Kashmiri Sikhs. This was necessary for survival, which as Bearak noted in his piece,
was the Sikhs’ most dire need at the time. For the Muslim community, too, the costs of living
with the exodus of yet another minority would be too high. Emotional appeals from Muslim
leaders such as Shabeer Shah, who said to Chittisinghpora’s Sikhs, “If you leave, you will do so
over our dead bodies,”20 perhaps belabor this point.
And so it was that in the days after the massacre, Sikh families continued to stay on while the
pind’s Kashmiri Muslim families, afraid of retaliation from the Sikhs and fearful of being picked
up by the Army (who they believed would blame them for the massacre), fled their homes.
Zakia, a middle-aged Muslim female remembered, “We were afraid of the Army; as you know
they don’t let you free unless you do as they say.”21 Arfa, her female neighbor, added that at the
time, Sikhs who came from outside were ready to burn down their homes. Returning home a
few months later to a tense atmosphere, Fatima, a twenty something Muslim female who runs
a local business, remembered her long-time Sikh neighbors being angry with her, “When we
came back, the Sikhs didn’t talk to us at all.”22 When I asked what it is like at present, Manzoor,
a 28-year-old Muslim entrepreneur responded with confidence that “aaj ka mahol jo hai, wo sabse
behtereen hai” (things are better than ever now).23
Although this behtereen mahol signifies that some reconciliation has taken place, the Sikh-
Muslim relationship still remains in flux. Raqib, a local shopkeeper, explained that at the time of
65
the massacre the Sikhs held militants responsible and “there was even an innocent guy (Wagay)
who was accused and jailed for 3 years. But later they regretted accusing him and the militants
for all this.”24 Raqib’s statement points to the distrust that not knowing the perpetrators creates
between the two communities. Living in close proximity in these circumstances makes them,
to borrow from Dhattiwala, “involuntary residents,”25 yet both acknowledge the necessity of
inter-communal solidarities for their survival in a context of pervasive violence. Nanak Singh
explained as much during our interview, “All the labor here is Muslim. We cannot live without
them and they cannot live without us.”26 Later Shahana, a lower-caste Muslim woman working
as a laborer in the Sikh fields begrudged this interdependence, angrily remarking when I asked
her what she thought of the Sikhs, “We cannot say anything about these Sikhs. We work in
their fields.”27
Inter-communal solidarities, as Dhattiwala (2019: 9) writes of the Hindu-Muslim conflict in
the mixed neighborhoods of Ahmedabad, are an important aspect of “the micro-mechanisms by
which ethnic groups facing the threat of violence survive in conflict situations” and belabor “the
tribulations of living together” in the face of it. Beyond their economic interdependence, there
exists a genuine recognition among both communities that diversity and difference are central
values “to be acknowledged and respected, not erased in the building of alliances” (Mohanty
2003: 7). The numerous Sikh and Muslim testimonies that I recorded made it clear that there
is little evidence of attacks on Sikh religious observances even during lockdowns. While there
is little commensality due to the religious rules governing the consumption of meat, it is also
accepted as a way of life to be respected.
As important as these alliances are in keeping Kashmir going despite violence, they are also
susceptible to breaking time and again, such as when young Sikh girls marry Muslim boys. How
this looming “threat” – and the underlying discourses accompanying it – becomes one of the
main reasons young women are mobilized in the Khalsa is examined in the next section.
Becoming Khalsa: Kashmir’s Young Sikhnis

Expecting violence to be central to discourses on everyday life, I was surprised that it was dis-
cussed sparingly by respondents. Rather, most respondents chose to focus on other grievances
in the Valley, including the limited economic opportunities for young Sikhs, alleged discrimina-
tion in favor of other communities for representation in government positions, lack of political
representation, the day-to-day inconveniences caused by frequent shutdowns and most impor-
tantly, the (perceived) threat of intermarriage between Sikh girls and Muslim boys.
Intermarriage, of which my respondents claimed that there are three or four cases every year,
was in fact such a pressing issue that Srinagar’s gurdwara committee leadership in May 2018
convened a meeting to address the problem of young Sikhs “excessively using their mobile
phones,”28 which according to them made young girls more vulnerable to “Islamic teachings.”
At this meeting, Sikh religious and political leaders discussed how youth can be “alternatively
engaged” to lessen this “exposure.” As I took notes, I was asked specifically to write that this
was an issue.
The next day, a 19-year-old undergraduate student Amritdhari Khalsa Sikh Amreek, who
I had met at the gurdwara earlier, wanted to speak privately about matters discussed at this
meeting. As we walked in the grounds of his university’s lush green campus, Amreek kept glanc-
ing over his shoulder while talking, making sure no one would overhear, and was somewhat
hesitant about being seen walking with a woman. Describing Sikh issues in the Valley, Amreek
said, “the biggest threat Sikhs face is from conversions. There is no danger otherwise.”29 Several
other respondents made similar remarks over interviews, such as 30-year-old dentist Veer Singh
66
Kashmiri Sikh Women
from Baramulla in North Kashmir, “Our biggest problem is (our) girls run away (to intermarry
and convert). O sanu kabool nahin” (that is not acceptable).30 When I asked Amreek how this
“problem” could be solved, he responded that regardless of the beards on their faces, “Kamzori
Sikhan de vich hai” (Sikhs had become weak from the inside). Because they are so few in number,
Amreek believed that “je Gurmat naal judan ge, taan” (if they join with Khalsa teachings), the
quam would become morally stronger and be less vulnerable to conversions. Indeed, the young
Sikh women whom I interviewed for this research too reiterate these ideas. They believe that
attaching themselves to institutions such as “Gurmat Vidyalas”31 is important to get the “right”
education.
Expressing her pride at wearing a dumala (turban), Ajuni, a 27-year-old dentist, was inspired
to do the Amrit (understood as baptismal) ceremony in college while attending religious gather-
ings led by a Kashmiri Sikh raagi (preacher who performs the singing of Sikh devotional hymns)
in Rajasthan. Describing herself as one of the first few women in Kashmir “jinne dumala sajaya”
(who wore the turban) and expressing pride at the respect it earned her from the Muslims,
Ajuni said, “I remember many Muslim shopkeepers appreciated my turban. They asked if it
was part of my religion. When I said yes, they said it’s so commendable.”32 Yet donning dumalas
(turbans) and kirpans brings ridicule and discrimination sometimes, as was Ajuni’s experience,
“I was at a wedding when an aunt asked me how long I intended to keep it, when I would
take it off ?” Ironically, Ajuni mentioned, her aunt’s concern was that it would be hard for her
to find a husband in this saroop (identity). Younger girls too spoke about bullying in school and
punishment from teachers and students alike but continued wearing it because they considered
themselves the “chosen” ones to carry forth its legacy. As two young teenagers who I met at
Gurdwara Bunga Sahib in Srinagar on another occasion explained to me, “E ta Guru Mahraj di
den hai” (this is a blessing the Guru has bestowed upon us).
Keerat Kaur, a 29-year-old Amritdhari woman completing her master’s in Political Science,
had attached herself to Gurmat teachings early on in life. Describing the love in her heart for
her ‘pita’ (father) Guru Gobind Singh, she explained,
I am thankful to Waheguru I was born in the Sikh faith, there is no comparison for
being Sikh. If I have to sacrifice myself for the faith, I will do it without any qualms.
I read the scripture, and I was with the Sikh Missionary college before marriage. To
tell you what I think honestly, I wish to radicalize all (the young people) and tell them
not to tolerate any insult to our religion.33
Keerat’s construction of herself as Guru Gobind’s daughter, and her willingness to sacrifice her-
self and “radicalize” all youngsters (by which she means setting them on the Khalsa path) in
defense of her faith, signifies the primacy which being Sikh assumes in these young women’s
lives, and through which they renegotiate their roles as Sikh women in Kashmir.
The jod (connection) between young people and Gurmat often begins with the teaching of
one of the most important commemorative events in Sikh history: the dastardly 1984 Golden
Temple attack by the Indian Army known as Operation Bluestar. On June 6th, 2018, I attended
its annual commemoration in Arigam, a village in South Kashmir’s Pulwama district, which my
respondents informed me was “Burhan da pind.”34 While such commemorations are held across
gurdwaras globally, this ceremony was unique35 because it was conducted entirely by girls, even as
young as eight years of age. The head of the gurdwara committee told me that this was routine,
and the girls perform the gurdwara’s daily prayers from the morning prakash to evening “ardaas”
(typically performed by men). He added that one reason the committee decided to bring young
women into the fold to discharge the duties of granthis (who read the scripture) and sevadars
67
(who assist the gurdwara affairs), roles typically held by men, was also that young (Sikh) boys
could hardly be trusted to carry forward the baton of the Khalsa, citing their gullibility and galat
sangat (bad company). The young women were also felicitated by eminent granthis from Punjab
with a siropa36 in recognition of their mastery of the scripture.
Employing the rhetoric of the “fallen” state of Sikhism ( Jakobsh 1999), in which the Sikh
male, who squarely shoulders the burden of propagating Khalsa identity and consequently Sikh-
ism itself, can no longer be relied on to do so, owing to the shearing of hair or keeping bad com-
pany (through the consumption of drugs, liquor), political Sikh leadership in Kashmir has, as is
the case in Arigam, turned to women to be its torch bearers. Encouraging young girls to become
Amritdhari Sikhnis, through dress, ritual, and missionary education, thus becomes important to
not only keep the Khalsa panth “strong”; in the context of conflict, it becomes a mechanism with
which to fight the perceived threat from “Islamic teachings,” intermarriage, and conversions, and
project demographic strength. Consequently, while the need for survival confines older Sikh
women in Kashmir and particularly in Chittisinghpora to the margins of the Sikh religious and
political sphere, young girls across Kashmir find themselves centered in the panth.
The Road Ahead

Asking the poignant question “Do you know how Kashmiris remember?,” Kaul and Zia (2018)
argue that “ignorance is as much an ally as ill-will” in conflict. Kashmiri women’s voices in con-
flict have only recently begun to be heard. While the recognition of their struggles in Kashmir’s
ongoing conflict has been a long time coming, Kashmiri Sikh women still have not been given
their rightful place in this discourse. In this chapter, I have attempted to address this absence
by foregrounding Kashmiri Sikh women’s experiences in this literature and by examining the
implications of conflict for the women who were widowed in Chittisinghpora, as well as for a
younger generation of Sikh women. Juxtaposing the experiences of these two groups of women
reveals how notions of safety for the community, in a context of pervasive violence and grow-
ing militarism, gender their experiences in drastically different ways. While Chittisinghpora’s
widows find themselves invisibilized in the discourses and practices around memorialization,
young Sikh women come to be centered in Sikh spaces in Kashmir.
Ultimately, these processes become important for Kashmiri Sikhs – a demographic micro-
minority (a term they use to describe themselves) – to project a moral “hegemony” and ensure
the Sikh quam’s collective “safety” in an otherwise pervasively unsafe context; rendering women
literal bearers of “honour and identity of the nation on their backs for the men to protect”
(Anjum 2018: 47) but also threatening to undermine carefully built Sikh-Muslim solidarities in
the increasingly nationalized project of violence unfolding in Kashmir. Despite these problem-
atic implications,. I argue that Kashmiri Sikh women’s experiences make them uniquely posi-
tioned to reclaim women’s roles within Sikhi and disrupt its long-standing focus on the Khalsa
male. Importantly, in the context of Kashmir’s conflict, they also alert us to the possibilities that
exist of navigating precarity without endangering solidarities.
Notes
1 Fieldwork and interviews for this research were completed between April 2018-March 2019. With
the exception of Mr. Nanak Singh, names of all respondents have been anonymized to protect their
privacy. Except where it was felt that the translation would be inadequate to convey meaning, the text
has been left in the original language with translations provided in English. The author would like
to thank Ms. Ifra Nissar, Ms. Gousia Binti Ghulam and Mr. Malic Tabish Meher for transcribing and
translating interviews in Kashmiri. Interviews have been minimally edited for clarity.
68
Kashmiri Sikh Women
2 A CASO is a military exercise in which men are routinely searched on the pretext of identifying
militants.
3 The word kaand means “scandal” in English and is intended to convey doubt regarding who perpetrated
the massacre and why, as it will become clear from the narrative; it is also intended to convey the scale
of disingenuousness surrounding the response of the state and central governments to the violence.
Until now, there has only been one inquiry (of several ordered) related to Chittisinghpora, whose con-
tents have never made public. The inquiry was also later discredited when the Pathribal and Brakpora
encounters (discussed later) came to light. For more on this, see Jaleel, Muzamil, “Why Justice Eludes
the Victims of Pathribal Fake Encounter?” The Indian Express, August 20, 2017, https://indianexpress.
com/article/india/why-justice-eludes-the-victims-of-pathribal-fake-encounter-4804985/.
4 Respondents use ”agencies” to refer primarily to Indian (and international especially Pakistani, Ameri-
can and Russian) intelligence and espionage bodies like the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW),
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
5 For a comprehensive history of Kashmir’s relationship with India and its struggle for independence, see
Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005;
Mridu Rai, “Kashmir: From Princely State to Insurgency,” Asian History. Oxford Research Encyclo-
pedias, 2018, https://oxfordre.com/asianhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.001.0001/
acrefore-9780190277727-e-184
6 Prior to August 4, 2019, the state of Jammu and Kashmir was divided into three regions: the Hindu
majority Jammu, the Muslim majority Kashmir Valley and the Buddhist majority Ladakh. While all
three regions have experienced conflict during their existence, the Kashmiri freedom struggle has been
restricted to the Valley. The present analysis is also confined to the Valley and its ongoing conflict.
7 Demographically, the Valley is a multiethnic and multireligious region, with Kashmiri Muslims
(96.4 percent), Kashmiri Hindus (2.4 percent), and Kashmiri Sikhs (0.81 percent) being the major reli-
gious groups as per the 2011 Census of India. See “Religion,” 2011, www.census2011.co.in/census/
state/jammu+and+kashmir.html.
8 Author interview, Geet Kaur, Chittisinghpora, June 19, 2018.
9 See for example Menon, Aditya, “ ‘Restored Our Faith in Humanity’: Kashmiris Thank Sikhs For
Help,” The Quint, February 21, 2019, www.thequint.com/news/india/pulwama-terror-attack-kash
miri-students-sikhs-khalsa-aid-help and Brar, Kamaldeep Singh, “Religious Duty of Sikhs to Protect
Kashmiri Girls: Akal Takht Jathedar,” Indian Express, August 10, 2019, accessed July 20, 2020, https://
indianexpress.com/article/india/kashmiri-girls-article-akal-takht-jathedar-370-5893819/.
10 For this point, and for her substantive feedback on this chapter, I am thankful to Professor Mallika
Kaur, Department of Law, University of California at Berkeley.
11 Kashmiri Sikhs trace their lineage to the extensive and well documented travels of the first Sikh guru
(preacher), Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism (1469), who travelled to Kashmir in the year 1516. Sikh-
ism’s advancement in Kashmir is also attributed to the travels of the sixth Sikh guru, Guru Hargobind,
whose visits in Kashmir are placed at around 1620 AD. For Guru Nanak’s travels and the settlement
of Sikhs outside Punjab, see Himadri Banerjee, “Sikhs Living Beyond Punjab in India,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Sikh Studies, 2014. The definitive text in which Guru Hargobind’s travels to Kashmir are
written about is the Suraj Parkash in Gurmukhi, written by the poet Santokh Singh. The travels of
both gurus are marked by several gurdwaras throughout Kashmir. Besides this, there is a second lineage
which is traced to the rule of two Sikh rulers, Sukhjiwan Mal (1753–63) and Maharaja Ranjit Singh
(1780–1839), under whose rule Sikh soldiers from the Punjab region were brought to Kashmir to
serve, allotted land, and settled in Kashmir.
12 My respondents informed me that only three families ended up migrating from Chittisinghpora. As
per the government of Jammu and Kashmir, 1714 Sikh families (6504 individuals) have migrated to
Jammu and other areas at the onset of militancy in 1989–90. For more details, see, accessed July 20,
2020, http://jkmigrantrelief.nic.in/.
13 Author interview, Deepa Kaur, Chittisinghpora, September 9, 2018.
14 Mohammad Yaqoob’s arrest was reported in the media on March 25, 2000; “Kashmir Massacre Sus-
pect Captured,” BBC News, March 25, 2000, accessed July 1, 2020, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/
south_asia/690352.stm. Wagay was later released and continues to reside in the village.
15 Ibid.
16 These killings are known as the Pathribal encounter and were soon followed by the killing of protes-
tors in Brakpora demanding an inquiry (known as the Brakpora encounter). For a detailed timeline of
these evets, along with the judicial status of the inquiries, see Kaur, Surangya, “Pathribal: A Timeline
69
of 18 Years of Injustice,” NewsClick, March 26, 2018, accessed July 1, 2020, www.newsclick.in/
pathribal-timeline-18-years-injustice.
17 Author interview, Nanak Singh, Chittisinghpora, June 18, 2018.
18 In 2019, a massive fire broke out which nearly destroyed the main façade of Gurdwara Samundri Hall.
Fortunately, the fire spared the military post near the entrance, which as one respondent told me,
would have resulted in a massive explosion thanks to the ammunition stored in the barracks. After
the fire, the residents requested that the posts and barracks be moved from gurdwara premises, so that
religious ceremonies could be performed without disruption in the only room untouched by the fire.
Both posts are now relocated to the back side of the gurdwara.
19 Author interview, Nain Kaur and Shanno Kaur, Chittisinghpora, June 19, 2018.
20 Statement made by Shabeer Shah on a visit to Chitti Singhpora, according to eyewitness Nanak Singh;
personal interview with Nanak Singh, September 8, 2017.
21 Author interview, Zakia and Arfa, Chittisinghpora, September 7, 2020.
22 Author interview, Fatima, Chittisinghpora, September 6, 2018.
23 Author interview, Manzoor, Chittisinghpora, September 6, 2018.
24 Author interview, Raqib, Chittisinghpora, September 6, 2018.
25 This is a term I borrow from Raheel Dhattiwala, whose study examines violence in the mixed Hindu-
Muslim neighborhoods of Ahmedabad, Gujarat after the 2002 pogrom; see Raheel Dhattiwala, Keeping
the peace: spatial differences in Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
26 Author interview, Nanak Singh.
27 Author interview, Shahana, Chittisinghpora, June 26, 2018.
28 Fieldnotes from meeting attended at Gurdwara Bunga Sahib, Srinagar, June 17, 2018.
29 Author interview, Amreek Singh, Srinagar, May 29, 2018.
30 Author interview, Veer Singh, Baramulla city, April 23, 2018.
31 A generic term used to describe a school for the teachings of the Khalsa. There are many Gurmat
Vidyalas across India which young people, typically boys, attend to learn about Sikhism. In Kashmir, the
most prominent of these is the Gurmat Taksal, which routinely organizes programs especially for young
women to be actively involved with Sikhi. The terms “Taksaal” and “Taksaali” have attained a particular
connotation in Sikhi and need to be contextualized. “Taksaal” can be understood as a seminary, and as
Mallika Kaur explains in her book Faith Gender and Activism in the Punjab Conflict, it is also understood
as a subset of Sikhs who follow certain discipline and practices separated from the majority; see Mallika
Kaur, Faith, Gender and Activism in Punjab: The Wheat Fields Still Whisper. Springer, 2019, p. 299.
32 Author interview (telephonic), Ajuni Kaur, February 6, 2019.
33 Author interview, Keerat Kaur, Chittisinghpora, June 27, 2018.
34 Burhan Wani was an immensely popular Kashmiri mujahideen (freedom fighter) from Arigam who
joined the Hizbul Mujahideen in October 2010 and was killed by the Indian armed forces in July 2016.
There are about 25–30 Sikh families in Arigram.
35 The Sikh belief is that the gurus in principle made Sikh men and women “equal.” Sikh women often
perform kirtan (singing of hymns) at gurdwaras (at mostly family ceremonies), but they remain absent
from being given gurdwara custodianship, or leading prayer services in any of the historic gurdwaras.
This has been vigorously debated, and on November 7, 2019, the Punjab assembly passed a resolution
effectively ending this discrimination (see Chitleen K. Sethi, “Punjab Assembly Breaks Glass Ceil-
ing, Calls for Women to Perform Kirtan at Golden Temple,” The Print, November 7, 2019, accessed
July 20, 2020, https://theprint.in/india/punjab-assembly-breaks-glass-ceiling-calls-for-women-to-
perform-kirtan-at-golden-temple/317167/). Sikh women are, however, yet to lead the prayers at the
Golden Temple.
36 A ceremonial cloth “awarded” in the gurdwara on important occasions in recognition of exemplary
achievements, to both males and females.
Works Cited
Anjum, Aliya. 2018. “Moving from Impunity to Accountability: Women’s Bodies, Identity and Conflict-
Related Sexual Violence in Kashmir.” Economic and Political Weekly 53(47): 47–53.
Arora, Kamal. 2017. “Legacies of violence: Sikh women in Delhi’s Widow Colony.” PhD Diss. Anthropol-
ogy, University of British Columbia.
BBC News. 2000. “Kashmir Killings Overshadow Clinton Visit.” BBC News, March 21. Accessed July 20,
2020. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/684632.stm.
70
Kashmiri Sikh Women
Bearak, Barry. 2000. “A Kashmiri Mystery.” The New York Times, December 31. Accessed March 7, 2019.
www.nytimes.com/2000/12/31/magazine/a-kashmiri-mystery.html.
Brass, Paul. 1997. Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence. Vol. 8. Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press.
Dean, Jodi. 1996. Solidarity of Strangers: Feminism after Identity Politics. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Dhattiwala, Raheel. 2019. Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu – Muslim Violence in Gujarat in
2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haripriya, Soibam. 2018. “Married to Martyrdom: The Remarried Widow of a Sikh Martyr (Punjab,
post-1984).” Contributions to Indian Sociology 52(3): 263–282.
Hundle, Anneeth Kaur. 2013. “Exceptions to the Expulsion: Violence, Security and Community among
Ugandan Asians, 1972–79.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 7(1): 164–182.
Jakobsh, Doris R. 1999. Relocating Gender in Sikh History: Transformation, Meaning and Identity. Vancouver:
University of British Columbia.
Kaul, Nitasha and Ather Zia. 2018. “Knowing in Our Own Ways – Women and Kashmir.” Economic &
Political Weekly, December 1.
Kaur, Bhavneet. 2021. “ ‘Politics of Emotion’: Everyday Affective Circulation of Women’s Resistance and
Grief in Kashmir.” Ethnography 22(4): 515–533.
Mahmood, Saba. 2011. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “Introduction: Decolonization, Anticapitalist Critique, and Feminist
Commitments.” In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity, 1–14. Durham,
NC: Duke Univerity Press.
Mushtaq, Samreen. 2018. “Home as the Frontier – Gendered Constructs of Militarised Violence in Kash-
mir.” Economic & Political Weekly, December 1.
Rediff. 2000. “The Rediff Interview, Kashmir DGP Gurbachan Jagat. ‘If They Have Doubts about the
Encounter They Can Ask for Exhuming the Bodies.” April 4, 2000. Accessed July 1, 2020. www.rediff.
com/news/2000/apr/04inter.htm.
Sangra, Sapna K. 2018. “Transcending Ethnic Differences: Feminist Perspectives from Jammu and Kash-
mir.” Economic and Political Weekly, August 18.
71
5
DISABLING KASHMIR
Deepti Misri
Introduction
In 2016, and then again in 2018, as the Indian state’s mass blinding of Kashmiri protesters came
to global attention for the first time, it became chillingly clear to the world that disabling Kash-
miris was a deliberate rather than incidental tactic of the occupation in Kashmir. Photographs
and images of children blinded by pellets played a key role in spotlighting the state’s tactic of
blinding as both a short-term crowd control mechanism, and a long-term way of disabling the
resistance to Indian occupation by disabling the bodies of Kashmiri protesters – all without add-
ing to a death count that would result in negative publicity for the state. As one senior police
officer put it anonymously:
The use of pellet guns to control protests is preferred to the use of live ammunition.
Deaths attract a lot of attention. Plus there is a view that when a protester is hit with
a pellet in the eye, it becomes a deterrent.
( Jaleel 2016)
These moments spectacularized the disability outcomes of a state regime that has in fact
functioned by disabling Kashmiris for long before the mass blindings of 2016. Although the tac-
tic of mass blinding is a relatively new one, other forms of disabling Kashmiris have existed well
before this point. As Kashmiri activists and Critical Kashmir Studies scholars (including many
included in this volume) have often foregrounded in their work, torture, widespread PTSD,
economic devastation, and the ongoing health crisis precipitated by internet loss and disruption
of medical communications have all been part of the landscape of debilitation and slow death in
Kashmir (Zia 2019). A recent human rights report on the Indian state’s use of torture in Kashmir
documents a range of torture techniques used on Kashmiri prisoners, including electrocution,
solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, eating excreta, rape, and sodomy – torture techniques
frequently resulting in permanent physical and psychological disabilities among prisoners and
their families (Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of
Civil Society 2019). A longer historical view of Kashmir also compels us to recognize the disa-
bling histories of caste and class, which have informed state power to discursively produce some
populations among Kashmiris as “intellectually superior” (namely Kashmiri Pandits) and others
72 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-7
Disabling Kashmir
as less so, couching intellectual ability in a eugenicist language of inborn superiority, rather than
the product of sustained educational policies that have produced such differences in access to
learning and its related outcomes. Although activism and scholarship on Kashmir has implicitly
been engaged in pointing to such relationships between the political, economic, physical, and
psychological debilitation of Kashmiris (whether Muslim, Pandit, or Sikh, in different ways),
the frameworks of disability studies have remained far afield from Critical Kashmir Studies, and
vice versa. This chapter attempts to place these fields in conversation in order to illuminate what
each can gain from engaging the other.
Disability Studies: An Overview

Taking shape in the 1990s in Britain and the United States, the field known as “disability
studies” has comprised two broad veins. The first vein is based in a critique of what disability
activists have called the “medical model” wherein disability is seen as inherent to the body,
which is conceived as impaired and as the object of cure. In contrast, disability theorists offered
the “social model,” in which disability is theorized as not inherent to the body, but as socially
and environmentally produced. To take one often cited example, not having limbs becomes a
“disability” only when one lacks access to negotiate one’s environment – for instance by the
provision of wheelchairs, access ramps for buildings, and so on. Otherwise, it might be merely
a biological variation, not a “disability.” Thus, access emerged as a core demand in scholarship
foregrounding the social model, which amplifies disability activists’ demands to integrate people
with disabilities into the public mainstream, by providing them increased access to architec-
tures and technologies that would allow for their demarginalization and inclusion. This might
happen, for instance, through the provision of wheelchair ramps or Braille lettering in public
spaces. Anchored to rights-based approaches for people with disabilities, the social model also
emphasizes the value of disabled life: it is invested in “unseating the dominant assumption that
disability is something that is wrong with someone” (Garland-Thomson 2002: 6). Scholars such
as Rosemary Garland-Thomson, Alison Kafer, and Anita Ghai have offered moving meditations
on social attitudes to disability, challenging ableist attitudes that take disabled existence as tragic,
and which presume medical cure as the default desire of all people with disabilities. This work
has also allowed us to see the intersections of disability with gender, sexuality, caste, race, and
poverty (Ghai 2015; Mehrotra 2020). In Kashmir, rights-based disability activism has taken the
form of demands for financial assistance and concessions, free education for the disabled, reser-
vations in government jobs, allocation of residential plots, and separate counters in government
departments, among other demands made of the Indian government; and disability activists
have often been arrested for making these demands.
A second vein of disability studies scholarship, which we might call the “biopolitical model,”
has complicated the calls for recognition, inclusion, and celebration of disability in many main-
stream and rights-based approaches to disability. This vein turns our attention to the mass
production of disability at a population level rather than individual level – as a function of what
French theorist Michel Foucault named biopolitics. Accordingly, scholars like Nirmala Erev-
elles (2011: 119) have questioned: “How can acquiring a disability be celebrated as ‘the most
universal of human conditions’ if it is acquired under the oppressive conditions of poverty,
economic exploitation, police brutality, neocolonial violence, and lack of access to adequate
healthcare and education?” Jasbir Puar (2017: xiv) points to the intentional maiming or debili-
tation of Palestinian bodies by the Israeli state, using the category of “debilitation” to describe
“the slow wearing down of populations instead of the event of becoming disabled.” For Puar,
the category of “debility” triangulates a binary between ability and disability and offers a way of
73
Deepti Misri
comprehending the fact that at a mass population level, some populations are in the long term
more vulnerable to the kind of slow attrition of body and mind that may or may not result in
a permanent disability that is immediately legible within the identity rubric of “the disabled.”
Thus, she asks:
Is a young black man without a diagnostic disability living in the United States who is
statistically much more likely than most to be imprisoned, shut up by police, or killed
by the time of adulthood actually a reference for what it means to be able bodied?
(ibid.: 74)
A similar question may be posed with regard to Kashmir: in a context where virtually every
Kashmiri may be targeted for debilitation, albeit not in an undifferentiated way (since such
vulnerabilities are inevitably classed, gendered, or shaped by other axes), what might a distinc-
tion between “ability” and “disability” even mean, and what might these categories obscure?
A recent report from Médecins Sans Frontières details how mental illness in Kashmir is the
norm rather than the variation, reporting that about 45 percent of Kashmir’s adult population
suffers from some form of mental distress, with women experiencing anxiety, depression, and
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in slightly higher numbers than men across all ten districts
of Kashmir.1 The recent Covid-19 pandemic amplified the mechanisms of debilitation in Kash-
mir, as the physical and digital restrictions of the lockdown imposed by the Modi government
came to be overlaid on top of the ongoing conditions of settler colonial processes intensified by
the events of August 5, 2019, when Jammu and Kashmir was stripped of its statehood via the
removal of Article 370.2 These events were accompanied by what soon came to be infamous
as the longest shutdown in internet history, as well as many months of curfew and an increased
military presence across the Valley. By the time the coronavirus arrived in Kashmir, Kashmiris
had already been suffering for many months under one of the most stringent lockdowns they
had ever seen, without the internet access that allowed for people in other parts of the world
to access some semblance of human connection from their homes, preserving them from the
psychological isolation.
The health crisis of the coronavirus compounded the massive health crisis that was already
underway under conditions of occupation. Internet restrictions and mobile phone connectivity
issues after August 5 meant that doctors in Kashmir were unable to communicate in the usual
ways and unable to keep track of swiftly changing information on Covid. Doctors in Kashmir
complained about their inability to download WHO guidelines, for instance, or medical jour-
nal articles reporting the latest research that they needed to access to treat the virus effectively.
Compounding this scenario, new domicile laws and the continuation of Hindu pilgrimages
such as the Amarnath yatra, guaranteed an influx of migrants into Kashmir, fueling fears that
the pandemic would become endemic as an already overloaded medical system would face an
added burden. We can see that the distinction between the disabled and the non-disabled is
a temporally tenuous one: in Kashmir, one might say, disability lies in wait, and often comes
sooner in one’s life cycle.
Integrating Disability Analysis Into Critical Kashmir Studies

The social and biopolitical models of disability studies detailed earlier can be both useful to
Kashmir studies while also benefiting from an engagement with our field. A disability analysis
can help us detail how the experience of “preexisting” disability is shaped by the environ-
ment of militarized occupation; and also how disability is a constant and regular product of this
74
Disabling Kashmir
environment. We can thus use these analytics to study at once how people with disabilities stand
at an increased vulnerability to the violence of occupation, and how occupation mass produces
disabilities by actively targeting Kashmiris for debilitation. For example, a recent report details
how people with existing and identifiable disabilities become more vulnerable as targets:
According to Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society ( JKCCS), a human rights

organization based in the valley, there have been at least 17 such cases where Indian
armed forces have killed mentally disabled persons, and sometimes as allegedly mistak-
ing them for militants in the last fourteen years.
(Wande 2018)
Two scenes from Munnu, Malik Sajad’s poignant graphic narrative of Kashmiri life and
death, living and dying under occupation, also speak to this intersection of illness/disability
and the violence of occupation. In one scene, the young protagonist Munnu’s blind grandfa-
ther visits Munnu’s family, coming over from his home in Eidgah to Batmaloo (104). When
shooting begins in the neighborhood during a crackdown, Abba is left outside in a little grove
near the family house. As everyone else takes shelter in the house, Abba runs around blindly
outside, disoriented by the sound of shooting and unable to find his way to the shelter of the
house. At one point his son, Munnu’s father, calls to him: “Abba, are you deaf ? You’ll get
all of us killed! Come here now!” But Abba only bangs hard into tree after tree as he tries to
negotiate the thicket, suffering bruises and injury in the process. Eventually he is rescued by
his grandson Bilal, who darts out to get him amidst relentless gunfire, endangering his own life
in the process.
The scene of “crackdown” reveals the exacerbated vulnerability of the disabled subject to
survival in a changeable sensorial environment that is subject to the vagaries of war. In another
scene later in the novel, Munnu’s efforts to take his sick mother to the hospital illustrate the
intersection of disability and debilitation. Here illness meets what Celeste Langan (2001) has
called “mobility disability,” diminishing “the difference between the ‘cripple’ and the ambula-
tory person who may well wish to move.” On the other hand, the presumably “able-bodied”
in Kashmir are living targets, always at risk of becoming disabled physically and psychologically.
To return to Puar’s use of “debility,” the “slow wearing down of populations” is evident in
Kashmir, even among those who do not experience diagnostic disabilities. Indeed, the latter
often follows the former in Kashmir, as we see in Azad Essa’s short film Out of Sight in Kashmir
(2019), which profiles Farzan, a young Kashmiri boy who has been blinded by pellets and is left
not only without sight but with a deep psychological impact, manifesting alternately as angry
outbursts and depression.
The lens of disability also foregrounds how militarized occupation disables Kashmiris by
disabling their social and infrastructural environment and modes of healing and wellness. Suhail
Naqshbandi’s 2016 cartoon expresses perfectly the relationship between the debilitation of
humans and of infrastructure: an ambulance with broken windows is being ferried by two hos-
pital attendants on a stretcher, in place of the injured body that usually occupies the stretcher.
In Naqshbandi’s own words, “in Kashmir, every rule of humanity is broken and even ambu-
lance drivers are beaten by the security forces, their window glasses broken” – even as the
injured being transported in these ambulances are targeted by the police and CRPF personnel
(Maqbool 2016). As I write this, Kashmiris on social media debate whether loud sonic booms
heard in Srinagar are the result of an earthquake or of controlled bombs going off, with contra-
dictory information coming from the state, breeding a sense of precarity that leaves a long-term
impact on every Kashmiri’s psychological welfare and mental health.
75
Deepti Misri
In addition to understanding how occupation both impacts people with existing disabilities
and produces new populations of people with disabilities, the theoretical frameworks of dis-
ability studies also allow us to discern the ableist underpinnings of militarized occupation as a
structure. Occupation as an ableist regime functions by maintaining and widening the ability/
disability gap between the body of Indian soldier and that of the Kashmiri subject.3 On the one
end, occupation produces the super-abled Indian soldier, whose physical abilities are hyper-
capacitated by the prosthetic paraphernalia of guns, tanks, and barbed wire. On the other end,
occupation also relies on producing the debilitated Kashmiri subject, whose body is vulnerable
to torture, maiming, disappearance, and death; and whose heart and mind are vulnerable to the
mental health effects of prolonged stress. Of course, the paradox of such violence is that perpe-
trators are not immune to being undone by the violence they commit, and so we also witness
a wide prevalence of mental illness and suicidality experienced by the hyper-capacitated Indian
soldier, who is often a member of one of the disenfranchised populations of India.
Within disability studies, feminist and queer disability analysis has also drawn our attention to
the intersections between gender, sexuality, and ability in ways that are also fruitful for scholars
in Kashmir studies to engage. A feminist disability analysis compels us to unearth the gendered
scripts underlying the ableist militarized occupation delineated earlier. Consider for instance the
scripts of masculinity and ability underwriting both the figures of the Indian soldier as well as
the Kashmiri Muslim male protester. The discursive trope of the hyper-able-bodied, terroristic
Kashmiri Muslim man directly sanctions their targeting by Indian state forces for incarceration,
maiming, and disability. Meanwhile, on the Indian mediascape, Indian soldiers’ vulnerabil-
ity – which would be otherwise unmanning – is frequently underscored in relation to Kashmiri
Muslim hypermasculinity. It is acceptable to cast Indian militaristic masculinity as vulnerable in
the face of monstrous hypermasculine Kashmiri Muslim male. While the bodies of Kashmiri
Muslim men are often among the most vulnerable to such targeted physical debilitation, Kash-
miri women have also been subject to the embodied violence of rape and torture, as well as the
traumatic fallout of the occupation and the torture, disappearance, and killings of young men
in their families.
Critical Kashmir Studies, Southern Theories of Disability,

and Indian Disability Studies
If, as discussed in the preceding section, Critical Kashmir Studies can clearly benefit from an
engagement with disability studies, the latter field also has much to gain through an attention to
Critical Kashmir Studies. In particular, recent calls to decolonize disability studies would benefit
immensely – theoretically as well as ethically – from attending to the specific context of Kashmir
as a site of ongoing colonization within the global south.
Recent scholarly efforts to decolonize disability studies have critiqued the prevailing “north-
ernness” of disability studies originating in the West and have called for what Helen Meekosha
(2011; see also Grech 2015) names “a southern theory of disability.” Meekosha observes how a
southern theory of disability would challenge the “scholarly colonialism” of much contempo-
rary disability studies, which has focused mostly on experiences of disability in the global north,
or else has simply exported these frames without modification to the global south. In contrast,
Meekosha suggests, a southern theory of disability would not only make visible the experiences
of disabled people in the global south but also examine the role of the global northern countries
in producing disability in the south through geopolitical forces of war, toxic waste, and capitalist
extraction. The context of Kashmir certainly contributes to such a goal, but it also expands and
immensely complicates this putative decolonial turn in the field of disability studies.
76
Disabling Kashmir
Firstly, the case of Kashmir does not simply provide yet another example from the global
south to correct the “northernness” of disability studies, but indeed compels us once again
to interrogate the north-south colonial-postcolonial binary, in which colonial power is typi-
cally theorized as flowing from the global north to the global south. To be sure, Meekosha,
Grech, and Staples are careful to underscore that the “global south” should be understood
not simply as a geographical location that maps neatly onto the southern hemisphere, but also
encapsulates the experience of marginalized communities within the so-called global north (for
instance, indigenous communities in settler colonial societies of Australia and the United States,
or immigrant communities within European countries).4 Writing from Australia, Meekosha
acknowledges the limitations of the binaries of “North/South” and “metropole/periphery”;
nevertheless, she notes that such distinctions are essential as a starting point to examine the role
of colonization in shaping disability, and vice versa.5 In this vein she observes that the “North”
still largely refers to the global economic and political centers of the (white-majority) countries
of Western Europe and North America. In this analysis, “global south” still largely describes
the erstwhile colonized or “postcolonial” nations of the hemispheric south. While this is an
important point, colonial relationships between and within countries or regions of the global
south remain elusive under this framework.
This model of theorizing colonial power is also embedded within Indian disability studies,
which situates itself within this decolonizing turn in disability studies, without ever interrogat-
ing relations of colonial domination that have long existed within the Indian subcontinent
itself. Indian disability studies has fruitfully attempted to confront histories of government-sanc-
tioned poverty, malnutrition, and unemployment, while developing intersectional frameworks
to account for the role of caste, class, and indigeneity in shaping disability in India (Addlakha
2013; Ghai 2015; Mehrotra 2020). Although these intersectional efforts are valuable and need
to be expanded, Indian disability studies has failed altogether to engage the Indian state’s own
histories of colonial domination in regions such as Kashmir, the Northeast, or the Andaman
Islands (Kanjwal 2019; Sen 2017; Wani 2020). Thus it has left intact the (albeit provisional and
interrogated) binary of global north and south, tracing colonial legacies rather than ongoing forms
of colonialism (Byrd and Rothberg 2011).6
In contrast to these aforementioned decolonizing efforts within disability studies, Critical
Kashmir Studies compels us to consider the global south not as an automatically postcolonial
zone (albeit one with its own stratifications), but one that requires decolonizing through specific
attention to the relationships between nation-states and regions within the global south. Thus a
disability-specific attention to Kashmir would require us to recognize Kashmir as a region that is
now – that is, in the present – subject to settler colonization by a “postcolonial” country whose
population is itself subject to high rates of poverty and disability that are a legacy of a history of
British colonialism. As an instance of ongoing colonialism and a territory currently occupied
by a state that is considered one of the primary exemplars of the “postcolonial” nation-state,
Kashmir deflects any simple assumption of the global south as a postcolonial monolith. It sug-
gests that disability-specific attention to global south must not only trace (as it has been doing)
how disability in global south is facilitated by capitalist flows of the north, but also go beyond
the north/south binary to consider colonial processes as they operate within the global south.
Beyond correcting First World knowledge formations by adding regional specificity; a truly
decolonizing approach to disability must also consider the realities of ongoing colonization in
the global south. In particular, Indian disability studies must task itself with foregrounding the
role of Indian settler colonialism in actively producing disability in Kashmir, by engaging in
close conversation with the field of Critical Kashmir Studies. As part of the decolonial turn to
the global south in disability studies, it must confront the colonial violence of the Indian state
77
Deepti Misri
and interrogate the mass production of disability among Kashmiris through the state’s use not
only of mechanisms like torture and mass blinding, but through its destruction of indigenous
Kashmiris’ relationships to the land and placing Kashmiris in a state of perpetual psychological
crisis.
Resistance and Disability Justice in Kashmir

In conclusion, a disability analysis for Kashmir must also account for the ways in which Kash-
miris have effectively contested the continual debilitation of Kashmiri people, vitality, and life in
a range of ways. The long fight for self-determination is itself a fight against the daily attrition of
Kashmiri life and health through the imposition of long curfews, the curtailment of movement,
the shrinkage of space for expression and communal being, the decimation of mental health,
and of course the active targeting of Kashmiris for violent destruction. Insofar as this struggle
seeks to stall the debilitating juggernaut of the state, it is imperative to consider it as a form of
disability activism in Kashmir, just as Puar (2017: 160) argues in the context of Palestine that
“acts of protest must be embraced as forms of disability activism and resistance.”
Kashmiri cultural production also provides a rich resource for understanding how Kash-
miris understand and contest the debilitating regime that shapes everyday life in Kashmir. One
recent example of this that I have examined elsewhere was a “resistance calendar” developed
by the Kashmiri youth group Aalaw to counter the Indian state’s opportunistic use of “female
empowerment” and disability-positive rhetoric in order to secure its credentials as forward
looking and “inclusive” of Kashmiris in its vision of positive citizenship (Misri 2020).7 Specifi-
cally, Kashmiris engaged in a visual contest against the visual scheme of the 2017 Jammu and
Kashmir Bank calendar, which had featured 12 “talented youth[s]” of the state who had “made
the entire state proud by following their dreams” (Greater Kashmir 2017). The bank calendar’s
January page had featured eight-year-old kickboxing champion Tajamul Islam, in a “(girl)
power pose”; a few pages later, on the August and September pages, the calendar featured
“inclusive” representations of disabled athletes and artists as productive citizens of the nation.
Recognizing the bank calendar’s manipulative use of the Kashmiri girl athlete (and more
largely of the image of Kashmiri youth), the Aalaw calendar instead foregrounded a represen-
tation of gendered disability, offering on its own January page an image of the pellet-marked
face of 14-year-old Insha Malik, who had been blinded when Indian forces sprayed a volley
of pellets at Kashmiri protesters. This counter-image of Insha as a counter-icon of “Kashmiri
youth” did two things: (1) it spectacularized the debilitation carried out by the Indian state by
revealing its impact on the very Kashmiri youth being celebrated in the bank calendar, and (2)
it offered a vision of disability that was starkly opposed to the recuperative images of produc-
tive disability offered by the bank calendar, where for instance the disabled painter Sanjay Saraf
was celebrated as “globally recognised for canvas paintings” while the “specially abled skater”
Chandeep Singh was upheld for winning a bronze in a national skating championship. In fore-
grounding Insha’s debilitation in a tragic rather than an aspirational register, the Aalaw calendar
offered a potent view of the violence of the occupation, while also cannily rejecting gestures
of “feel good” disability acceptance that only consolidate the larger debilitating machine of the
settler colonial state.8
This is not to say that the goals of inclusion and access that are prized in much of disability
studies scholarship are irrelevant in Kashmir. On the contrary, in a context where the state
maims Kashmiris every day in direct and indirect ways, questions of access, amelioration, and
care remain crucial. And yet as they strain under a long occupation, Kashmiris have often
been clear that the state cannot be the only avenue of care if they are to maintain their right to
78
Disabling Kashmir
advocate for their own political future. They have therefore developed their own networks of
care. In 2019, Kashmiris in the Anchar neighborhood of Srinagar were freshly targeted with
pellet guns as Anchar emerged as a major hub of protest against the revocation of statehood and
suspension of Article 370 on August 5. As state police in plain clothes were known to comb the
hospitals looking to arrest injured protesters, Anchar developed its own system of aid as an army
of “pellet experts” treated the pellet injured utilizing amateur first aid kits comprising blades,
Dettol, cigarette lighters, and cycle spokes to disinfect injuries and disembed pellets. While
such amateur measures to treat injury and debilitation do not compare in quality to professional
medical care available at hospitals and do not by any measure represent an ideal level of health
care, they tell us much about what Kashmiris find most debilitating to their physical and mental
well-being. Between the physical injury of pellet guns and the psychological impact of the sus-
tained debilitation of their sovereignty, it is clear that staying safe from physical injury is hardly
to stay safe from disablement altogether. Scholars in both Critical Kashmir Studies and disability
studies are obliged to adapt our analysis to recognize how under conditions of settler colonial
occupation, disability is the norm rather than the exception, and no one living under such
conditions inhabits an “able” body or mind. Placing disability justice frameworks in conversa-
tion with indigenous activism organized around relationships to land, Jaffee and John write:
“Imagining futures wherein disability is legible as radical possibility or desirable difference must
be simultaneous with confronting the corporeal violence of exploitation that produces disabled
bodies and renders spaces inaccessible, physically and spiritually” ( Jaffee and John 2018: 1419).
This must be our brief.
Notes
1 A news item in Al Jazeera notes that “According to the report, 50 percent of women and 37 percent of
men are likely to suffer from depression; 36 percent of women and 21 percent of men have a probable
anxiety disorder; and 22 percent of women and 18 percent of men suffer from post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD)” (Tamim 2016).
2 On August 5, 2019, the Indian government announced the removal of Article 370 of the Constitution
of India, a provision that had maintained a semi-autonomous status for the state of Jammu and Kashmir
since 1954. Under this change, Jammu and Kashmir would no longer be a state, and would be bifurcated
into two union territories ( Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh), to be governed directly from New Delhi.
3 I draw here on Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s analysis of disability as part of an “ability/disability sys-
tem [which] produces subjects by differentiating and marking bodies” (2002: 5). In Garland-Thomson’s
view, however, this differentiation is largely cultural and “ideological rather than biological,” a product
of social and environmental norms. My analysis above on the other hand foregrounds the production of
bodily difference between the Indian soldier and the Kashmiri (whether civilian or militant, since the
armed capacity of the latter rarely matches up to that of the soldier, often seated in an armored vehicle
that serves as the extension of the soldier’s body).
4 In calling to decolonize disability studies from the perspective of the global south, these scholars draw
on the framework of “global south” to complicate the earlier binary of politically and economically
privileged “First World” nations and marginalized “Third world” nations, by calling attention to the
deep inequities existing within the former.
5 Meekosha (2011) also attends closely to the production of disability by northern imperialist settler colo-
nial regimes in the present.
6 Byrd and Rothberg’s (2011) analysis of the tensions between postcolonial and indigenous studies reso-
nate with the larger field of indigenous studies, which has pointed repeatedly to postcolonial studies’
failure to engage with ongoing forms of colonialism in the present.
7 This vision of citizenship was offered by the then finance minister Haseeb Drabu as the “positive” coun-
terpart to the youth who had taken to the streets in angry protest against the Indian administration after
the killing of the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.
8 A fuller discussion of this calendar and its optical aspects can be found in Misri 2020.
79
Deepti Misri
Works Cited
Addlakha, Renu, ed. 2013. Disability Studies in India: Global Discourses, Local Realities. New Delhi: Rout-
ledge India.
Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society
( JKCCS). 2019. Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir.
Srinagar. https://jkccs.net/torture-indian-states-instrument-of-control-jammu-kashmir/.
Byrd, Jodi A. and Michael Rothberg. 2011. “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity.” Interventions 13(1):
1–12.
Erevelles, Nirmala. 2011. “The Color of Violence: Reflecting on Gender, Race, and Disability in War-
time.” In Feminist Disability Studies, edited by Kim Q. Hall, 117–135. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Essa, Azad. 2019. “Out of Sight in Kashmir.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR4_NcBBd74.
“Finance Minister Unveils J&K Bank Calendar 2017.” 2017. Greater Kashmir, January 1, 2017.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2002. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA
Journal 14(3): 1–32.
Ghai, Anita. 2015. Rethinking Disability in India. New Delhi: Routledge India.
Grech, Shaun. 2015. “Decolonising Eurocentric Disability Studies: Why Colonialism Matters in the Dis-
ability and Global South Debate.” Social Identities 21(1): 6–21.
Jaffee, Laura and Kelsey John. 2018. “Disabling Bodies of/and Land: Reframing Disability Justice in Con-
versation with Indigenous Theory and Activism.” Disability and the Global South 5(2): 1407–1429.
Jaleel, Muzamil. 2016. “Kashmir Protests: Pellets Take a Toll, 92 Eye Surgeries and Counting.” Indian
Express¸ July 12. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/kashmir-protests-burhan-
wani-death-stomne-pelting-crpf-hizbul-mujahideen-2908277/.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2019. “India’s Settler-Colonial Project in Kashmir Takes a Disturbing Turn.” Washington
Post, August 5.
Langan, Celeste. 2001. “Mobility Disability.” Public Culture 13(3): 459–484.
Maqbool, Majid. 2016. “Here’s How Kashmiri Cartoonists Are Playing with Their Pain.” The Wire,
August 17.
Meekosha, Helen. 2011. “Decolonising Disability: Thinking and Acting Globally.” Disability & Society
26(6): 667–682.
Mehrotra, Nilika, ed. 2020. Disability Studies in India: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Singapore: Springer.
Misri, Deepti. 2020. “Dark Ages and Bright Futures: Youth, Disability, and Time in Kashmir.” Public
Culture 32(3(92)): 539–565.
Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press.
Sen, Uditi. 2017. “Developing Terra Nullius: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Indigeneity in the Andaman
Islands.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59(4): 944–973.
Tamim, Baba. 2016. “Kashmir’s Mental Health Crisis.” Al Jazeera, September 3.
Wande. 2018. “Killing of Mentally Disabled People: An Unsettling Trend.” February 22. www.wandemag.
com/killing-mentally-disabled-trend/.
Wani, Maknoon. 2020. “Kashmir and the Rise of Settler Colonialism.” Himal Southasian, September 1.
Zargar, Safwat. 2019. “Meet the Amateur Pellet Doctors of Srinagar Who Treat Protestors Too Scared to
Go to Hospital.” Scroll.In, September 19.
Zia, Ather 2019. “Blinding Kashmiris: The Right to Maim and the Indian Military Occupation in Kash-
mir.” Interventions 21(6): 773–786.
80
6
HORTUS INTERRUPTUS
A Time for Alegropolitics in Kashmir
Introduction
Roshe walla meyani dilbaro
Poshan bahar aaw yuur walo
(Come to me stealthily, my love

Come, the flowers are in bloom!)
Kashmiri folk song, cited in Haider

My roots cling to the fading scent of springs past.
Why keep me waiting long?

Asiya Zahoor, “Insomniac Almond Tree Speaks”
Consider these epigraphs: one, a lover’s call to their beloved in response to the quickening
rhythms of springtime, and the second, a ventriloquized almond tree, impatient with the bur-
den of “springs past” and of waiting for change. The first epigraph, in the Koshur language, is
from a Kashmiri folk song that appears at a prominent moment in the film Haider (Bhardwaj
2014), Bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to dramatize
the conflict in Kashmir, through a screenplay co-written with Kashmiri author Basharat Peer
(Bhardwaj and Peer 2014). The second belongs to a poem in Kashmiri poet, filmmaker, and
scholar Asiya Zahoor’s first published anthology, Serpents Under My Veil (Zahoor 2020).1 Despite
differences of language, genre, tone, and the material circumstances of their originating texts,
both epigraphs draw on the same source: a set of tropes involving birds, blossoms, gardens, and
the arrival of spring after winter. Although usually conveying hope through the awakening of
sensuous love, within both Zahoor’s poem and Haider, these tropes are redeployed to comment
on Kashmir as a conflict zone. Interrupting the cyclical, seasonal temporality of the garden, the
poem and the film each call for a new time by demanding a new approach to attachment and
care of the self.
Kashmir has long been presented as a garden within creative production from the region
and analysis of imaginative representations of it (Kaul 2015; Waheed 2015). Specific descriptive
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-8 81
components of this garden circulate within an imaginary of Kashmir as “a territory of desire”

(Kabir 2009). This discursive construction of Kashmir has proceeded through intersubjective
investments in a complex fantasy from a defining moment: the entry of the camera into the
Valley of Kashmir. From the late nineteenth century, this predominantly visualized fantasy of
desirability accrued multiple dimensions: natural beauty, civilizational antiquity, the erasure of
Kashmiris from the land, and attempts by diverse autochthonous parties to reoccupy it sym-
bolically and materially. Crosscutting this layered structure of desire are successive interventions
from postcolonial India as occupying and neo-colonizing force (Duschinski et al. 2018). The
most recent phase commenced on August 5th, 2019, with the reduction of the erstwhile state
of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories, diminished territorially and in terms of fed-
erative autonomy through the abrogation of its constitutionally enshrined special status. I place
the persistent allegory of the Kashmir Valley as garden against these developments. This horti-
cultural imaginary bestows on the space a civilizational depth and contour crucial to Kashmiri
self-representation. Although, in literary critical terms, it can be analyzed through the lens of
“pastoral” (Kabir 2016), it differs from the latter’s sylvan attributes that are contrasted to urban
sophistication.
The Kashmir Valley, in folksong, poems, tropes, and visualizations, is evoked as what the bib-
lical and medieval Latin traditions would have called hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden (Aben
and De Wit 1999), and the Indo-Persian tradition, gulshan (Roth 2019), an ornamental garden
of perfumed, delicately colored roses (gul) that are ever more precious because ephemeral. While
this garden’s seasonal temporality reminds us of the Western classical carpe diem tradition, its Per-
sianate genealogy brings into the fray the bulbul, or nightingale. Indigenous traditions contribute
other avian and floral personifications – the narcissus, the bird of prey – to nuance the lyrical
allegories they service. This imaginative toolkit circulates within Kashmir as a collective, lyri-
cal memory of how its beauty is articulated, even while dramatizing the relationship between
beauty, desire, and time as a philosophical and mystical conundrum. Grasping the experience
of beauty against the ever-moving axis of time is by no means a preoccupation exclusive to
Kashmiris. But the circumstances of a long-term conflict zone make Kashmir’s “crisis in time”
(Falak 2019) particularly urgent and intractable. I present and probe these specificities through
two responses to Kashmir as gulshan: the film Haider and the creative work of Asiya Zahoor.
In both responses, the gulshan’s blossoming has been indefinitely stalled by a chronic disori-
entation of its spiritual compass. I call this status quo the hortus interruptus. The allusion to coitus
interruptus is deliberate. Hortus interruptus draws attention to the conflict’s impact on Kashmiri
subjectivity by highlighting the repercussions on women’s experience of sexual pleasure. The
prudery that usually attends such matters in the Indic domain is exacerbated by the psychic toll
of a conflict zone, as well as the war waged on women’s bodies in any militarized space. The
convergence of these issues has forestalled talk of pleasure in the context of Kashmir. Can there
ever be an appropriate time for a woman’s pleasure? How much more inappropriate must such
pleasure be when the apparatus of the state relentlessly exacts its necropolitical toll on bodies
(Mbembe 2019)? I tease out from the hortus interruptus the possibility of a new temporality for
Kashmir: a time for alegropolitics, or the political potential of the traumatized, violated body
seeking to extract from horror a defiantly resistive joy (Kabir 2020). While Haider foregrounds
heterosexual relationships as the arena for its focus on women’s pleasure, it allows glimpses of a
wider spectrum that includes autonomous and embodied self-expression, and a communion of
bodies with nature. Zahoor’s creativity explicitly ranges across this alegropolitical spectrum. Her
work leads us out of an impasse that Haider cannot move beyond. The necessity of alegropolitics
within Kashmiri resistance strategies emerges through Zahoor’s embrace of a Kashmiri phe-
nomenology of time – interrupted and derailed, yes, but also reconfigured and reoccupied to
82
Hortus Interruptus
make space for female agency. Zahoor’s alegropolitics sets out an agenda of a radical love and
care of the self. It is through looking after herself, her work suggests, that the Kashmiri woman
gains agency to respond to the always urgent political call for azaadi.2
The Garden’s Stymied Business

Departing from classic Bollywood depictions of Kashmir involving verdant meadows and blue
lakes framed by snow-clad mountains (Kabir 2009), Haider consciously gives us a cinematog-
raphy of winter. This visual mood suits the heaviness of a film about the Kashmir conflict that
does not let us forget that it is an adaptation of a Shakespearean tragedy (Sen 2018), itself set in
the dark North of Europe. Our expectations as viewers are answered by a snowscape that moves
down into the valley from the framing mountains to cover the surfaces of everyday life. The
bleak beauty of winter light filters through tree branches stripped bare of leaves. Nevertheless,
there is a counterpoint: a well-known ghazal about impending springtime, composed by Faiz
Ahmed Faiz and famously interpreted by Mehdi Hassan. We first encounter it when Haider,
face-to-face with his burnt-out home, remembers happier times there. Within “flashes of his
childhood [that] appear before him as he walks through the house” (Bhardwaj 2014: 37), we see
the boy Haider with his father, Hilaal, who recites the ghazal’s first line: gulon mein rang bharein,
baad-e-naubahaar chalein (“let the roses fill with color, let the spring breezes play on”). Haider, on
some prompting, completes the couplet: chaley bhi aao ki gulshan ka karobar chalein (“please come
soon, so that the garden can go about its business”). This couplet, first given through flashback,
becomes a leitmotif for the reactivation of Hilaal’s memory in the present.3
When the mysterious Roohdar (the film’s equivalent of Hamlet’s ghost) appears in Haider’s
life, it is through this couplet that he reveals his knowledge of Hilaal’s fate after he had been
disappeared (Bhardwaj 2014). The iteration of its first phrase (“let the roses fill with color”)
performs an injunction to act, transmitting Hilaal’s double-coded command through Roohdar
as message-bearer: avenge your father/ ensure the onset of spring. At the snowed-in graveyard where
Roohdar meets Haider, death and winter combine to weigh down the present with negative
affect. These binaries are set into motion earlier when Haider broods over his absent father
along with his friends, the grotesquely comic duo of Salman and Salmaan. Haider intersperses
their absurd dialogue with two fragments from the ghazal (Bhardwaj 2014: 63). The first, gulon
mein rang bhare, we have already heard Hilaal deliver. The second, qafas udaas hai yaaron, saba se
kuch to kaho (“the cage is unhappy, friends, go say something to the breeze”) comes from later in
the ghazal than its opening couplet, and thus reaches for an intertext beyond the audible range
of the film. That Faiz wrote this ghazal while imprisoned for his anti-colonial activities lends
additional resonance to Haider’s citation of the “unhappy cage,” especially in light of his obser-
vation in this scene, pura Kashmir qaidkhana hai dost (“all of Kashmir is a prison, my friends”)
(Bhardwaj 2014: 64).
Alongside the injunction to usher in the spring, then, is a competing insistence on the cage
or qafas that, together with the adjective udaas (melancholic, sorrowful, sad), generates a nega-
tive effect. The alliteration of qafas with qaidkhana (prison) connects imprisonment with the
stymieing of cyclical, seasonal temporality. This prison is both Kashmir and the body of the
Kashmiri. The reappearance of udaas within another dialogue suggests what kind of a body
this may be. Haider’s grandfather tells his daughter-in-law (and Haider’s mother) Ghazala that
“this house is a ruin without your laughter” (Bhardwaj 2014: 84). Ghazala’s relationship to an
idealized domesticity and its pedagogic propagation had been established early on in the film:
the first time we see her is as a schoolteacher, asking her pupils to repeat after her the ques-
tion, “what is a home?” and repeat, too, clichéd answers about home as the site of the happy
83
heteronormative family comprising mother, father, and siblings (Bhardwaj 2014: 12–13). That
hopeful naïveté is rapidly shattered by a sequence of events culminating in the Indian army’s
arrest of Hilaal and annihilation of their beautiful and elegant home, decorated to high standard
with Kashmiri artisanal work. Through a web of verbal echoes and semiotic seepages, then,
connecting separate points of narrative time, the film suggests that the melancholia of the gar-
den’s stymied business impacts home and land alike through the woman whose laughter can no
longer be heard.
My Stealthy Love and Her Stolen Laughter

Ghazala’s laughter is an expression of embodied joy – what in Spanish is called alegría and in Por-
tuguese, alegria (Kabir 2020). It is linked to her relationship with Khurram, the younger brother
of her husband Hilaal, that the film does not shy away from flagging up as transgressive. While
derivative of the Horatio-Gertrude relationship that powers the revenge plot in Hamlet, the
mutual attraction between Ghazala and Khurram antedates the horizon of the narrative present.
During the same visit to her father-in-law, they embrace with a hint of an erotic charge, and,
on being questioned by Ghazala and his father as to why he doesn’t want to marry, Khurram
declares, “it’s because all the pretty ones are taken, just like you!” (Bhardwaj 2014: 85). Such
banter between a married woman and her devar (younger brother-in-law) has had long sanction
in the Indic world. With Hilaal’s disappearance, however, we have no option but to deal with
its barely concealed sexual frisson – particularly because we assess their affection through the
eyes of Haider, who returns to Kashmir from his university in the plains of India to confront the
destruction of his home, the disappearance of his father, and the burgeoning romance between
his mother and uncle. Indeed, on stumbling unannounced onto their flirtation, it dawns on
both him and the audience that this could have a longer, and thus arguably even more unac-
ceptable, timeline: “has your musical been on for a while,” he inquires sardonically, “or did this
romantic production begin . . . after father’s disappearance?” (Bhardwaj 2014: 53).
Haider’s discovery of this intimate moment between Khurram and Ghazala, at the very
moment that he seeks her out, is all the more powerful because he overhears Khurram singing
the couplet from the Kashmir folk song that forms my first epigraph and urging Ghazala to
join. After some coyness, she accedes. As she hums, Khurram dances in a Kashmiri folk style.
Their interaction is framed by the view of mountains from the open windows and translucent
fluttering curtains suggestive of a freshness and openness as well as the springtime breeze that
will awaken the garden. The lyrics confirm the alignment of the horticultural trope with sensual
arousal: “come to me stealthily, my love, come, the flowers are in bloom!” (Bhardwaj 2014: 48).
This is exactly the moment that we – as well as Haider – hear Ghazala’s laughter. The scene
is framed by Haider’s approach and it is with his eyes and ears that we apprehend its meaning.
Ghazala’s response to Khurram’s flirtation is abruptly quelled by the advent of her son, who is
later castigated by his uncle for having robbed his mother of her first smile in months. Hence
the laughter that is interrupted by Haider emits two connotations. As the source of feminine
alegría, it ensures the plenitude of the heteronormative home built on the marital relationship,
and ever more urgently required with the Indian state’s willful destruction of the structures of
Kashmiri society. But, in being channeled toward Ghazala’s surreptitious romance with her
brother-in-law, and thus intervening within the marital relationship, it also threatens that pleni-
tude’s reestablishment.
An alegropolitical reading must extract the significance of these contradictions in the context
of a conflict zone. Through the moral censure which the son brings to his mother’s singing
and laughter, Haider suggests an elemental disturbance that draws gravitas from the grandeur of
84
Hortus Interruptus
Shakespearean tragedy. This fraternal fracture inherited from Hamlet is calqued on to the murky
politics of Indian-occupied Kashmir: on the one hand, Hilaal’s death is squarely attributed to
his torture at the hands of the military; on the other, Khurram, the usurper, participates know-
ingly in the farce of democracy that plays out in the Valley. Not only is eros split off from domus;
the perturbation of its spiritual compass that the film suggests through this split is heightened
through two elaborations it introduces within the Hamlet story. First, drawing on the Kashmiri
men who have regularly been disappeared by the Indian state, it keeps open the possibility that
Hilaal, too, may have disappeared rather than died. Second, it places a Kashmiri folk song – the
only time during the film that we hear the Valley’s autochthonous language, Koshur – in the
mouths of Khurram and Ghazala, at the very moment their mutual attraction becomes evident
to Haider. Although impacting on the narrative level differently, these elaborations bestow an
ethical dimension to the garden’s stymied temporality. Further, they complicate that dimension
by connecting it to the ambivalence transmitted through Ghazala’s stolen laughter.
Half-Widow, Half-Bride, Mother (Tongue)

Unlike Hamlet, Haider faces – at least initially – not the fact of his father’s murder but his pre-
sumed disappearance. This resignification of Bhardwaj’s source text by a swerve toward Kashmir
owes to his discovery of Basharat Peer’s memoir of a Kashmir childhood, Curfewed Night (Peer
2010; see Bhardwaj and Peer 2014: vi; Singh 2014; Hoydis 2020). As co-writer of the screen-
play, Peer brings to it his lived experience as Kashmiri in India. The consequent triangulation
of Shakespeare, the Bollywood apparatus, and the Kashmir conflict, itself deeply shaped by that
apparatus, has been commented on in scholarly and popular domains – but largely to deter-
mine the postcolonial motivations behind and consequences of Bhardwaj’s adaptation of Shake-
speare.4 Some discussions do recognize the film’s mobilization of two “intertexts” – Hamlet
and Curfewed Night (Hoydis 2020) to depart from Bollywood Kashmir and reveal, instead, a
society scarred by disappeared men and the quest for justice led by their mothers and wives (Sen
2018). What remains unremarked on in academia and popular commentary alike is the film’s
consequent focus on Ghazala’s sexuality. A Kashmiri woman designated “half-widow” on the
disappearance of her husband finds herself in a limbo that is not merely juridical (Zia 2016).
Kashmiri society expects her to eliminate all hints of womanliness as she traverses the public
sphere, even if she presents herself very differently at home. This specific burden of the con-
flict on Kashmiri women is highlighted through Ghazala’s refusal to conform silently to these
societal expectations of the half-widow. Indeed, in a remarkable scene with Khurram, she calls
herself “a half-bride.” In one stroke, an abnormal state normalized through long-term conflict
is defamiliarized, its implications for a woman’s sexual needs laid bare.
Hilaal’s absence does not provoke in Ghazala a longing for him; rather, she expresses frankly
to a shocked Haider the revulsion she used to feel toward his father’s selfless medical work.
“Hilaal had lost himself in the hospital, a saint saving lives. His clothes, his skin reeked of blood.
The smell of death” (Bhardwaj 2014: 91). For a film that foregrounds the violence on Kashmir
and Kashmiri bodies perpetrated by the nation-state, it is a bold move to remind us simultane-
ously that such violence ricochets within the home and the family to damage the woman who
is meant to hold together this structure. Ghazala’s memory of being repulsed by Hilaal’s medi-
cal work joins her rejection of “half-widow” status to critique powerfully the conflict’s toll on
Kashmiri women – through a pointed invocation of temporality. As Ghazala reminds Haider,
“The wives of disappeared people are called ‘half-widows’ here. We can only wait” (Bhardwaj
2014: 92). The implications of this waiting unfold through the couplet Khurram sung to her.
Hilaal reeks of blood and death; Khurram woos her with the fragrance of springtime blossoms
85
and the promise of sexual quickening. Although as “half-bride” she wants to respond to his
overtures, as “half-widow” she cannot. Haider’s interruption of Ghazala’s song literally inter-
rupts the trajectory of the blossoming garden. That this metonymic link is established through
a Koshur folksong adds another affective dimension to Ghazala’s desire to break through stasis
and enter another temporality.
Since most Indians have little idea even that the Valley possesses an indigenous language
called Koshur (Kabir 2009), we can safely see Peer’s (rather than Bhardwaj’s) hand behind
the insertion of this couplet. In constellating the relationship between Khurram, Ghazala, and
Haider around it, Peer draws on the universal metaphor of mother (as) tongue, additionally
charged by the debilitations of long-term conflict on Kashmiri collective identity. “Oh my
Koshur mother, I swear, you are my vision and you are my cognition,” wrote Kashmiri poet,
Rahman Rahi, responding to those debilitations (Kabir 2009: 137–138). If Ghazala is mother
(tongue), moreover, Hilaal is associated with an Urdu ghazal, albeit one that uses the same hor-
ticultural imagery as the folksong. This shared content reminds us of the multilingual history
of Kashmir within which the two languages circulate (Kabir 2009: 135–141). The Urdu ghazal
recited by father and son, and the Koshur folksong, sung by mother and brother-in-law/ lover,
constitute an interlocked affective system whose meaning derives from the competition and
collaboration between these languages within the collective Kashmiri psyche. Rather than seek
to reconcile their conflicting affective charge, Peer has exploited it to suggest the irreconcil-
ability of Haider’s and Ghazala’s positions. While Ghazala longs for release from stasis through a
confirmation of Hilaal’s death, Haider demands the opposite: “please tell me mother, he’s alive,
he’s alive!” (Bhardwaj 2014: 93). This fundamental divergence of interests is pulled into a deeper
affective domain through the connotations of Urdu as a language of cerebral refinement, vs.
Koshur as the language of domesticity and embodied pleasure.
Escaping the Cage, Evading the Hawk

Peer’s citation of the Koshur folksong about love in springtime activates recognition of a long
Kashmiri investment in the Indo-Persian horticultural tradition. During the modernist period
in Kashmiri literature, this investment took on a specifically political turn – indeed the bold
reworking of gul-bulbul imagery by a poet such as Ghulam Rasool Majhoor is the very articula-
tion of Kashmiri literary modernity (Kachru 1981). For Kashmiris cognizant of their literary
culture, the folksong in Haider exists in a continuum with Mahjoor’s poetry, where the mytho-
poetic atemporality of the former is infused with the latter’s participation within a wider politi-
cal awakening amongst the Koshur-speaking population of the Kashmir Valley. The affective
associations of the language as mother tongue enables the lyric mode not only to permit the
coexistence of these contrary principles but also enhance their allegorical potential. Mahjoor’s
famous poem “Vwolo ha bagvano” (Come, gardener) clearly capitalizes on this semantic shim-
mer: “Who will set you free, captive bird, crying in your cage? Forge with your own hands,
the tools of your own deliverance” (Raina 1972: 1–5). This command, of proverbial ubiquity
amongst Koshur speakers, marshals the emotive power of the language to transform a recogniz-
able mythopoetic trope into a performative call for linguistic and subjective autonomy. Cyclical
temporality of the seasons is converted into the radical temporality of revolution. A rupture of
normality’s placid surface is urgently demanded so as to break through to another time – precisely
that of Sheikh Abdullah’s manifesto for Naya (new) Kashmir (Kanjwal 2018).
Mahjoor infuses his garden with a sense of immanent, trembling chaos. Thronging the gar-
den’s gates are thousands of laughing hyacinths even as inside, rank nettles proliferate, threaten-
ing to choke the roses. The gardener’s measured maintenance of order has to quicken in pace to
86
Hortus Interruptus
manage this dangerous acceleration. A series of imperatives articulates this new temporality as
hope, demand, and necessity, while linking the gardener’s speed-weeding to the revivification
of the stagnant garden with its caged birds and the creation of autonomous modes of breaking
free: “who will set you free, captive bird, crying in your cage? Forge with your own hands, the
instruments of your deliverance!” Mahjoor’s garden in distress revamps the inherited gul-bulbul
imagery by drawing on new personifications and a new temporality. Within modern Kashmiri
poetry, a further twist to the horticultural assemblage is provided by Mahjoor’s successor Rahman
Rahi, whose first anthology Nawroz-i-sabha, published in 1958, supplements the caged bulbul
and the watchful gardener with new dramatis personae – “the sparrow hawk in ambuscade for the
oriole.” This predatory bird (Koshur, baez) swooping down on the songbird in flight to carry it
off in its talons reappears in Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, “A Pastoral” (Ali 1997), which, through
intertextual allusions to both Rahi’s scenario and Mahjoor’s bulbul in springtime, masterfully
heightens the mounting danger and accelerated temporality that must attend hopes of returning
to Kashmir.
Running through modern Kashmiri literature, then, is a dense intertextuality around pre-
carious and vulnerable songbirds. This inner history is picked up in Haider to present Kashmir as
a hortus interruptus, both stuck in time and ever susceptible to danger. In responding to Ghazala’s
fears on discovering the schoolboy Haider’s attraction to Kashmiri militancy, her father-in-law
adopts a gnomic tone: “these are dark days. Birds of prey (kaale parinde) are circling above – they
prey without care – kites (cheel) grab sparrows (chooze) and falcons (baaz) feast on nightingales
(bulbuls)” (Bhardwaj 2014: 83). This avian gallery anticipates the film’s spectacular set-piece, the
song Bismil, that corresponds to the “play within the play” in Hamlet. The song is performed by
Haider and supporting dancers as wedding entertainment for Ghazala and Khurram. Through
lyrics, choreography, and setting, it deftly gathers the film’s manifold uses of the horticultural
assemblage into a dramatic problematization of female sexuality, time, happiness, and danger. In
this task, Bismil leans heavily on the Koshur literary tradition of avian precarity in conjunction
with the garden setting. It thus moves into a distinctly Kashmiri affective register a recognizable
feature of both English early modern theatre and Bollywood films: the play within the play on
the one hand (Nelson 1958) and the song and dance number on the other (Gopal and Moorti
2008). The interruptive quality shared by both metatheatrical devices consolidates the gulshan
as the hortus interruptus, even while giving viewers the key to the film’s message about love and
longing in a conflict zone.
Reddened Jhelum and the Sacrifice of Joy

Unusually for Bollywood, Bismil bestows on Kashmiri masculinity an uncompromising alterity –
through not guns and Islam (Kabir 2010) but, instead, signifiers drawn from the embodied and
performative culture of Kashmir. Against the stunning setting of Anantnag’s Martand (Sun)
Temple, long associated discursively with pre-Islamic Kashmiri antiquity (Kabir 2009: 80–94),
an all-male troupe led by Shahid Kapoor in the role of Haider dances vigorously to bellicose
percussion. The hint of menace in their athleticism is cathected on to towering puppets drawn
from the Kashmiri folk theatre bhand pather, particularly that of the bird of prey (Urdu baaz;
Koshur baez). These props reactivate the satirical and allegorical function of bhand pather even
as its language and theatricality morph into a Bollywood-style song-dance number, while the
latter’s other semiotic dimension, that of its lyrics, is developed into a parable of the hortus
interruptus. The song turns the standard gul-e-bulbul imagery on its head: don’t rendezvous with
the rose, it warns the nightingale. It subsequently evokes another scenario – a happy man and
woman whose coupledom is destroyed by a falcon circling the garden with death in its wings.
87
Intertextually recalling the songbird in the bird of prey’s talons as well as the springtime garden,
the connection is made only to be perverted: the rose exudes poison, not love. As the lyrics end
with the blood of the murdered man reddening the Jhelum river, reality, both intra- and extra-
diegetic, shatters the mythopoetic register.
A play of meaningful gazes between Haider, his mother, and his uncle/stepfather encourages
the song’s internal and external audiences to identify the waylaid woman as Ghazala, the mur-
dered man as Hilaal, and the rapacious falcon as Khurram. However, the sacrificial nightingale
that remains ungendered opens out the allegory to wider possibilities: the songbird could be
Ghazala, any Kashmiri – including Haider – and even Kashmir itself. The deceptive gul and
dangerous baaz begin signifying a host of forces threatening the multivalent bulbul’s happiness –
from Khurram’s machinations, to the Indian occupation, and, equally, Haider’s possessiveness of
Ghazala. By muddling expected alignments between pairs of symbols and the symbolized, the
song presents the Kashmiri psyche as a confused field of competing demands. The confusion is
compounded by Haider and Khurram both claiming Ghazala’s affections through indigenous
cultural forms: Khurram had wooed her with a folksong; now Haider channels folk theatre
to castigate his mother for remarrying. These conflicting mobilizations of Koshur as mother
(tongue) recalls but also dissipates Majhoor’s message of self-reliance to the bulbul – “forge with
your own hands, the tools of your deliverance.” Since home as a physical site is the first casualty
of conflict, only embodied resources for such “deliverance” remain. The film suggests that these
resources can become efficacious when channeled in different ways: through language as orality,
through the physicality of performance, through the body in nature, and through (hetero)sexual
fulfilment. Simultaneously, it suggests that under current conditions in Kashmir, such chan-
neling is nigh impossible.
The film complements Ghazala’s frustrated sexuality with the initially joyous relationship
between Haider and Arshia (the Ophelia figure). Their tender lovemaking, their intimate jokes
involving the Kashmiri accent, and their embrace within the hollow of a Chinar tree after
dancing with a troupe of bhands in a village, together suggest that, even in the midst of dev-
astation, embodied joy or alegría emerges as a healing force when eros is in consonance with
nature and with creative (including humorous) uses of the mother tongue. Yet this possibility is
raised only to be crushed. Haider’s inability to accept his mother’s sexuality is entangled with
his barely disguised Oedipal attraction to her, as figured in an erotically charged scene before
her wedding where he plants a kiss on her neck while fastening her wedding necklace. The
pathology of Haider’s erotic attachment to his mother inescapably impacts his relationship with
Arshia. At the same time, her father’s collusion with Khurram’s dirty politics and her brother’s
possessiveness situate hyper-patriarchy and the loss of moral bearings as the effect of long-term
conflict on the Kashmiri psyche. By the end of the film, the thwarting of sexual desire figured
as the hortus interruptus extends across the very land, and indeed, transforms it into a limitless
graveyard. This macabre setting for dialogues and songs follows the logic of Achille Mbembe’s
“necropolitics” (2019), inexorably leading to the narrative’s self-detonation through the suicide
bombing of Ghazala. For Mbembe, the suicide bomber is the logical culmination of resistance
that seizes from oppression the most radical agency possible. Haider transmits a somewhat dif-
ferent message: Arshia and Ghazala may exert ultimate sovereignty over themselves, but their
deaths foreclose the possibility of a time for pleasure in Kashmir.
An Urgent Way for Her Body to Learn Slowness

Haider boldly positions female sexuality as the hinge between the “mournful disquiet surround-
ing the notion of time” in Kashmir (Falak 2019), and the disruption of that disquiet through
88
Hortus Interruptus
flashes of embodied joy. Yet it cannot follow through its radical realizations. The suicides of
Ghazala and Arshia are the vanishing point where alegropolitics meets necropolitics; Haider
may have exacted his revenge in forcing Khurram to live his own “half-life,” but this conclusion
uneasily projects Khurram, wounded, hovering between life and death, as representing the stasis
of Kashmir society, suspended in what I earlier called “cryptopolitics” (Kabir 2009: 144–149).
More than a decade after I examined the cultural productions that led me to that formulation,
I seek evidence from Kashmir for hope as a resistive temporality. While reflecting my own evolu-
tion, this move does not want to deny the experience of stasis as Kashmiri reality. Indeed, the
refusal to “move forward” in step with the Indian state’s blueprint for Kashmir’s “progress” is
itself an act of resistance (Falak 2019) configuring an alternative phenomenology of “crip time”
(Misri 2020). Grappling with multiple temporal phenomenologies is fundamental to the strug-
gle to articulate a Kashmiri subjectivity through and in conflict. Haider harnesses the desiring
machines of the oppressor to suggest, to the viewing public of the postcolony, “crip time” as
a condition of the Kashmiri present. But to figure through it hope as and for another future,
representation has to accommodate the distension of time predicated by a woman’s demands for
her pleasure. This “erotohistory” (Freeman 2010) also must evade the constrictions of a heter-
onormative and ableist (Misri 2020) framing of that pleasure.
This frame dominates Haider, shaping its inability to depict an alegropolitics of female self-
fulfillment beyond the horizon of necropolitics. The film underlines its own shortcomings
through the red wool muffler that Arshia knits for her father. Used to bind the hands of her
lover Haider, and then abandoned outside his once-beautiful burnt house, it ultimately unravels
as does Arshia’s life. Its disintegrating trail leads me to a very different cinematic outcome for
resistive temporality when materialized through female creativity: Asiya Zahoor’s lyrical Stitch
(Zahoor 2018), which uses its 7.49 minutes to communicate an alternative response to daily life
confined and menaced by barbed wire and gunfire. Deploying these signifiers of Indian occupa-
tion, Zahoor’s camera interrupts its own task of immersing the viewer in the sights and sounds
of Kashmiri nature (birdsong, river and mountain, the squelch of mud) that constitute its young
female protagonist’s world. Just like the jagged tear on her headscarf as it catches the barbed
wire, which this schoolgirl clumsily stitches together, the conflict ruptures existence on the level
of her body as it grows into awareness of femininity and its public presentation. Curfew robs our
protagonist of the opportunity to enter an art competition whose prize money equals the price
of a new headscarf. Even as her sketches of the mountain landscape flutter to the ground, she
transposes the stitch on to a self-portrait, only to shade over it with intensely focused strokes.
Her cover-up of a cover-up transmits a coming of age through the realization that waiting
during a curfew without end can be surmounted by another temporality – the urgency of the
pencil stroke that makes creativity her salvation and solution.
In Majhoor’s words, again, “forge with your own hands, the tools of your deliverance!” The
schoolgirl’s fierce energy combines with Zahoor’s haptic focus on her feet stepping carefully
through mud, up the stairs, and across boulders. We feel her body learning to navigate world on
her own terms. The seizing of agency through a sensuous awareness of the female body in space
is also a reoccupation of time, a modulation of urgency and slowness initiated by the woman
as creator of art. It is Zahoor’s cinematographic (and philosophical) answer to the conundrum
expressed through her personification of the almond tree in the poem which gave an epigraph
to this essay. Zahoor’s insomniac tree can neither sleep nor breathe (Zahoor 2020: 43–44).
Aligning itself to the women “on their way/ to the Psychiatrist hospital up the hill” it asks us,
readers, “to ring the gardener.” The tree is sick – of waiting for spring to come; and it is afraid
of “regressing” to a future where its “wounds would rust.” This “crip” intervention within linear
time nevertheless ends with an address of hope to the gardener: that he would come soon. After
89
all, “I stayed awake all this while/ to shelter the story of your blossoms” – a closing observation
that brings together the voices of the tree and the poet. Zahoor reminds the gardener of his debt
to the female Kashmiri contribution in ensuring community resilience during the indefinite
prolongation of conflict. To bear this burden, of sheltering the “story of the blossoms” is to be
“a bird of a yet to be born garden,” forever “running against time” (Zahoor 2020: 35); but to
regain agency is to “swim against the current, regaining time” (Zahoor 2020: 39). Zahoor’s
anthology itself enacts this reclamation of temporality: “She loiter[s] in its pages, my defined
space mine alone/ you can’t scare me tapping the watch on your wrist” (Zahoor 2020: 37).
Zahoor frequently disrupts the classic horticultural tropes sedimented into the Kashmiri
imaginary. She diverts the heteronormative use of shady trees for romantic trysts into the
tree’s dream of “an odd consummation of a young girl by a shady old Chinar” (Zahoor 2020:
20), using this peculiar inter-species jealousy to Kashmir’s iconic tree to suggest conflict’s
derailment of nature’s nurturing role. Though this elemental confusion recalls Haider, Zahoor
carves out through it a specifically Kashmiri, female, mode of self-care that operates outside
the box of regulated heteronormative activity. Sexuality itself is not under the lens: rather,
her interest is in reconnecting trees to women (however difficult that task may be), and in
restoring value to intergenerational female bonding. Even if there “is a daughter who is yet
to be conceived,” the poet will address her, enumerating the would-be mother’s gifts – that,
significantly, include “Hamlet’s unfinished line/ for the Vale of Kashmir/ to be or not be,
that is . . .” (Zahoor 2020: 29–30). Scrambling time further, this potentiality is already ful-
filled in the “soft revolutions” of her grandmother, “turning the fleece of a Kashmir goat
into cashmere” (and indeed, into “Kashmir”), whose “lullabies” and “prayers” counter the
“heavy guns” and “barbed wire,” and who offered “trays of mustard rice to a shrine in the
mountains” despite a soothsayer’s prediction that “embers [would] turn to ashes” (Zahoor
2020: 34). Zahoor sidesteps this dire prediction. She uses her poetic agency to create a lyric
time whereby her grandmother’s restorative act can signify the immanence of community.
Yet this is no cuddly octogenarian: Zahoor’s grandmother diverts routine feminine chores
into fearsome yet casual destruction of the occupier’s temporality: “inhal[es] embers” of her
own igniting and “exhales fire” as “she paused her singing/ to boil almanacs in a samovar”
(Zahoor 2020: 33–34).
As with Haider, then, Zahoor’s poems and film suggest cumulatively that, in Kashmir, time
itself “is out of joint” (to quote from Hamlet) and must be rebooted through a radical uncou-
pling of female pleasure and agency from heteronormative co-optation of the natural rhythms
that dictate the garden’s blossoming. Through a detailed reading of Haider, I showed how this
agenda converts the gulshan to the hortus interruptus. The film’s intended critique of the forces
holding Kashmir at ransom cannot push beyond the detonation that blows apart the female
body attempting to rewrite the pleasure script. Nevertheless, it leaves the viewer of popular
culture some important glimpses into a Kashmiri habitus defined by a sensorium alternative to
Bollywood’s stubborn Kashmir clichés, including wintertime and folksong. In the fragments
of Zahoor’s lyric consciousness, however, such flashes come together to move alegropolitics
beyond the trap of privileging heteronormative romance (however transgressive) as the cor-
nerstone for rebuilding community. “I am a torn-off page/ from one of my burnt books,” says
Zahoor (2020: 64), but this book exists, for us to read and hear her voice through. Despite
awaiting men with chainsaws, “a headless Chinar still says, RESISTANCE” (Zahoor 2020: 21).
And despite its insomnia and tiredness, Zahoor’s almond tree reminds us that, starting from its
very conception as a poem by a Kashmiri woman, there can indeed be a time for alegropolitics
in Kashmir.
90
Hortus Interruptus
I gratefully acknowledge Ashaq Hussain Parray for his invaluable research assistance toward
the writing of this chapter. I also thank Rosa Beunel, Deepti Misri, and Asiya Zahoor for mak-
ing available materials that were essential for its argumentation.
Notes
1 Zahoor lived and worked between New Delhi and Baramulla until late 2020; since then, she has moved
to the USA on a postdoctoral fellowship.
2 I use the word azaadi fully cognizant of its slippery semantics that arises from its shifting mobiliza-
tion within a long-term conflict zone. In my usage, developed from work on the ground, it signals
“a yearning for a confident, well-defined Kashmiri identity . . . compress[ing] a present-tense denial
of the right to identity, memory, and history, with a messianic aspiration toward a different future. It
confers on to Kashmiris a folded temporality” (Kabir 2009: 10; see also ibid., 152–54 and passim). This
essay takes further these early thoughts on the mutual implication of the demand for azaadi and the
Kashmiri experience of time.
3 Since the screenplay, which is presented in Hindi/ Urdu (rendered in Devanagari script) and English
translation, exists alongside the film as a collaborative publication (Bhardwaj and Peer 2014), I cite from
its translation by page number. When the poetic quality of the dialogue is important for the argument,
I quote from the screenplay’s Hindi/ Urdu original in Roman transliteration, and add its accompany-
ing translation, which I sometimes deviate from slightly to make explicit the interpretative point I am
making through the quote.
4 The powerful pull of the Shakespearean text has so deeply shaped commentary on Haider that even
those who wish to turn away from the question of literary influence rehearse in detail the (post)colonial
genealogy linking Shakespeare to Bhardwaj (Casey 2018; Hoydis 2020; Sarkar 2016; Sen 2018). In con-
trast, I privilege examining what the film is trying to do by bringing Haider to Hamlet via Bollywood’s
imbrication in a long history of the camera in Kashmir. While popular reviews of Haider note this
imbrication, I place the film within an alternative genealogy of responses that try and escape it (Kabir
2009, 2010).
Works Cited
Aben, Rob and Saskia De Wit. 1999. The Enclosed Garden: History and Development of the Hortus Conclusus
and its Reintroduction into the Present-Day Urban Landscape. Amsterdam: 010 Publishers.
Ali, Agha Shahid. 1997. The Country without A Post Office. New York: WW Norton & Company.
Bhardwaj, Vishal, dir. 2014. Film: Haider.
Bhardwaj, Vishal and Basharat Peer. 2014. Haider: The Original Screenplay. New Delhi: HarperCollins
India.
Casey, Jim. 2018. “Indian Fakespeare.” In Where is Adaptation? Mapping Cultures, Texts, and Contexts,
edited by Casie Hermansson and Janet Zepernick, 141–159. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Falak, Uzma. 2019. “Resistance and Pain Beyond Words Challenging the Narrative Warfare in Kashmir.”
https://thepolisproject.com/resistance-and-pain-beyond-words-challenging-the-narrative-warfare-in-
kashmir/#.X3m4Ly2ZPwc.
Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gopal, Sangita and Sujata Moorti, eds. 2008. Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hoydis, Julia. 2020. “Hamlet Revision: Bhardwaj’s Haider as Crossmapping and Contact Zone.” Adapta-
tion. https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apaa035.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2009. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
———. 2010. “The Kashmiri as Muslim in Bollywood’s ‘New Kashmir Films.’ ” Contemporary South Asia
18(4): 373–385.
91
———. 2016. “The New Pastoral: Environmentalism and Conflict in Contemporary Writing from Kash-
mir.” In South-Asian Fiction in English, edited by Alex Tickell, 199–215. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2020. “The Fleeting Taste of Mazaa: From Embodied Philology to an Alegropolitics for South
Asia.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43(2): 243–254.
Kachru, Braj B. 1981. Kashmiri Literature. Vol. 4. Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2018. “The New Kashmiri Woman.” Economic & Political Weekly 53(47): 37.
Kaul, Suvir. 2015. Of Gardens and Graves: Essays on Kashmir, Poems in Translation. New Delhi: Three Essays
Collective.
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press.
Culture 32(3): 539–565.
Nelson, Robert James. 1958. Play within a Play. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Peer, Basharat. 2010. Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in his
Homeland. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Raina, T. N. 1972. An Anthology of Modern Kashmiri Verse. Poona: S. J. Patwardhan.
Roth, Nicolas. 2019. “Poppies and Peacocks, Jasmine and Jackfruit: Garden Images and Horticultural
Knowledge in the Literatures of Mughal India, 1600–1800.” Journal of South Asian Intellectual His-
tory 1(1): 48–78.
Sarkar, Abhishek. 2016. “Haider and the Nation-State: Shakespeare, Bollywood, and Kashmir.” South Asian
Review 37(2): 29–46.
Sen, Amrita. 2018. “Locating Hamlet in Kashmir. Haider, Terrorism, and Shakespearean Transmission.” In
Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an Era of Textual Exhaustion, edited by Sonya Freeman Loftis, Allison Kellar, and
Lisa Ulevich, 87–100. New York and London: Routledge.
Singh, Harneet. 2014. “ ‘Kashmir Is the Hamlet of My film,’ Says Vishal Bhardwaj on Haider.”
The Indian Express, October 5. http://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/bollywood/
kashmir-is-the-hamlet-of-my-film/.
Waheed, Mirza. 2015. The Book of Gold Leaves. Harmondsworth: Penguin UK.
Zahoor, Asiya, dir. 2018. Film: The Stitch.
Zahoor, Asiya. 2020. Serpents Under My Veil. New Delhi: Tethys.
Zia, Ather. 2016. “The Spectacle of a Good Half-Widow: Women in Search of their Disappeared Men in
the Kashmir Valley.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 39(2): 164–175.
92
SECTION II
Militarism, Humanitarianism,
Occupation
Mona Bhan
Using ethnographic and archival methods, the chapters in this section analyze how occupation
works through a complex intertwining of legal, economic, and geographic interventions that
violently impose a particular vision of territoriality in Kashmir. The chapters consider some of
the key modalities through which state terror operates in Kashmir and is materialized every day
through juridical and extra juridical mechanisms – through laws that are purportedly humani-
tarian (Ghosh and Duschinski), state-imposed trade regulatory mechanisms that repress rather
than evoke cross-border linkages (Saraf ), and bodies of young Kashmiri men that are routinely
dehumanized and made non-grievable (Ganie). Occupation exterminates Kashmiri Muslim
bodies but it also obliterates histories and geographies that challenge the state’s social and spatial
orders. While the chapters reveal the quotidian operations of power in Kashmir, they also docu-
ment how people’s resistance disrupts the totalitarian powers of an occupying regime. Everyday
practices of recalling and renarrativizing alternate histories challenge the boundedness of Indian
territoriality, and Kashmir’s place in it (Kaur).
Such alternate histories, as Aditi Saraf reminds us, are not fictive but linked fundamentally
to Kashmir’s geographical and trade connections with places in South and Central Asia. Mate-
rial routes on which Kashmiris traversed and carried their goods and commodities are integral
to visions of the past and future, shaping people’s continued resistance to violent imperial and
postcolonial border-making projects. Engaging in a multiscalar analysis, Saraf first tracks how
in urban bazaars of Srinagar, trade networks become a “field for both expressing and mediating
the politics of self-determination,” and how controlling trading routes, particularly along the
contested Line of Control, is an “important component of the Indian state’s militarized gov-
ernmentality in Kashmir.” Drawing from her ethnographic fieldwork, Saraf demonstrates the
centrality of the bazaar as a site of “social movements and solidarities,” arguing how the work of
trade is deeply political in contexts of intense securitization. Everyday practices of participating
in protests and shutdowns aligned traders and shopkeepers politically with the movement of
azaadi while their labor in ensuring “the flow of essential provisions during prolonged curfew,
strikes, and other forms of depredation” sustained the movement. Such flows of goods and
payments, and commodities and artifacts, gain even greater salience when analyzed against the
backdrop of historic and contemporary border-making processes in which controlling and con-
taining trade networks became significant ways to enforce state sovereignty over messy geogra-
phies of travel and sociality. She emphasizes a range of state-initiated “regulatory fabrications”
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-9
Mona Bhan
that included bizarre trade regulations, carefully devised vocabularies, and everyday processes of
control and containment that only make sense as political instruments meant to “repress older
geographies of contiguity and commerce” rather than enable them.
But memories are hard to repress. Bhavneet Kaur’s chapter evocatively demonstrates how
everyday artifacts, quotidian objects in people’s homes that include currency notes, quince
apples, and pherans, exert their emotional, visceral force and enable a “different kind of retell-
ing of the Tehreek.” Such articulations are not dependent on oral and textual narratives alone.
Focusing on people’s “sensory and embodied recollections,” she gently pieces together often
“invisibilized practices of remembrance” and situates them within the larger politics of resistance
in Kashmir. Everyday social life is a key arena where political violence exerts a forceful presence
and where memories of pain, loss, and grief are embedded and engraved, existing often outside
the “margins of speech” but nevertheless producing what she calls a “perpetuity of grief.” Such
enduring forms of grief haunt individuals and communities but they also serve as testimonies to
the gruesomeness of loss under conditions of occupation. When language freezes or is rendered
numb, women’s dreams and songs become “artifacts” that embody the intensity and viscerality
of pain.
Mohd Tahir Ganie’s chapter focuses on youth mobilizations and the forging of what he
calls an “insurgent political consciousness” through multiple “expressions and modes of dis-
sent.” Through a close attention to class and gendered forms of protest, Ganie presents a dense
and complex portrait of the resistance landscape in Kashmir – art, music, poetry, graffiti, and
stones are all varied expressions of youth resistance in Kashmir that serve the goals of Kashmir’s
national liberation. Youth mobilizations rely on local networks of resistance as much as they
draw from and forge transnational linkages through social media platforms. As Ganie argues,
the youth of Kashmir constitute a new political generation that has come of age amidst India’s
violent war in Kashmir, rising Islamophobia across the globe, and the US War on Terror. At
the same time, youth politics, while remarkably different since 2008, is an “organic extension”
of intergenerational politics for azaadi that has been an integral part of Kashmir’s collective
political consciousness for decades. Through careful conversations with protest participants and
political activists, Ganie counters Indian media caricatures of young stone pelters as misguided,
criminal, and antisocial, or as dangerous elements who have been radicalized by discourses of
Islamic resurgence. On the contrary, he documents young people’s experiences of participat-
ing in funerary processions for rebels who are deeply respected for their resolve and integrity
of purpose even as their bodies are deemed “non-grievable” by the state. Amidst a context
of deep silencing enforced by the state and military apparatus, repression of youth politics on
university campuses, and the near total lack of political opportunities to dissent, stone pelting
expresses the “insurgent consciousness” of Kashmiri youth while the street emerges as a key site
of political theatre. Although the state attempts to silence street protests using pellet guns and
tear gas shells, for the youth funerary processions and stone pelting become means to “reclaim
the public sphere.”
Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh and Haley Duschinski’s chapter is a fine-grained courtroom eth-
nography of the high courts in Kashmir where thousands of young Kashmiri men, criminal-
ized for their “habitual” stone pelting or protests, struggle to free themselves from the clutches
of a “lawless yet legally saturated carceral grid,” which, the authors argue, is “driven by the
imperative to keep political dissidents in permanent limbo.” An instrument of this “cyclical and
fluctuating system of contingent illegal and legal detentions,” or “carceral grid,” are laws such as
the Public Safety Act (PSA), which produces infinite deferrals of justice and cements the legal
context of permanent emergency in a zone of occupation. PSA cases literally swallow up young
bodies, throwing them into a state of prolonged and indefinite incarceration, often without
94
Militarism, Humanitarianism, Occupation
their families knowing the whereabouts of their kin in custody. And once these PSAs are filed,
the authors argue, “the only remedy is to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the J&K
High Court.” Considered to be a fundamental element of the rule of law and a legal mechanism
against state-inflicted terror and abuse, habeas corpus petitions have routinely been used by
Kashmiri lawyers to fight for detainees who are jailed under preventive detention laws such as
the PSA. And yet, Ghosh and Duschinski show how habeas corpus litigations in Kashmir, even
as they rely on humanitarian registers, end up “normalizing and consolidating the practices of
arbitrary detentions and state terror.” In other words, such petitions serve as integral elements of
India’s “counterinsurgency lawfare” against Kashmiri dissenters. The habeas corpus allows for
the “filtering” of India’s occupational violence through colonial emergency laws. In so doing,
such “humanitarian” laws package India’s democracy for global consumption and secure India’s
performative investments in juridical redressal and the rule of law.
Taken together, the chapters demonstrate how multiple iterations of militarized control in the
Valley work to silence Kashmiris. Through permanent emergency regulations, border-making
rituals, and discursive maneuvers that reframe Kashmiri protestors as seditious, misguided, or
criminal, the state’s legal, juridical, and economic interventions have worked in concert to
extend and cement India’s occupation of Kashmir. Resistance, too, thrives in the least sus-
pected spaces – as Kashmiri streets become sites of political theatre, and household objects the
embodiments of loss and grief, Kashmiris assert their relentless will to persist despite the ever-
expanding powers of a repressive military state.
95
7
CLAIMING THE STREETS
Political Resistance Among Kashmiri Youth
Mohd Tahir Ganie
Introduction
This chapter focuses on the youth demographic that has played a vital role and assumed greater
significance in the latest phase of the Kashmiri self-determination movement. Contextualizing
the Kashmiri youth resistance within the militarized landscape and colonial control of Kash-
mir, the chapter examines the forms and avenues utilized by the Kashmiri youth to resist the
state. The analysis is based on participant observation in the post-2008 protests, semi-structured
interviews with protest participants and other political actors, and the review of the media and
official reports about these protests.
The chapter advances three key arguments. First, in the post-2008 period Kashmiri youth
has emerged as the most significant political actor in the new dynamic phase of the Kashmiri
self-determination movement where violent and nonviolent modes of resistance co-exist. Visi
ble in media visuals and larger political discourses, the contemporary youth population in Kash-
mir can be characterized as the new political generation because a large section of this youth
population, unlike their parent’s generation, is embedded in the social media ecosystem, which
has emerged as a site of “everyday political talk” or “micro-political engagement” (Vromen
et al. 2015) and anti-state resistance, thus bolstering the Kashmiri self-determination movement
by creating transnational linkages and alternative media platforms to circumvent state censorship
(Osuri 2019). The newness of this generation is also due to its unique historical location where
its formative experiences and political subjectivity are shaped by the complex of the raging
armed conflict, the post-9/11 world order, and the concomitant rise of Islamophobia/War
on Terror discourses that have direct bearing on Muslim youth around the world (Bayet and
Herrera 2010).
Second, by virtue of the successful intergenerational transmission of the insurgent conscious-
ness in Kashmiri society, the new political generation of Kashmir is part (and organic extension)
of what we might call the mobilized generation, an ensemble of intergenerational adherents of
the azaadi movement cutting across age, gender, and class. As such, frame-alignment, which
social movement theorists such as Benford and Snow (2000) view as an important element for
social mobilization, is of lesser relevance in the context of Kashmir self-determination because
pro-azaadi organizations do not necessarily need to reach out to the Kashmiri public to enlist
or mobilize their support for the movement, because popular support is a given, as reflected,
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-10 97
Mohd Tahir Ganie
for example, in the constant and near universal backing Hurriyat’s hartal calls receive from the
public. Nonetheless, the lack of political opportunities has stymied institutionalization of the
Kashmiri youth resistance. The securitization of Kashmiri youth, that is, state viewing the youth
(and the youth bulge in Kashmir) in security terms, has meant that only state-sanctioned space
and avenues are publicly open for political engagement for the Kashmiri youth. While lack of
innovations and reforms in Hurriyat’s organizational structure has meant that the energy of
the new political generation could not be channeled into a disciplined party politics, relentless
state persecution of Hurriyat members and severe restrictions on the normal functioning of the
Hurriyat and other dissident groups has also created disincentives for youth to formally be part
of any resistance group (Kanjwal 2016). Those associated with independent student organiza-
tions have faced police harassment and jails. Consequently, political expressions of Kashmiri
youth remained confined to the street protests or social media, and in some cases to armed
resistance.1 Since societies differ in class, location, and gender, a youth generation also reflects
this internal stratification based on social markers, which shape their distinct responses to the
shared historical circumstances. Internal stratification creates the “unmistakable social and spatial
heterogeneity within the [Kashmiri] resistance movement,” with the youth of certain (mostly
working-class) neighborhoods laboring more for the azaadi than other localities (Sharma 2020:
49). With public sphere severely (and often violently) restricted by the state through deep mili-
tarization of civilian spaces, the mobilized generation is often forced into stone-pelting protests,
as reflected in the data since 2008 (see Table 7.1). Stone throwing is an expression of the insur-
gent consciousness of the new generation of politicized youth, but its prevalence also reflects the
lack of political opportunity in general (Ganie 2021). Therefore, while agreeing with the criti-
cism of political opportunity theory that it tends to post-facto attribute opportunity to any political
mobilization, this chapter nevertheless frames opportunity as an important factor for explaining
the frequent youth-led stone-pelting incidents in Kashmir and particularly the absence of mass
protests after the removal of Article 370 in August 2019.
Finally, from a macro perspective, the youth political resistance in Kashmir is largely driven
by what John Cockell (2000) calls “the structural paralysis” in the relationship between India
and Kashmir. Fundamental incompatibility between Indian state’s idea of “national security”
and Kashmiris’ sense of national identity and group security engenders a condition where the
Table 7.1 Stone-throwing protests since 2009
Year Stone-throwing incidents Arrests
2009 278 493

2010 2794
2011 330 5417
2012 284
2013 500+ 1325
2014 449
2015 730
2016 2808 10,571
2017 1412 2838
2018 1458 3797
2019 1999 765 (Aug–Nov)
Source: Ministry of Home Affairs, government of India, and Ministry

of Home, Jammu & Kashmir government (https:// kashmirlife.net/
trapped-in-the-cycle-2176/).
98
Claiming the Streets
Indian state imposes a structure of violence in Kashmir to maintain its control over the territory
and its indigenous population. The use of surveillance technologies to monitor Kashmiri social
media through state-sponsored “cyber volunteers” (Ali 2021) and widespread deployment of
pellet guns against civilian demonstrators is a practice of state control that was shaped by the
post-2008 youth-led resistance, which encompassed both streets and the social media. Under-
pinned by a massive force of nearly half a million security personnel (Armed Conflict Survey:
268), technologies of surveillance (Falak 2015; MHA Annual Report 2017–2018: 16) and vari-
ous counterinsurgency tactics (Bhan and Bose 2020), the architecture of state security while
controlling and subjugating the local population of Kashmir also, paradoxically, stimulating their
resistance. Aggression inherent in the state architecture of control triggers and sustains the local
antagonism against the state and its different facets. Kashmiri youth resistance therefore must be
located in this specific militarized context to understand its dynamics.
A Failed Dialogue Amid the Youth Bulge

Following the 1999 Kargil War and the deadly 2002 military standoff on the borders, India
and Pakistan resumed the dialogue process in the early 2000s. The 2003 Agra Summit started
on high expectations but failed to produce any breakthrough on the core issue of Kashmir.
The two countries continued to talk during the tenure of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf from 2004 to 2008. Annual fatalities in Kash-
mir decreased from approximately 3000 in 2002 to 500 in 2008 (South Asia Terrorism Portal).
Although human rights violations faced by Kashmiris did not cease, new political developments
created a hope for an improved political situation. In 2004, the Indian government announced
INR 24,000 crore economic package and the J&K government constituted Economic Recon-
struction Agency (ERA), expediting infrastructural development in Kashmir.2 Gradual but lim-
ited easing of restrictions provided political opportunity to All Parties Hurriyat Conference
(APHC) and other pro-Azaadi groups to conduct their activities and expand their base. In 2006
and 2007, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF) successfully conducted its Signature
Campaign and Safr-e-Azaadi ( Journey to Freedom) program, and Tehreek-e-Hurriyat (formed
in 2004 after the split with APHC) organized countercultural programs to the Chief Minister
Ghulam Nabi Azaadi’s initiative of organizing Gandhi Jayanti in Kashmir.3
However, this period of relative calm was soon shattered by the 2008 mass protests and
counter-protests on the Amaranth Land Row which lasted for two months from June 23 until
August 2. Indian security forces killed 46 persons during the protests.4 In the Kashmir Valley,
the protests soon turned into a mass anti-India uprising, particularly after Jammu-based Hindu-
nationalist groups imposed an economic blockade on Kashmiri Muslims. Kashmiris began
thronging the rallies organized by Hurriyat and other civil society groups between August 11
and 24, 2008.5 Men, women, and children marched together from town to town demanding
azaadi from India, first to north Kashmir’s Sopore and Baramulla then to south Kashmir’s Pamp-
ore and finally to the capital city Srinagar. However, the scheduled Lal Chowk Chalo rally of
August 24 was violently crushed by India by imposing a stringent curfew, mass arrests of politi-
cal activists and leaders, and the killing of at least five civilians, including a Kashmiri woman.
While different sectors of Kashmiri society joined the mass rallies of August 2008, for
the young generation the whole event was a momentous occasion, which initiated them
into anti-India political rebellion. The insurrectionary force created by the uprising did not
dissipate when the protests died after the violent state crackdown on August 24. This revo-
lutionary force was acquired and embodied by the new youth generation, who engaged in
later street protests that were often accompanied by stone throwing – a popular mode of
99
Mohd Tahir Ganie
political protest in post-2008 Kashmir (Ganie 2021). Youth-led street protests, particularly
stone throwing, were a challenging new political development for India, which had, by the
mid-2000s, largely controlled the Kashmiri armed rebellion that broke out in the late 1980s
(Staniland 2014).
By 2011, more than half of Kashmir’s 6.8 million population was under 30 years old. The
youth population (15–30 years old) had reached nearly 30 percent (more than two million).
This demographic surplus or youth bulge infused the Kashmiri resistance with new energy and
contributed to frequent street protests. Youth bulge is a stage where a country or a region wit-
nesses increased young population relative to the general population. In the absence of a thriv-
ing economy and good governance that can absorb the young people and properly channel their
energy, the youth bulge potentially turns into a destabilizing factor (Ganie 2020). Economic
and governance factors alone do not lead to youth bulge–linked political crisis. There are other
sociological factors. However, many Indian commentators tend to emphasize the former to
explain the Kashmir case, as a way to depoliticize the youth-led protests in Kashmir. Unemploy-
ment is certainly a problem but only a part of the grievances of the Kashmiri youth, and these
commentators often overlook the fact that in the late modernity young people usually enter
the labor market in their late twenties or early thirties, because they spend an extended period
of their youthful years in colleges and universities (Furlong 2013: 4). Unlike the settled adults,
young people (particularly from the middle class) are usually removed from economic interests
and tend to question the established norms and values. Youth partake in political resistance or
street protests, mostly because they are not yet entrenched in the demanding situations of famil-
ial, social, and professional obligations (McAdam 1986).6
Youth and Political Resistance: A Brief Theoretical Overview

Scholars have theorized youth resistance in varied socio-political and economic contexts.
Tuck and Yang (2011) identify four broader and overlapping themes: cultural resistance (Dun-
combe 2002), everyday acts of resistance (Scott 1985, 1990), youth development as resistance
(Ginwright, Noguera and Commarota 2006), and social justice framework of resistance (Solor-
zano and Delgado Bernal 2001). At the heart of all these perspectives is the notion of youth
acting on their agency to disrupt, thwart, modify, challenge, or navigate the regimes of state
control and the processes of inequalities and to strive for emancipation, liberation, and justice.
However, rather than romanticizing youth resistance we must see it as “revelatory” in the way it
can illuminate social reality and power (Kelley 2014: 87).
Critical psychologist Michelle Fine (2014) provides a nuanced picture of youth resistance
when she writes:
Youth, like the rest of us, speak in marbleized tongues, braiding discursive currents of
critique and fear, desire and ambivalence, a yearning to exist and a profound wish to
be-long. Resistance is never pure, never simply oppositional or rejecting; it is often
enacted with an affective bouillabaisse of anger, disappointment, sense of injustice,
desire, yearning and ambivalence.
(50)
Thus, like elsewhere, we can expect Kashmiri youth resistance taking different forms and var-
ied expressions. Resistance could mean Kashmiri youth negotiating the oppressive political
environment by creating counter-maps “to make social life possible” ( Junaid 2019); forming
100
intimate networks or “affective female alliance” against varied forms of domination and sur-
veillance (Falak 2018); engaging in “protest photography” (Kanjwal, Bhat and Zahra 2018);
using metaphors as part of counternarratives to the integrationist agenda of the state (Ganie
2019); designing “counter-calendars” in response to state (visual) propaganda with respect to the
imagination of Kashmiri youth (Misri 2020); surviving the traumatizing violence of conflict and
war (Zia 2019); pushing back against assimilation into the hegemonic Western value systems
and modes of thought embodied in the rationalizing discourses of modernity and humanism;
carving a space for personal politics that adheres to the agenda of global justice and inter-
civilizational struggle against neo-liberal order; or choosing death to defy state’s power over
their lives (Dar 2018).
When located in the specific context of the militarized administration of Kashmir, political
resistance of Kashmiri youth would then essentially mean the vigorous refusal to the assimila-
tionist project of Indian nationalism, which seeks to establish Indian rule over Kashmir as a fait
accompli so as to deny the right to Kashmiri self-determination as provided under the UNSC
Resolutions (47, 51, 80, 91). Politically, this refusal to be forcibly assimilated can manifest and
find its expressions in diverse forms of everyday acts of resistance, but to emerge as a collective
force it must negotiate the political opportunity structure that would determine its potency in
terms of its organizing power.
Since the 1950s, the Kashmiri resistance has been carried on by disparate political formations
(for most part by the Plebiscite Front) that were consistently repressed by the India state. Kash-
miri resistance took a more militant form in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, All Parties Hur-
riyat Conference (APHC) became its foremost political representative. In the post-2008 period,
the movement percolated through the new youth generation, whose formative experiences
were constituted in a protracted armed conflict which they felt and observed intimately. The
new youth generation experienced the war-induced trauma, witnessed and faced the human
rights violations, and organically became participants in the clash of narratives on the Kashmir
issue. Political consciousness, attitude, and behavior of the Kashmiri youth generation, there-
fore, must be located in their unique historical location, which shaped their political subjectiv-
ity. Traumatic events bear deeply on the consciousness and self-identity of a generation whose
internalized experiences of those events develop into a set of distinct values, interests, and politi-
cal orientation (Edmunds and Turner 2002: 13–14). However, who labors for azaadi (resistance)
by taking part in (risky) street protests depends to a large extent on a person’s positionality –
class, gender, and location.
Navigating the Militarized Space

Indian rule over Kashmir has two broad dimensions: legal and spatial. India has usurped Kash-
miri sovereignty through what Duschinski and Ghosh (2017) call “occupational constitutional-
ism.” Establishing political dominance and territorial control over Kashmir by constituting legal
mechanisms, India has also created a state of permanent emergency and crisis in Kashmir by
making preventive detention as the key component of its coercive governance (ibid.: 20). The
legal aspect of Indian rule is complemented by the spatial occupation, which was consolidated
following the outbreak of the armed insurgency in the late 1980s – when India adopted the mil-
itary strategy of area dominance to quell the popular uprising. This entailed placing numerous
armed units of Indian army and paramilitary in the military camps that were set up inside and
around the civilian areas of Kashmir. This elaborate system of control and surveillance allowed
India to rapidly mobilize its troops to quell anti-India protests and kill the insurgents with armed
101
Mohd Tahir Ganie
units within Operation Sectors/Zones reinforcing each other swiftly. Anthropologist Mohamad
Junaid (2019) draws an apt picture of the architecture of this militarized occupation:
Housed in camps, cantonments, and bunkers – built inside schools, hospitals, pub-
lic buildings, and orchards – and checking public movement through watch towers,
check-points, CCTV cameras, and mobile patrols, Indian military occupied almost
all public spaces in Kashmir. Kashmir was continuously divided and re-divided into
military sectors, operational zones, and special police ranges. A totalizing counterin-
surgency grid, underpinned by a logic of “security” and “control,” was laid over the
region which not only prevented protests but also created elaborate restrictions on
everyday life, pushing Kashmiris further toward armed struggle.
( Junaid 2019: 5)
This vast multifarious militarization affects everyone, from subaltern to middle class to business-
people, demarcating the permissible boundaries of movement and action for Kashmiri civilians.
Some places are more vulnerable to the ill-effects of such militarization than others, such as
the areas closer to the Line of Control and the villages where media cannot reach easily (Bhan
2014). A hard fact of everyday life in Kashmir, excessive militarization has damaged ecology
(Kanth and Ghosh 2015) as well as the mental health of people, and exacerbated the vulner-
ability of and unease among women, particularly in rural areas where socio-economic structure
requires women to be mobile outside their homes. It is in this space marked by deep militariza-
tion that the Kashmiri youth must corporeally and discursively perform their dissent and assert
themselves politically.
Resisting with Stones

Initially, stone-throwing protests (called kanni-jang in local parlance) in Kashmir were confined
to a few pockets of Srinagar (the inner-city neighborhood of Maisuma and the old city areas
or Downtown) and Baramulla. In 2009, around 278 stone-throwing incidents were reported in
Kashmir for which the police arrested 493 persons.7 In the first two months of 2010, the police
arrested a further 419 persons. According to the J&K government data, 3408 stone-throwing
incidents were reported during the first three years of the 2010s: 2794 (2010), 330 (2011), and
284 (2012).8 When the 2016 anti-India uprising erupted, stone-throwing protests surged once
again, with more than 2300 incidents reported between July and December.9 By July 2019,
incidents of stone throwing had witnessed a “significant drop” of 40 incidents by mid-year,
but the abrogation of Article 370 in August triggered a fresh bout of stone-throwing protests,
despite New Delhi putting Kashmir under an unprecedented communication lockdown and
saturating the region with the highest ever military presence.10 Approximately 1193 stone-
throwing incidents were reported in the post-August 2019 period, while the number for the
entire year (2019) stood at 1999 incidents, the highest since 2017.11
As armed militancy re-emerged from south Kashmir around 2013 and turned into a full-
blown insurgency by 2015, regular gunfights broke out between armed groups and Indian
soldiers. To create an opening for the trapped rebels, young Kashmiris started disrupting the
gunfights by hurling stones at Indian troops. On a few occasions, these tactics worked but at
a high cost. Indian troops killed nearly 60 pro-rebel protestors near the gunfight sites in 2018
alone.12 These developments created a new security challenge for India, with Inspector General
of ( J&K) Police Vijay Kumar terming stone pelting as a larger issue than militancy (Yusuf 2021).
102
The View From New Delhi

The Indian state blames Pakistan or Kashmiri “separatist” groups for anti-India protests in
Kashmir. For example, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (2017: 6) writes about the 2016 anti-
India uprising: “The year 2016 has seen a change in Pak tactics following a strategy of the
superimposition of militancy over civil resistance through radicalization by vested interests and
social media.” Indian media, which often toe the official line on the Kashmir issue, framed the
stone-throwing protests as a work of a separatist syndicate or psychologically disturbed youth
or paid agents of Pakistan. For example, Lieutenant General Ata Syed Hasnain, who served as
the top commanding officer of Indian army in Kashmir in the post-2008 period, remarked on
a TV program NDTV Dialogues in April 2017 that “the whole issue of street protest today has
reached a level of professional management.” General Hasnain claimed that post-2008 youth-led
street protests were organized by the Kashmiri separatist groups through their cadres.13 Another
panelist on the show, Hardeep Puri, the former Indian diplomat to United Nations, character-
ized Kashmiri stone throwers as “misguided elements” who lack parental control. Writing in
The Hindu, Indian journalist Malini Parthasarathy described the youth-led agitations in Kashmir
as “spontaneous gatherings reacting to events,” that is, to the civilian killings by Indian troops.14
These characterizations of anti-India protests in Kashmir have pervaded the official and non-
official Indian discourses since 2008.
There were a few exceptions in Indian media, especially the web-based independent news
portals, who showed a more or less balanced picture. In November 2016, ScoopWhoop did a
report after Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar claimed that Kashmiri protestors were
paid INR 500 for throwing stones at Indian forces. ScoopWhoop refuted these claims through
data-driven analysis and foregrounding Kashmiri voices. One Kashmiri interlocutor was quoted
as saying, half-jokingly: “If it’s all about money, why doesn’t Indian government give every
Kashmiri a Rs 2,000 note to stop asking for Azadi.”15
Most international observers underlined the political nature of the stone-throwing protests,
some comparing the Kashmir case with the Palestinian struggle. For example, British journalist
and filmmaker Adrian Levy argued in 2010 that the Kashmiri youth were
expressing much more intifada kind of rage. . . . They are reacting against over secu-
ritization of Kashmir, resulting in stone pelting that is very difficult for India or for any
country to deal with. This is dangerous. It is fire that is burning.16
Nonetheless, incessant negative framing by influential Indian news channels led to the cari-
caturing of young Kashmiri protesters as mindless social deviants. Constant use (and disap-
proving enunciation) of the term pather-baaz – as the Hindi news channels called the young
Kashmiri demonstrators – made the protest tactic of stone throwing into some sort of a profes-
sional appellation for people with criminal predispositions and antisocial tendencies.17 Rather
than seeing it as the part of a repertoire of contention that developed in the particular socio-
historical context, stone throwing was projected almost as an extension (or manifestation) of the
innate aggressiveness of the Muslim male. This constant vilification of the young protesters led
to the gross misrepresentation and criminalization of the pro-azaadi protests.
Indian media’s antagonistic reporting against the Kashmiri youth protesters partly stemmed
from the fact that stone throwing would sometimes injure Indian soldiers, who are hero-wor-
shipped in mainland India as “our jawans,” who are part of the pantheon of Indian nationalism
and who receive unconditional support from the Indian public. From an Indian perspective, the
103
Mohd Tahir Ganie
hostility of Kashmiri youth toward Indian soldiers was “anti-national.” The political context that
determines the hostile relationship between Indian soldiers and Kashmiri youth, as well as the
findings of the different surveys that majority of Kashmiris do not consider themselves “Indian”
and thus cannot be treated as “anti-national,” was either missed or willfully ignored.
Dynamics of Violence and Nonviolence in Kashmir

Media reports and discussions on Kashmir protests tend to subsume the nuances and com-
plexities under the broad-brush of violence, which is the defining term through which they
frame the episodes of contention. The phrase “radicalization” is uncritically thrown around
to frame Kashmiri youth subjectivity. Emphasis on this term by Indian commentators and
officials is perhaps due to its linkage with War on Terror discourses that help in delegitimizing
the protests by Muslim youth. But what is often lost in these simplistic media reports and dis-
cussions is the fact that political movements, usually, contain within them differing tendencies
and approaches toward social and political change and varied forms and modes of resistance.
Dominant media framing of pro-azaadi protests as mindless violence, with stone-throwing
Kashmiri youth shown as the lead actor of these protests, invisiblises the peaceful protests and
protesters, who often outnumber the people who usually take part in the stone-throwing
protests. Violent events overshadow the nonviolent ones in media reports, because they serve
a purpose for the state.
Violent protests often occur because any form of protest that remotely expresses a pro-azaadi
thought is disallowed in Kashmir. The state either contrives or actively provokes a violent
response from a gathering of the pro-azaadi protestors in order to gain justification for retribu-
tion against them. This is an easier and faster way to put down a protest demonstration by not
only dispersing the crowd but also creating deterrence against its resumption through the sheer
display of state violence. The fence-sitters and ambivalent bystanders, who might potentially get
drawn into a protest if it becomes a local spectacle, are deterred when the cost of participation is
increased. When the coercive apparatuses of the state coordinate to suppress the public sphere,
they curb the active protest and also dismantle the psychological structure that could make the
next one possible by creating disincentives.
India employed this strategy when the pro-azaadi protests had begun to take an organized
form during the 2016 uprising. The Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society ( JKCCS) docu
mented several cases where Indian armed forces disrupted nonviolent pro-azaadi rallies. On
September 6, 2016, JKCCS noted in its press report:
In the week spanning from 29 August to 5 September, a total of eighty public meet-
ings/rallies were held across all districts of Kashmir among which government forcibly
disrupted 36 rallies, using extensive of force against the assembled people; shelling
with bullets, tear gas shells and pellets. The government forces, in many instances, van-
dalized the venue of these pro-freedom rallies, set ablaze the tents and threw away the
food items which were cooked by local organizers for the participants of the rallies.18
(Raiot 2016)
Interestingly, though not unprecedentedly, after weeks of stone-throwing protests, which

erupted spontaneously following the killing of Burhan Wani on July 8, 2016, people had
eventually started thronging to the peaceful rallies, making a remarkable transition (within the
same episode of contention) from one form of protest to another. Jamaat-e-Islami, a robust
104
cadre-based organization with deep roots in several rural pockets of Kashmir, was instrumen-
tal in organizing these rallies in which young people participated in large numbers. While
the APHC leadership knew they would not be allowed to organize rallies like in 2008, they
adopted an innovative way to sustain the protests through “strike calendars,” which “set up a
quasi-parallel political authority, and with it, a parallel temporal and social order for Kashmiris.”
When people refused to follow the official order of things and voluntarily restricted their own
movement, they marked their disobedience and displayed “a reclamation of control and argu-
ably a performance of sovereignty” (Trishal 2019). Part of this nonviolent protest program was
graffiti writing in which youth majorly partook (Amin and Majid 2018).
The Mobilized Generation

Since 2008, approximately 4000 people have been killed in Kashmir, including 2000 rebels
belonging to different militant organizations ( JKCCS 2019: 9). Most of the rebels killed in the
last five years have been young Kashmiris, most of whom received only rudimentary training
in arms to fight the vastly strong Indian military. Dying in quick succession due to unrelent-
ing military raids, the Kashmiri rebels could not achieve much militarily, though they receive
support from the civilian population, particularly the youth, who throng to their funerals in
large numbers. On July 9, 2016, at iconic rebel leader Burhan Wani’s funeral in Tral, approxi-
mately 200,000 people assembled, including children and women.19 Before him, when Paki-
stani militant Abdur Rehman (alias Abu Qasim) was killed in a gunfight on October 29, 2015,
a massive crowd of men, women, and children converged in the premises of the Secondary
School Bugam in Kulgam district.20 On June 26, 2018, a similar scene was witnessed at Sopat-
Tangpora village of Devsar tehsil in the Kulgam district where the local rebel Shakoor Ahmad
Dar’s funeral was attended by thousands of mourners, who chanted pro-freedom, pro-Islam,
and anti-India slogans.21 R., a young student from south Kashmir who participated in the
October 29, 2015, procession, said he had not seen such a large funerary procession in his life.
For him, “it was an instinctual reaction, respect for people with highest integrity, fighting for
us” that made him leave his home and join the funeral. He had received a WhatsApp message
from his friends about the gunfight that killed the militant. R. not only participated in what he
calls “the collective mourning” by walking to a village 5 kilometers from his home but also live
tweeted about the event while sitting on the compound wall of the government school where
the public had gathered for the funeral. “I watched a large group of girls, they made their way
through the crowd while passionately raising slogans that had made their faces red. It was a sur-
real experience,” said R.22
Inshah Malik (2018) argues that the funerary processions of fallen rebels have become a site
of political contestation for Kashmiri women. By thronging to the funeral processions, women
not only have transformed the religiously informed culture of mourning in Kashmir, where
men and women have separate roles, but also defied the state by mourning for those Kashmiri
bodies that the state has designated as “non-grievable.” Through such strong assertions in the
public sphere, Kashmiri women have “provided a new political cohesion to their Kashmiri
political community” (ibid.: 64) and brought out “a more robust pro-women politics within the
resistance movement” (ibid.: 66). In these funerals, young women in colorful dupattas can be
seen raising their fists during sloganeering, some jostling for the last glimpse of the fallen rebel,
and some mourning or watching silently behind the covered face on their windowsills. Most of
these events occur in the hinterland where women are mobile or publicly more engaged due to
the agrarian structure of the society.
105
Mohd Tahir Ganie
Youth and Students in Resistance

A more urban-based political mobilization involving the participation of young women
occurred on April 17, 2017. Women students across Kashmir hit the streets and at some places
clashed with the police after the news spread of Indian paramilitary barging into a government
degree college in Pulwama and thrashing its students. The tech-savvy Kashmiri youth recorded
these protests on their smartphones and instantly broadcasted videos online to attract the world’s
attention.23 The New York Times, Washington Post, Daily Mail, Arab News, Sun Herald, and many
others carried the news about the student revolt. The New York Times report of April 17 car-
ried the headline: “About 100 Kashmir Students Hurt in Clash with Indian Troops.” Stone-
throwing women students became the defining picture of these protests.
Analyzing the student protests that occurred between 1964 and 1974 and in April 2017, Mir
Fatimah Kanth (2018) argues that the participation of contemporary young Kashmiri women
in the Kashmiri resistance forms “a part of the continuum of a largely undocumented and
intergenerational history of Kashmiri women’s participation in the struggle against the Indian
state, spread over the last six decades” (ibid.: 42). However, their role has been underestimated
if not overlooked. Framing of their participation has also been problematic because when their
political act is interpreted as an exceptional spectacle that then “denies them the position of
genuine political actors having their own creative and subversive engagements with the resist-
ance movement” (ibid.: 46).
Nevertheless, one cannot ignore the element of class and location in the account of young
Kashmiri women’s participation in the street protests. While a middle-class Kashmiri woman
may find it easier or be willing to join a protest rally inside the premises of an educational insti-
tution, she is unlikely to join a pro-azaadi protest march organized near her home. The main
disincentive in this case is the familial pressure encapsulated in the idea of shareef gharich koor
(woman of a noble family) who is not supposed to partake in such activities. Of course, deep
militarization of civilian areas which a street protest must confront is a big disincentive too, but
a middle-class neighborhood in the Srinagar city does not present the same condition of violent
militarization as a municipal town in Pulwama or Baramulla districts. Certain localities labor
more for azaadi than others. That is, however, not to say that the middle-class women have not
faced repression when they resisted the state within their colleges and universities. In the 1970s,
the J&K administration had adopted harsh methods to deal with the raging student activism
in Kashmir. Coercion and corporal punishment were employed to discipline the colleges and
repress student activism, leading to “a visible atmosphere of suffocation in the women’s colleges”
(Puri 1975).
As Huzaifa Pandit (2019: 112) writes, “the whole project of student politics in the Kash-
mir Valley has historically been associated with the larger question of the political agency of a
dispossessed Muslim population under foreign occupation.” As such, the administration of the
University of Kashmir (KU) – whose chancellor is always New Delhi appointed governor of
J&K – tend to keep a tight control over student activism on the campus. In 2009, the university
administration banned the Kashmir University Students Union (KUSU), apprehending that the
organization may disrupt the scheduled annual convocation that was to be presided over by then
Indian President Patibha Patil.24
In the absence of institutional avenues such as formal student unions, female students are
forced to march on roads within the university premises to register their protests – and they face
many hurdles. For example, Sara, who was a sociology master’s student at KU in 2015–2017,
says that when students mobilized from their departments the protests were “comparatively nor-
mal,” in the sense that the main problem they faced during such protests was the “uncomfortable
106
glances from the police and the administration.” However, they faced major hurdles when they
wanted to protest from their hostels. Sara (2020) recounted:
Firstly, they would lock the main door and not open it. I remember twice or thrice
girls had to break the lock to come out for the protest. Other than that the hostel
administration would warn us that they’d call our parents up. Mostly they would use
religion and morality to scare us like they’d say that women who belong to decent
families don’t do all this, and sometimes they’d accuse us of roaming around with men
in the name of protests.25
Sara says that the university administration used moral discourses to dissuade them from taking
part in politics. Their parents were called to the campus to create pressure on their wards:
Right in the beginning, parents of girl hostellers were invited for a short interactive
session where they were told how religion and morality doesn’t allow women to be
in the “battlefield.” In a very subtle way, our parents were told that “good women”
should be more focused on studies than on these “protests.” And same age-old cliché
that university is only a place for studies, not politics.
Defying the university administration is fraught with risks. Zooni, a master’s student in the
social work department, told me how she was summoned by the KU proctor and threatened for
taking part in protests. Some students were on the watch list and remained usual suspects, who
would be summoned by the proctor whenever any student protests happened on the campus,
whether against a fee hike or in support of the Kashmiri self-determination movement. Despite
these intimidations, some students remained politically active on the campus through a small
network of trusted colleagues, who organized pro-azaadi programs whenever they were able to
do so. Sometimes students spontaneously gathered in the lawns of the Iqbal library in reaction
to events. For example, on May 6, 2018, they held a funeral in-absentia for the rebels, includ-
ing an assistant professor of sociology from KU, who had been killed in a gunfight in Shopian
district. On December 15, 2018, after Indian troops killed seven unarmed Kashmiri civilians in
the Sirnoo and Kharpora villages of the Pulwama district, hundreds of students converged on
the lawns of the KU library and chanted pro-azaadi and anti-India slogans.
Policing the Student and Youth Activists

One of the tactics often used by the J&K police to pressure student activists is to “summon”
them to police stations. Members of All Jammu Kashmir Students Union (AJKSU) told me that
they have faced constant harassment both from the university administration and the police.
“Working in a conflict zone and running a student organization is always difficult, that too
when the student activism has been banned by the state,” Tajamul, president of AJKSU, told me.
AJKSU emerged after the devastating 2014 floods in Kashmir, but real trouble for its members
started after the group, in tandem with KUSU, mobilized thousands of students during the
April 2017 student uprising.
All the members including me received calls from CID [Central Intelligence Depart-
ment] asking us to report to our local police stations. Some of our top members were
taken to “CARGO” [an interrogation center in Srinagar] for questioning. Later a fake
107
Mohd Tahir Ganie
news was circulated by major news portals that AJKSU is run by the PDP [Peoples’
Democratic Party, a pro-Indian party]. Thus, forced us to close it [the group],
Ghazi Muzamil, an AJKSU member, told me.26

“I was summoned by police, CID and the then Chief Minister and Education Minister also.
I faced lot of things which I was not supposed to, which I had not thought about,” says Tajamul,
then a 25-year-old MBA student. In May 2017, after the Punjab police raided his accommoda-
tion in the Zirakpur area of Mohali district in the Indian state of Punjab, he was immediately
thrown out by the landlord on the direction of the police. “Student activism in Kashmir in
linked with the [pro-azaadi] resistance and the state knows if they let student activism to flourish
here [in Kashmir] it will turn into Hurriyat,” says Tajamul.
It was the KUSU that had initially given the call for peaceful protests against “the brutality
perpetrated by Indian forces on students [of the Pulwama college]” (see Figure 7.1). AJKSU
supported KUSU’s call. But, while KUSU call was for one-day peaceful protest, AJKSU had
asked students to continue protests until action was not taken against those involved in assault-
ing the Pulwama college students. “Frankly, we were not prepared for the response we got, we
didn’t expect that our call will be so effective,” says Tajamul.
There are more than 280 higher secondary schools and 46 government degree colleges in
Kashmir. It was the students of these educational institutions who had poured onto the streets,
marched and protested across Kashmir in April 2017 on the call of KUSU and AJKSU. In an
interview with FreePressKashmir, a KUSU leader told journalist Bilal Handoo that theirs was
indeed only a one-day protest call. However, he added, “Students witnessing and facing oppres-
sion were long seething in rage. They were awaiting a moment for a collective outburst. When
that moment came, we only gave them direction.”
Figure 7.1 Screenshot of the KUSU Press Release of April 15, 2017, on Facebook
108
Police came down hard on young protestors, detaining around 20 students in a police station
in Pulwama town. Police cases were registered against many others, including six students from
Government Degree College Baramulla who were booked under FIR 61/2017 Sections 307,
168, and 148. In September 2017, India’s central counterterrorism agency, the National Inves-
tigation Agency (NIA), began questioning nearly 60 students, including KUSU and AJKSU
leaders. After being summoned, harassed, and threatened by the police and other security agen-
cies most of the AJKSU members resigned from the organization by July 2017. R., a former
member of the KUSU, told me that absence of organizational structure helped the organization
survive, since the authorities cannot zero-in on anyone because there are no leaders, no mem-
ber is formally listed anywhere. The KU administration, he claimed, uses informers (co-opted
students and cafeteria personnel) to keep an eye on the suspected student activists in the campus
hostels. The KUSU remains a shadow organization and operates discreetly, but “by publicly
owning the protests, AJKSU guys brought trouble to themselves,” said R.
Conclusion
The 2008 uprising impacted the new youth generation in Kashmir and initiated them into
the Azaadi movement. The revolutionary force generated by the 2008 uprising augmented an
insurgent consciousness among the Kashmiri youth and this insurgent consciousness is widely
dispersed and variedly expressed. It has found its way into different forms of resistance, such as
art, music, poetry, and varied genres of writing. For example, during the last three uprisings
(2008, 2010, and 2016), innovative protest songs and dances have been created by Kashmiris
that capture their collective aspiration and “their decades-long resistance against occupation and
repression” (Zargar 2019). Stone throwing is also an expression of this insurgent consciousness.
Stone pelting manifests politics of the mobilized youth generation but also lack of political
opportunity in general.
While forms of political participation have changed, the street remains the main theatre
of political action (or spectacle) for youth, though street protests are risky because the public
sphere is violently kept out of bounds by the state forces for political protests through indis-
criminate use of pellet guns and tear gas (Kaur 2020). Funerary processions of the fallen rebels
become an occasion when the youth reclaim the public sphere. However, in street-based politi-
cal participation, class dynamics play a role, with youth from mostly working-class backgrounds
fronting such high-risk protests.
Successful intergenerational transmission of insurgent consciousness means that a critical
mass of Kashmiri youth is already mobilized. Pro-azaadi organizations do not necessarily need
to reach out to enlist their support because their support is a given. In varied forms and through
different modes, Kashmiri youth do articulate and transmit collective action frames of the pro-
Azaadi organizations. Narratives, social interactions, and practices geared toward national libera-
tion, therefore, prevail in the Kashmiri society.
The Indian state and nationalist media frame deeply ingrained insurgent consciousness among
Kashmiri youth as “radicalization.” Since Kashmiris are mostly Muslims, invoking the politically
loaded term “radicalization” in their case links it with the War on Terror discourses, which tend
to view Muslim youth as a problematic demographic category. Negative connotations of the
term thus help in delegitimizing the popular sovereignty demands of the Kashmiri population.
Youth around the world share common concerns and anxieties related to general issues of
employment, livelihood, and health. They have been at the forefront of protest demonstrations
against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and Latin America and have played a decisive
role in progressive politics in Europe. However, unlike their contemporaries around the world,
109
Mohd Tahir Ganie
Muslim youth cope with a difficult post-9/11 geopolitical scenario, to which they are particu-
larly vulnerable. The unique historical location of Muslim youth makes them a “generational
subset” (Bayet and Herrera 2010) because of the way the war and violence in much of the
Muslim-majority world and the pervasive discourses of Islamophobia affect their psychology
and life courses. Complexities of this generational subset in terms of the variegated responses
to the challenges of late modernity and local political situations are often overshadowed by the
simplistic monolithic image of Muslim youth being a “radicalized population” or always at the
cusp of extremism.
Violence against the Kashmiri youth stem from the varied sides of the “Indian state,” which
is a fluid entity comprised of the core institutions (executive, military, police, and judiciary) and
a diverse ensemble of social and political forces, including nationalist media and militant right-
wing organizations. Kashmiri youth face not only physical violence on the streets by Indian
security forces but also psychological assault by Indian media and the social media users who
abuse and demonize them if they try to express their distinct national identity and ask for the
right to Kashmiri self-determination. India political elite has shaped what is the essence of being
India and how this essence is to be embodied and performed by a nationalist Indian. This inter-
nalized common sense or banal nationalism responds to the events and entities that are deemed
as “anti-national” by taking cues from the symbolic representation of the nation as encapsulated
in terms like “national security” and “bharat ki akhandata” (integrity of India). Pro-azaadi youth
and their political activism is anathema to these notions and hence repression against Kashmiri
youth dissidents is widely supported within India.
Relentless state crackdown has not allowed proper institutionalization of the Kashmiri
resistance and hugely undermined the training in the discipline of nonviolent protest meth-
ods. And yet, episodes of contention in Kashmir have included both violent and nonviolent
protests. During the 2016 uprising, people carried out nonviolent protests including the
candlelight vigils, processions, graffiti writing, blackouts, roadside prayers, and the long-
est strike in Kashmir’s history (Dreze 2016). Kashmiri youth claim the streets by assertively
assembling on them, and they claim the streets by also voluntarily disappearing from them
as a strategic method of showing defiance to the order of the state during strikes. They have
received grievous injuries on their bodies by taking part in high-risk stone-throwing protests.
While many have been deterred by the pellet guns, some still take part in such protests, as
the data shows.
As repression has increased in Kashmir during the recent times (Freedom House 2020),
critical opprobrium of the pro-Indian parties has intensified and become widespread among the
youth. The APHC has also received criticism for lacking strategic thought and action plan to
guide the resistance. To “de-radicalize” and wean the Kashmiri youth away from azaadi politics,
New Delhi has deployed the developmental narrative and formulated youth-oriented schemes
under the rubric of “Mission Youth” for which the Indian government has earmarked INR
300 crore or US$41 million (Pargal 2021). But with Article 370 gone and the Modi regime,
seemingly, on the course of altering Kashmir’s demography as the final solution of the Kashmir
issue, young Kashmiris now feel vindicated in their condemnation of the political elite and see
resistance as more important than ever before to save the distinct identity of Kashmir. While
under the current situation of severely curtailed civil and political liberties, the possibility of
an organized political mobilization remains unlikely in the near term, the Kashmiri resistance
can be expected to stay alive underground. And, whenever political opportunity opens, the
youth-led resistance may burst forth publicly and abruptly, as happened in 2008, 2010, 2016,
and 2017.
110
Notes
1 Between 2010–2018, nearly 470 local youths have joined different anti-India armed groups in Kashmir
( Jaleel 2018).
2 Even though some critics pointed out that this economic package did not create jobs. See Armand
Hussain Talib, “Packages of Deceit,” Greater Kashmir, March 14, 2015, www.greaterkashmir.com/
news/gk-magazine/packages-of-deceit/.
3 Under Azad, the then J&K government had started assembling school kids in the Sher-e-Kashmir
International Conference Centre (SKICC) in Srinagar for elocution and debate on Gandhi, as a way
to Indianize them.
4 “223 People Killed in Kashmir Unrests in 2008, 2010, 2016: Govt Tells House,” Hindustan Times,
February 10, 2017, www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/223-people-killed-in-kashmir-unrests-in-
2008-2010-2016-govt-tells-house/story-f835qWXDdfOcqAI4DsF2HO.html.
5 “Amarnath land row – Chronology of events,” Greater Kashmir, August 19, 2008, www.greaterkashmir.
com/news/gk-magazine/amarnath-land-row-chronology-of-events/.
6 This is what Doug McAdam (1986) calls “biographical availability,” which, he argues, was one of the
reasons for massive participation of young people in the Freedom Summer campaign of the 1960s dur-
ing the Civil Rights Movement in the US.
7 The main reason for this sudden upsurge in stone-throwing was the rape and murder of Asiya and
Neelofar in the Shopian town in May 2009.
8 “117 Force men, 93 civilians Among 614 killed in Militant Violence in 3 Yrs: Govt,” Rising Kashmir,
October 8, 2013, www.jammu-kashmir.com/archives/archives2013/kashmir20131008b.html.
9 Faisul Yaseen, “JK Govt Figures Catch Parrikar on Wrong Foot,” Rising Kashmir, November 16, 2016,
www.risingkashmir.in/news/jk-govtfigurescatch-parrikar-on-wrong-foot.
10 India dispatched additional 46,000 troops to Kashmir within a span of 10 days, from 25 July to 5
August 2019. These numbers exclude the 85,000 paramilitary forces who were already Kashmir for
the security of Amarnath Yatra and elections. When combined with J&K Police force (over 83,000
personnel), Indian army soldiers (200,000) and auxiliaries and intelligence agencies, the strength of
Indian security personnel in Kashmir number approximately 500,000.
11 “1,999 stone-pelting incidents in 2019 in J-K, 1,193 post abrogation of Article 370,” The Economic
Times, January 7, 2020, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/1999-stone-
pelting-incidents-in-2019-in-j-k-1193-post-abrogation-of-article-370/articleshow/73129411.cms?
from=mdr.
12 “57 Civilians Killed Near Gunfight Sites in Kashmir This Year,” Rising Kashmir, December 16, 2018,
www.risingkashmir.com/news/57-civilians-killed-near-gunfight-sites-in-kashmir-this-year-339733.
html.
13 He further said: “I have been watching stone throwers from the day one. In fact, if you ask me the
stone throwing started from my headquarter at Baramulla in 2008. Right there it started with profes-
sional stone throwers, those who were drug addicts primarily, many of these radi-wallahs [coster-
mongers] from Baramullah who were compensated 300 rupees a day to throw a stone.” The NDTV
Dialogues: Kashmir, Indi-Pakistan, and the Way Ahead, YouTube, April 16, 2017, www.youtube.com/
watch?v=gX3hgIe3Fas&t=85s.
14 M. Parthasarathy, “Understanding Kashmir’s Stone Pelters,” The Hindu, August 4, 2010, www.the
hindu.com/opinion/lead/Understanding-Kashmirs-stone-pelters/article16120870.ece.
15 S. Zargar, “Here’s Why Kashmiris Are Laughing Off Parrikar’s Claim That Note Ban Has Ended
Stone-Pelting,” Scoop Whoop, November 17, 2016, 2018, www.scoopwhoop.com/Heres-Why-Kash
miris-Are-Laughing-Off-Parrikars-Claim-That-Note-Ban-Has-Ended-StonePelting/.
16 As quoted in the Conveyor magazine of April 2010 (Vol. 2 No 4, p. 8).
17 For example, Aj Tak Hindi news channel report on 25 July 2017 said, “Kashmir ke pathar gang ke
khilaaf NIA ki badi chott. 48 chehroon ki pehchaan. NIA ne pathar bazoon ka kiya tayaar dossier.”
[trans. A big step of NIA against the stone-pelting gang of Kashmir. 48 faces identified. NIA prepared
the dossier against the stone-pelters].
18 “So You Want To Have Unarmed/Peaceful Protest In Kashmir?” Raiot, September 6, 2016, www.raiot.
in/so-you-want-to-have-unarmedpeaceful-protest-in-kashmir/.
19 S. Irfan, “Scenes from Burhan Wani’s Funeral,” The Wire, July 8, 2017, https://thewire.in/politics/
the-funeral-burhan-wani.
111
Mohd Tahir Ganie
20 S. Dar, “Most wanted LeT commander’ Abu Qasim dies in Kulgam gunfight,” Greater Kashmir,
October 30, 2015, www.greaterkashmir.com/news/kashmir/most-wanted-let-commander-abu-qasim-
dies-in-kulgam-gunfight/.
21 K. Gul, “Lashkar commander laid to rest in Kulgam,” Greater Kashmir, June 26, 2018, www.greaterkash
mir.com/news/kashmir/lashkar-commander-laid-to-rest-in-kulgam/.
22 Author interview. June 2020. E-correspondence.
23 In 2016, Reliance JIO had introduced the world’s cheapest 4G internet data and a large number of
Kashmiri youth had subscribed to the service.
24 During a big rally on the campus, KUSU had called for a boycott of the president because the state had
failed to hold accountable the perpetrators of rape and murder of Asiya and Neelofar of Shopian.
25 Author interview January 2020. Email correspondence.
26 Ibid.
Works Cited
Ali, Jehangir. 2021. “J&K Police Recruits ‘Cyber Volunteers’ to Flag Posts on ‘Radicalisation,’ ‘Anti-
National Activities.’ ” The Wire, February 4. https://thewire.in/government/jammu-and-kashmir-
police-cyber-volunteers.
Amin, Mudasir and Iymon Majid. 2018. “Graffiti in Kashmir: Politicising the Street.” Economic and Political
Weekly 53(14): 61–66.
Bayat, Asef and Linda Herrera. 2010. Being Young and Muslim: New Cultural Politics in the Global South and
North. New York: Oxford University Press.
Benford, Robert D. and David A. Snow. 2000. “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview
and Assessment.” Annual Review of Sociology 26(1): 611–639.
Bhan, Mona. 2014. Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity in India: From Warfare to Welfare?
London: Routledge.
Bhan, Mona and Purnima Bose. 2020. “Canine Counterinsurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir.” Critique
of Anthropology 40(3): 341–363.
Cockell, John G. 2000. “Ethnic Nationalism and Subaltern Political Process: Exploring Autonomus Dem-
ocratic Action in Kashmir.” Nations and Nationalism 6(3): 319–345.
Dar, Rouf. 2018. “In Choosing Death Kashmiri Youth Defy India’s Power over their Life.” The Polis Pro-
ject, June 5. https://thepolisproject.com/in-choosing-death-kashmiri-youth-defy-indias-power-over-
their-life/#.Xxyc3y2ZP_U.
Dreze, Jean. 2016. “Kashmir’s Hidden Uprising.” Indian Express, December 5. https://indianexpress.com/
article/opinion/columns/kashmir-valley-shutdown-hidden-uprising-indian-army-militants-4410627/.
Duncombe, Stephen. 2002. Cultural Resistance Reader. London: Verso.
49(3): 314–337.
Edmunds, June and Bryan S. Turner. 2002. Generations, Culture and Society. Philadelphia: Open University
Press.
Falak, Uzma. 2015. “How Indian Surveillance Disrupts Ordinary Life and Lives in Kashmir.” The Caravan,
June 18. https://caravanmagazine.in/vantage/how-indian-surveillance-disrupts-ordinary-life-and-lives-
kashmir.
———. 2018. “Affective Female Alliances and Companionships of Resistance in Kashmir.” Economic &
Political Weekly 53(47).
Fine, Michelle. 2014. “An Intimate Memoir of Resistance Theory.” In Youth Resistance: Research and Theo-
ries of Change, edited by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. New York: Routledge.
Freedom House. 2020. “Indian Kashmir.” Freedom in The World. https://freedomhouse.org/country/
indian-kashmir/freedom-world/2020.
Furlong, Andy. 2013. Youth Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Ganie, Mohd Tahir. 2019. “Metaphors in the Political Narratives of Kashmiri Youth.” South Asia: Journal
of South Asian Studies 42(2): 278–300.
———. 2020. “Youth Bulge and Conflict.” In The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, edited
by O. Richmond and G. Visoka. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2021. “All I Got is Stones in my Hand: Insight into Youth-led Stone Pelting Protest in Indian-
administered Kashmir.” Social Movement Studies 20(1): 115–123.
112
Ginwright, Shawn, Pedro Noguera, and Julio Cammarota. 2006. Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and
Community Change. New York: Routledge.
Jaleel, Muzammil. 2018. “Since 2010, 467 local youth from 354 villages across Jammu-Kashmir have become
militants.” Indian Express, June 12. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/since-2010-a-militant-or-
more-in-every-village-in-jammu-and-kashmir-hizbul-mujahideen-burhan-wani-death-5213627/.
JKCCS. 2019. “Annual Review of Human Rights Situation in Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir.”
Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Coalition of Civil Society.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2019. “Counter-maps of the Ordinary: Occupation, Subjectivity, and Walking under
Curfew in Kashmir.” Identities 27(3): 302–320.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2016. “Kashmiri Youth: Redefining the Movement for Kashmiri Self-determination.” Al
Jazeera Centre for Studies, March 15. https://studies.aljazeera.net/en/reports/2016/03/kashmiri-youth-
redefining-movement-determination-160315105907419.html.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2018. “State Violence and Youth Resistance: Perspectives from Indian-Held Kashmir.”
In Political Violence in South Asia, edited by Ali Riaz, Zobaida Nasreen, and Fahmida Zaman, 70–84.
Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Kanjwal, Hafsa, Durdana Bhat, and Masrat Zahra. 2018. “ ‘Protest’ Photography in Kashmir: Between
Resistance and Resilience.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 46(3 & 4): 85–100.
Kanth, Mir Fatimah. 2018. “Women in Resistance: Narratives of Kashmiri Women’s Protests.” Economic
and Political Weekly 53(47): 42–46.
Kanth, Mir Fatimah and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh. 2015. “Landscapes of an Occupation.” Himal,
August 18. www.himalmag.com/landscapes-of-an-occupation-kashmir/.
Kaur, Bhavneet. 2020. “Everyday Suffocations, Smells and Sounds of Jung: Ethnography of Tear Gas in
Downtown Srinagar.” Himalaya 40(1): 20–29.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 2014. “Resistance as Revelatory.” In Youth Resistance: Research and Theories of Change,
edited by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. New York: Routledge.
Malik, Inshah. 2018. “Gendered Politics of Funerary Processions: Contesting Indian Sovereignty.” Eco-
nomic & Political Weekly 53(47): 63–66.
McAdam, Doug. 1986. “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer.” American
Journal of Sociology 92(1): 64–90.
Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. 2017. “Annual Report 2016–17.” https://www.mha.gov.
in/sites/default/files/AnnualReport_16_17.pdf.
Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. 2018. “Annual Report 2017–18.” https://www.mha.gov.
in/sites/default/files/AnnualReport_17_18.pdf.
Culture 32(3(92)): 539–565.
Osuri, Goldie. 2019. “#Kashmir2016: Notes Toward a Media Ecology of an Occupied Zone.” South Asian
Popular Culture 17(2): 111–131.
Pandit, Huzaifa. 2019. “Schools of Resistance – A Brief History of Student Activism in Kashmir.” Postco-
lonial Studies 22(1): 95–116.
Pargal, Sanjeev. 2021. “J&K’s ‘Mission Youth’ gets Rs 200 cr Central funding, UT to contribute Rs 100 cr.”
Daily Excelsior, March 28. www.dailyexcelsior.com/jks-mission-youth-gets-rs-200-cr-central-funding-
ut-to-contribute-rs-100-cr/.
Puri, Balraj. 1975. “Students and Politics.” Economic and Political Weekly 10(28): 1040.
Raiot. 2016. “So You Want to Have Unarmed/Peaceful Protest in Kashmir?” September 6. www.raiot.in/
so-you-want-to-have-unarmedpeaceful-protest-in-kashmir/.
Scott, James C. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Sharma, Sarbani. 2020. “Labouring for Kashmir’s Azadi: Ongoing Violence and Resistance in Maisuma,
Solorzano, Daniel G. and Dolores Delgado Bernal. 2001. “Examining Transformational Resistance
through a Critical Race and Latcrit Theory Framework: Chicana and Chicano Students in an Urban
Context.” Urban Education 36(3): 308–342.
South Asia Terrorism Portal. “Jammu and Kashmir Datasheet, Fatalities between 1988–2000.” www.satp.
org/datasheet-terrorist-attack/fatalities/india-jammukashmir.
Staniland, Paul. 2014. Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
113
Mohd Tahir Ganie
Trisal, Nishita. 2019. “The Indefinite Strike: Rules, Routines and Recognition in Indian-administered
Kashmir.” Paper presented at the Yale Modern South Asia Workshop, Yale University, New Haven,
CT, February.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2011. “Youth Resistance Revisited: New Theories of Youth Negotiations
of Educational Injustices.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 24(5): 521–530.
Vromen, Ariadne, Michael A. Xenos and Brian Loader. 2015. “Young People, Social Media and Con-
nective Action: From Organisational Maintenance to Everyday Political Talk.” Journal of Youth Studies
18(1): 80–100.
Yusuf, Shabir Ibn. 2021. “Stone Pelting Larger Issue than Militancy: IGP.” Greater Kashmir, March 23.
www.greaterkashmir.com/news/front-page-2/stone-pelting-larger-issue-than-militancy-igp/.
Zargar, Harris. 2019. “Kashmir’s Resistance Anthem.” New Frame, October 15. www.newframe.com/
kashmirs-resistance-anthem/.
Zia, Ather. 2019. Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: The
University of Washington Press.
114
8
THE WRIT OF LIBERTY IN THE
COURTS OF KASHMIR
Introduction
On July 29, 2020, the Supreme Court of India, India’s highest constitutional court, was hear-
ing the habeas corpus appeal of Mian Qayoom, the 76-year-old lawyer and president of the
Jammu & Kashmir ( J&K) High Court Bar Association. Qayoom was among hundreds of politi-
cal dissidents and activists held in preventive detention under the J&K Public Safety Act (PSA)
after being picked up in midnight raids in the week preceding the constitutional amendment
of August 5, 2019. While most political detention cases in Kashmir are never heard and adju-
dicated, Qayoom’s habeas corpus challenge had travelled from the J&K High Court, where it
was rejected, to the Indian Supreme Court. Speaking for the bench, Supreme Court Chief
Justice Koul stated that “it is time for all wounds to be healed and look to the future within the
domain of our country. . . . Hope is something which creates the future and we are hopeful”
(Talwar 2020). The court applauded the state’s benevolence in allowing Qayoom to be released
early to be able to spend the festival of Eid with his family, advising him to “also adopt a more
constructive approach to the future” and the government to “consider how to bring complete
normalcy [in Kashmir] at the earliest.” The three-judge bench indicated that it appreciated the
state’s “constructive approach” and ordered Qayoom’s “conditional release” on the basis of an
affidavit that he would not travel to Srinagar until August 7 – the date of the official lapse of
his detention order, and two days after the first anniversary of the abrogation – and would not
make or issue any public statements. Since Qayoom was being set at liberty, the court found
it unnecessary to rule on the central question of the state’s violation of Qayoom’s right to life
and liberty through illegal detention. The Supreme Court’s failure to rule on the illegality of
Qayoom’s detention and overturn the J&K High Court judgment even as it ordered Qayoom’s
conditional release meant that the lower court’s decision serves as precedent and shapes the law
relating to PSA detention decisions.
Viewing the court’s failure to consider the liberty question in this case as yet another act of
“judicial evasion” in a tranche of similar instances involving the illegal detentions of Kashmiri
political prisoners, Indian constitutional scholars made comparisons to the mass detentions
through suspension of habeas corpus during the Indian emergency of 1976. At the time of
the abrogation, India preemptively curtailed massive popular protest and dissent by imposing a
severely repressive siege, including troop deployments, communications blockades, undeclared
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-11 115

curfews, widespread detentions, and other human rights violations. It justified this state of siege
as a necessary step to impose a special and temporary legal order during a time of crisis. But
the current legal order, including suspension of habeas corpus, is not special or temporary. It is
a persistent and persisting feature of the emergency legal order in Kashmir. And in construct-
ing Kashmir as a space of beauty, hope, and healing “within the domain of our country,” the
constitutional court did not simply evade questions of liberty and rule of law in the specific
instance of the case before it, or in the region more generally. It rather staged the rule by Indian
law over Kashmir, invisibilizing the pervasive suspension of rights and liberties in the region
while legitimizing the use of law as an instrument of counterinsurgency governance, coercive
pacification, and militarized goodwill.
Often called the “writ of liberty,” the writ of habeas corpus is an extraordinary prerogative
of a court to ask state authorities to “produce the body” of an individual in custody so the
court can review the legality of the arrest or detention. The suspension of the right of habeas
corpus is generally accepted as indicating the suspension of ordinary law and the prevalence
of an emergency law framework. Widely recognized as a cornerstone of rule of law and a
powerful remedy against state abuses including enforced disappearance, habeas corpus petitions
have been extensively used by Kashmiri lawyers as a remedy in thousands of cases of enforced
disappearance, particularly in the 1990s, and illegal detention, especially under preventive
detention laws.
In his work on the colonial jurisprudence of emergency, Nasser Hussain (2003) argues that
habeas corpus jurisprudence was a means of normalizing emergency through invocations of
the “writ of liberty” and ideas of rule of law. He identifies a central paradox: why was the
writ of habeas corpus available to colonial subjects in a legal regime underwritten by racialized
hierarchies and the logic of conquest? From the point of view of governance, the permanent
insecurity of the colonial state rendered absolute executive and martial powers of detention
necessary and the availability of habeas corpus impractical. Yet the outright exclusion of habeas
corpus was politically unviable and ideologically inconvenient due to its centrality to notions
of British justice and rule of law. The colonial jurisprudence of emergency thus hinges upon
“a maneuver of suspension” whereby the law suspends itself through its own operations (ibid.:
92; see also Lokaneeta 2021; Reynolds 2017: 86). In this reading, habeas corpus jurisprudence
through invocations of the “writ of liberty” became a means of juridicalizing and legitimizing
sovereign power by drawing natives into the gravitational force field of British jurisdiction. John
Reynolds expands on Hussain’s work by tracing the linkages of imperialism, race, and emer-
gency in historical as well as contemporary legal regimes, reminding us that “emergency law has
been (and remains) deeply implicated in settler coloniality and related processes of occupation,
dispossession and discrimination” (Reynolds 2017: 11).
As we have argued elsewhere, India’s domination and control over Kashmir is based on a
normalized logic of permanent emergency that produces and is produced by a jurisdiction of
suspicion “with its origins in colonial power relations, entrenched in the constitutional foun-
dations of the postcolonial Indian state” (Duschinski and Ghosh 2017: 2; Ghosh 2020). This
permanent emergency in Kashmir operates through an everyday preventive detention regime
that “intermingles the systems, techniques, and jurisdictions of criminal process, administrative
detention, and military warfare” (Ghosh and Duschinski 2020). The production, circulation,
and control of files operate as a key modality of power and governance – what we have called
“paperwork warfare” that allows the counterinsurgency state to create a self-enclosed and law-
less yet legally saturated carceral grid, driven by the imperative to keep political dissidents in
permanent limbo using the “striated jurisdictional topography” (Singha 2015) of administrative
116
The Courts of Kashmir
detentions, criminal and constitutional cases, blurring distinctions between legally permissible
and arbitrary invocations of ordinary and extraordinary law (Ghosh and Duschinski 2020).
This chapter extends these arguments by turning an ethnographic gaze on how habeas cor-
pus litigation in Kashmir operates as a mode of normalizing and consolidating the practices of
arbitrary detentions and state terror through languages and performances of rule of law. Such
policing and judicial practices are a form of counterinsurgency lawfare (Raman 2018). They
constitute Kashmir as a legalized permanent emergency, where executive and military powers
are constantly expanded and judicially authorized, while seemingly upholding constitutionalism
and rule of law. Through analysis of ethnographic data on habeas corpus hearings in preventive
detention cases under the PSA in the J&K High Court in 2016–2017, we argue that this legal-
ized permanent emergency is sustained and legitimized through judicial performances in the
habeas corpus courtroom. During this period, the J&K High Court heard many habeas corpus
cases following a period of intense popular protest, police repression, and mass arrests in the
summer of 2016. We analyze the ways in which judicial performances of legality and rule of law
in these courts effectively draw incarcerated bodies further into the terrifying circuit of contin-
gency, delay, and deferral, underlining the routinized and permanent nature of the suspension of
law itself. Our argument is that the legal and political exigencies of settler colonialism, militari-
zation, and occupation require “a maneuver of suspension” of habeas corpus (Hussain 2003: 92)
that reveals the contradictions at the heart of the counterinsurgency state’s constitutional court.
This chapter is based on our long-standing fieldwork as legal and political anthropologists
focusing on the complexities of law, power, and militarized violence in Indian-controlled Kash-
mir. The Indian state’s policy of denial of the armed conflict and human rights abuses has
meant that scholars, journalists, and human rights researchers must work under conditions of
official and unofficial travel restrictions, threats of detention and deportation, and pervasive
scrutiny, suspicion, and surveillance. While based in Kashmir, Ghosh conducted the ethno-
graphic research for this analysis by watching courtroom proceedings, collecting documents,
and conducting interviews with detainees, their families, and their lawyers during a period
of upheaval and crackdown in the Kashmir Valley across six months in 2016–17. During this
time, she also acted as part of the legal team that challenged the PSA detention of human rights
defender Khurram Parvez through her role as a legal researcher for the Kashmir-based human
rights documentation center, Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society ( JKCCS). Ghosh’s
dual positionality as a lawyer and anthropologist allowed her to “pass” as a legal insider and
helped her navigate some of the risks and intricacies of carrying out field research in Kashmir.
Across several years, we have adopted a methodological approach of “collaboration at a dis-
tance” through virtual modes of synchronous and asynchronous communication, document
sharing, and write up (see Ghosh and Duschinski 2020). This approach aligns with our broader
ethos of scholarly collaboration, participation, and engagement as critical scholars conducting
politically engaged and public facing empirical research on occupation, settler colonialism, and
self-determination in Kashmir.
In the next section, we describe the everyday legality of Kashmir’s detention regime and its
techniques for holding custodial bodies in limbo through deferral, delay, and non-adjudication.
We then situate habeas corpus litigation in Kashmir within this context of counterinsurgency
lawfare, arguing that the exercise of habeas corpus deepens and extends the hold of the carceral
grid even as it claims to provide remedy against illegal detention and state abuse. We conclude
with ethnographic analysis of how judicial scripts and performances of militarized humanitari-
anism and constitutionalism juridicalize the relationship of persuasion and punishment, simul-
taneously authorizing and suspending the rule of law.
117
The Body in Custody

In the everyday legality of Kashmir, criminal, constitutional, and administrative jurisdictions
are claimed over incarcerated individuals through exercise of the power to detain and release
at will. We have analyzed this cyclical and fluctuating system of contingent illegal and legal
detentions as the “carceral grid,” a mode of political containment operationalized through an
assemblage of densely enmeshed files, intelligence dossiers, police databases, court cases, and
constitutional discourses (Ghosh and Duschinski 2020). The temporalities of infinite defer-
ral, delay, and incarceration convert PSA into the “ultimate weapon” in the state’s arsenal of
lawfare,
lawfare: its use of its own rules – of its duly enacted penal codes, its administrative law,
its states of emergency, its charters and mandates and warrants, its norms of engage-
ment – to impose a sense of order upon its subordinates by means of violence rendered
legible, legal, and legitimate by its own sovereign word.
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2006: 30)
Stories of detainees’ entries into the carceral grid often begin with arbitrary and undoc-
umented detention in the police station following a police sweep and heightened security
measures, which routinely accompany a plethora of contingencies, which may include mili-
tary operations against militants and police action against protests, visits by official or diplo-
matic delegations, or religious and Indian national holidays. The identification and targeting
of individuals is determined by circumstances of a detainee’s political affiliations, biography,
or location that serve as an “index of tendencies” (Berda 2017: 50) signifying their propensity
for “anti-national” or “anti-social” conduct. Individuals, mainly young adult males or adoles-
cents, are typically abducted without warrant or warning and taken to the nearest jail or sub-
jail, which are specially notified prison facilities usually located in or near the district police
headquarters.
Often detainees’ families receive no intimation of the arrest. For instance, when visiting
Kupwara sub-jail in September 2016, Ghosh heard of sixteen teenage boys from Pattan, a town
two districts away, who were being held incommunicado, with no information provided to their
families. In such cases, families may find out the location of their detained husbands or sons
through socialized circuits of police information. During this period of undocumented custody,
families may bargain with police, frequently through bribes, for release or assurances that the
detainee will not be transported or tortured. Families receive assurances that the detainee will be
released shortly after “questioning” – a euphemism for interrogation through torture. They, or
the detainee themselves, may secure their release by signing either official bonds of good behav-
ior under Section 107 of the Criminal Procedure Code, or unofficial illegal bonds promising
not to re-offend. Following the mass arbitrary detentions in August 2019, police formalized the
long-standing practice of issuing community bonds by making village elders sign guarantees of
good behavior, undertaking on the pain of fines and imprisonment that local youth identified
as troublemakers would not re-offend.
The looming threat of a PSA order, under which a juvenile detainee may be indefinitely
swallowed up by the carceral grid, operates as a means of keeping prolonged detentions
secret and undocumented and perpetuates a system of police extortion and corruption. Dur-
ing Ghosh’s fieldwork, a criminal defense lawyer in Baramulla described the pervasiveness
of undocumented detentions and the vulnerabilities and uncertainties of families who were
seeking the release of detainees at the local police station level without resorting to the
118
courts, which could “provoke” police into applying the PSA and thus solidifying and formal-
izing the hold of the carceral grid.
Any time, if you go to the police lines or [Joint Interrogation Centers], you will see
at least two or three boys – routinely. I’m talking about in normal times, not when
the situation is bad. Boys are routinely in illegal detention and families are waiting and
begging and negotiating.
The oscillation between punitive and persuasive police powers is intimately negotiated in the
field of preventive policing through kinship bonds, gifts, and influence as families appeal to local
police, who may be family or neighbors, to pass on messages, allow access to detained children,
and ensure detention in the relative familiarity of the local lock-up, along with others from their
area (for more on predictive and preventive policing in India, see Narayan 2020, 2021). Police
exercise their “provisional agency” ( Jauregui 2014: 2016) by holding undocumented detainees
hostage as they bargain with families for bribes, constantly deferring their release, yet virtuously
reassuring families of their children’s welfare and that “the Act” – the colloquial term for a
PSA order – will not be applied. This exercise of provisional agency brings families and police
together in a space of complicity, collaboration, and compromise (Fazili 2018).
Under PSA, detainees are held in regular prison facilities and juvenile detention homes
with no concession to their status as political prisoners, though they are not charged with or
convicted of any crime. The police only intimate the family of the application of the PSA after
the detainee is transferred to prison, often hundreds of kilometers outside Jammu and Kashmir,
so that the family cannot challenge the order before its execution. And PSA detainees often
become charged through FIRs of suspected involvement in incidents of “rioting,” “destruction
of property,” and mob violence, which are used as shorthand to signal the danger that detainees
pose to public order and security. These FIRs are never investigated or effectively tried though
the criminal justice system, but hundreds remain “open,” or pending investigation, in the police
archives for years, being deployed repeatedly against various individual suspects in multiple
simultaneous or subsequent PSA detention orders. A lawyer based in Srinagar described the
fluctuating and terror-filled nature of the carceral grid’s hold over suspicious bodies through the
power of the PSA:
If the initial illegal detention is challenged, then the police may invoke an existing
open FIR as justification for the detention. If the court issues a bail order before the
police are ready for a release, then the police may arrest the individual from the court-
room immediately following release on another FIR. When all else fails, they always
have the ability to use the record of multiple FIRs to detain under PSA.
The PSA is a central pillar and “ultimate weapon” in the hyperlegal emergency system that
accelerates and deepens the indefinite circulation of custodial bodies and paperwork across
multiple jurisdictions of bureaucracy, police, courts, and prisons. The Baramulla-based criminal
defense lawyer drew attention to the menace inherent in the workings of a legal system, where
police have the power to override all mechanisms of judicial accountability:
Everyone is afraid of PSA because there is no remedy, no lawyer, no bail. You are stuck
indefinitely in hell. Kashmir is a place where the [Sub Inspector] is more powerful
than a High Court judge, because no matter how many times the court releases him,
[the police] can continually implicate suspects in PSA cases.
119
Counterinsurgency Lawfare and the Writ of Liberty

Once the ultimate weapon is used, the only remedy is to file a petition for a writ of habeas
corpus in the J&K High Court, often a day’s journey away from the detainee’s family home, or
the Supreme Court of India challenging the detention order on limited constitutional grounds
of procedural fairness. These habeas challenges are usually filed on a pro bono basis on behalf of
families of political prisoners by members of the J&K High Court Bar Association at Srinagar.
This Kashmir Bar Association (KBA), of which Mian Qayoom was President at the time of his
detention, has played an exemplary role across the past three decades in using the state’s own
legal system to challenge the effects of emergency laws including illegal detentions, detentions of
individuals in distant locations outside the state, and improper treatment of detainees within state
facilities (Duschinski and Hoffman 2011). Working under conditions of counterinsurgency law-
fare, KBA lawyers “function collectively as an authoritative normative community and powerful
institutional actor, working within the parameters of the Indian legal system while simultaneously
supporting and maintaining solidarity with the movement for self-determination, and contesting
the legitimacy of Indian state rule” (ibid. 2011: 8; Hoffman and Duschinski 2020; for the role
of lawyers in comparable contexts, see Bisharat 1995; Geva 2016; Hajjar 2005; McEvoy 2011).
The Indian Supreme Court has repeatedly held that provisions of preventive detention laws
must be construed as restrictively as possible, given the huge amplitude they provide for the
abuse of executive discretion and the arbitrary deprivation of liberty. In J&K, PSA detention
orders are usually challenged on the grounds of a number of standardized illegalities including
the non-supply of documents to the detainee, the non-application of mind by the detain-
ing authority, the invocation of vague and unsubstantiated charges, and the blind copying of
language from police dossiers. Grounds of detention include vague and unsourced allegations
replete with references to “inputs” from “discreet agencies,” collected through intelligence
methods and surveillance tactics that necessarily remain outside of judicial review.
In his recent analysis of 100 cases of preventive detention orders passed between July and
October 2016 in which habeas corpus petitions were filed in the J&K High Court, Gaurav
Bhawnani (2018) demonstrates how case after case shows the same forms of unconstitutional
executive action, including notable but not unusual cases of political prisoners who have been
imprisoned almost continuously for over a decade with more than 30 consecutive illegal deten-
tion orders quashed. Bhawani identifies patterns consistently recurring across the cases includ-
ing frequent illegal and undocumented detentions both before the order is passed and after the
order is quashed by the High Court, midnight transportation from Kashmir Valley to distant
jails in Jammu district, and delays in holding hearings that often surpass the period of the legal
detention order itself.
In the vast majority of habeas corpus cases, the J&K High Court quashes detention after
detention on the basis of legally flawed orders, citing Supreme Court precedents on the par-
amountcy of individual liberty and the exceptionality of preventive detention. Indeed, the
High Court quashing of these prima facie illegal orders is often a foregone conclusion, as case
after case shows familiar and repetitive patterns of the same grounds of challenge. In a recent
analysis of 210 case studies of PSA detentions between 2012 and 2018, Amnesty International
(2019) found that the J&K High Court most often found PSA detentions to be unconstitutional
because of several repeated patterns of illegality including: procedural and technical lapses in the
drafting of PSA orders; vague and unsubstantiated information; detention of minors; repeat and
identical orders; illegal and revolving-door detentions; non-supply of copies of documents; and
evidence of non-application of mind by detaining authorities such as fundamental errors of fact
and matters of record.
120
As Ghosh noted in her courtroom observations, the J&K High Court routinely heard and
quashed PSA orders – upwards of ten orders in a single sitting – for failing to satisfy the consti-
tutional tests of reasonableness and non-arbitrariness of state actions. These quashings typically
took place 12 to 18 months following the initial detention, after routinized delays and deferrals
granted by the writ court, despite laws and rules of case flow management stating that “matters
of liberty” must be expeditiously disposed of by the court within 15 days of the filing of the
habeas corpus plea. The court continued to treat each case as an individual and aberrant case of
illegality, performatively reiterating the application of constitutional due process norms while
ignoring the institutionalized and entrenched system of unconstitutional detentions and delib-
erate abuse of process by the counterinsurgency police and bureaucracy.
Following the High Court’s orders for release after the quashing of an illegal detention order,
the detainee is officially released from prison but immediately transported in a police vehicle
to the Joint Interrogation Centre ( JIC) run by Counter Insurgency Kashmir (CIK) unit of the
J&K Police for a “debrief ” and then held at the police station of the area concerned under one
the numerous open FIRs cited in the detention order. The individual must then individually
apply for bail under the ordinary criminal process in each of the mentioned FIRs. During this
time, he circulates between various police jurisdictions and courts, allowing authorities time
to execute a fresh PSA detention order if they consider it necessary. Only a clearance from
counterinsurgency police authorities can ensure his eventual release, but he remains marked as
a threat and vulnerable to repeated cycles of indefinite illegal and legal criminal and administra-
tive detentions.
The quashing orders are written in standardized registers of constitutionalism, rule of law,
and individual rights and liberties, citing a host of familiar precedents relating to Article 21 and
reiterating the legal impermissibility of everyday bureaucratic practices of detention, such as
identical orders and non-application of mind. The High Court’s routinized practice of quashing
one illegal order after another on the basis of technical grounds serves to obscure the terrorizing
operations of the counterinsurgency carceral grid.
Judicial Maneuvers in the Habeas Corpus Courtroom

In the first few weeks of the summer uprising of 2017, the Kashmir Bar Association launched a
strike against the daily cycle of civilian killings and use of unlawful force by authorities. While
lawyers continued to help families draft and file habeas corpus pleas and briefed them on what
to say, petitioner families appeared in court in person without legal representation. It was com-
mon to see rural and poor families, sometimes including the very elderly or young children,
often women, thronging the court’s corridors and sitting for hours, awaiting their habeas cor-
pus hearings in the visitor’s galleries of the ceremonial, wood paneled courtroom. They stood
before judges, ill at ease in the surroundings of the overtly ceremonial courtroom, supplicating
the judges with folded hands for the release of their missing children, bringing home the full
weight of the law’s terrifying and magisterial power. As “normalcy” returned to the courtroom,
lawyers began to appear again. In this section we draw on the courtroom performances and
scripts of militarized humanitarianism and constitutionalism to ethnographically describe the
maneuver of suspension and the work of habeas corpus jurisprudence, in the regime of perma-
nent emergency and perpetual war.
In October 2017, Ghosh attended the habeas corpus hearing of a case involving a 20-year-
old vegetable vendor named Zubair who had been arrested in May and whose PSA dossier
mentioned 21 FIRs relating to incidents of rioting and incitement to violence but did not refer
to him specifically. The legal proceedings took place in the J&K High Court. Zubair’s legal
121
counsel was Shafqat Mir, a senior member of the bar who represented many terrorists accused
as well as a large number PSA detainees and victims of rights violations. In the back rows of the
courtroom, Zubair’s brother Zeeshan strained to hear what was being said. Ghosh noted the
tension in his body and his attitude of intent listening to the court proceedings.
Zubair’s family was from the old town of Baramulla, a locality known for its history of resist-
ance politics, and Zeeshan was a local stone-pelting boy. Zubair had been first picked up by
plainclothes police of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) from his hospital bed in
May 2017. Ten months earlier, he had been shot during a street protest by state armed forces
using pellet shotguns, a crowd control technique extensively deployed by soldiers and police
in Kashmir to maim and mark protesters who can later be identified and arrested from check-
points or hospital wards as they seek treatment (Physicians for Human Rights 2016). Zubair had
undergone two surgeries to remove hundreds of lead pellets embedded in his stomach. Two days
after his second surgery, he had been picked up and illegally detained for nine days at the local
police station while his family bargained and bribed police for his release. His family applied to
have him transferred on the basis of his surgeries and the Block Medical Officer’s report, but the
court rejected the application. Zubair’s family said that he was selling vegetables at the square
when protests broke out and the police began firing at the crowd. His police dossier used the
standardized language of such documents to refer to him as a “habitual stone pelter” and an
“anti-social” and “unruly element.”
At the habeas corpus hearing, Shafqat Mir rose and stood before the court. A small wiry
man with an electric energy and staccato delivery style, Shafqat was known as “the people’s
lawyer” for his enduring commitment to fighting systemic oppression in the courts by provid-
ing free legal aid to everyday Kashmiris who had been trapped in the carceral grid because
of their commitment to the freedom struggle. After his death in January 2020, his associate
remembered him by saying, “Being a sympathizer of the movement, he stood up for our right
to Azadi and remained a vehement opponent of the Indian occupation. He was simply mir-
roring the general sentiment of the Kashmiri people” (Malik 2020). He was also known for his
empathy in dealing with clients and their families. In the fall of 2017, he could often be found
between cases sitting on a sofa in the spacious lobby of the High Court, engaging in intense
discussion with his associates, his clients’ families, and visiting researchers. He approached all
of these interlocutors with a spirit of generosity and kindness. In Zubair’s case, Shafqat had
decided to personally appear in court because on the previous court date, Zeeshan had become
so frustrated with the delayed proceedings that he had almost come to blows with the firm’s
young junior lawyer. Shafqat wanted to argue the law, knowing that judges often preferred to
accelerate the process by focusing not on law but rather on injuries, family circumstances, or
other humanitarian grounds.
Shafqat Mir began by taking the court through the many facts and procedural illegalities that
rendered the detention order invalid.
At this point he was interrupted by the Judge: “Why should you attack security forces?”
Shafqat appeared not to hear this query, and continued to enumerate the techni-
cal grounds on which the detention order was violative of the “procedure laid down
by law” and cite constitutional precedents on preventive detentions. “First, they filed
the PSA ten months after the date of the incident. Second, he was already in custody,
under the criminal investigations of the FIR, so what is the need for resorting to PSA?
One FIR relates to a mob incident on 14.9.2016. On that day of the FIR, he was
undergoing surgery in hospital. I have produced the medical records.”
122
The State counsel broke in here, to point out the notorious criminality of the boy.
“There are 11 FIRs against him in 2016 alone. A total of 21 cases against him.” Refer-
ring to the preventive detention order he quoted, “He is an unruly, disorderly person.”
The Judge however raised the question of the legal requirements for establishing
the need for the extraordinary detention without trial. He said: “Why not use the
ordinary law of the land, why preventive detention? Was it based on the subjective
satisfaction of the District Magistrate? His last activity is 10 months before his deten-
tion, so why PSA now?”
The State Counsel began to read out stock phrases from the PSA grounds of deten-
tion and referred once again to his “notoriety” and the 21 police complaints against
him. “He is a well known unruly element, my lord.”
The Judge nodded. “Of course he is no gentleman. He is a habitual. But you
have not shown me how subjective satisfaction that he is a threat is met, when he was
already in police custody.”
The State Counsel continued to read from the file.
The Judge looked grim and dissatisfied. “There is an absence of justification or
explanation in the PSA order [for the delay] and the fact remains he was already in
your custody facing trial, what was the need? Do you have anything else?”
State counsel: “Your Lordship may grant me time till 4pm, I will bring you the
case law.”
Judge: “List Tomorrow.”
The quashing took place after two further hearings, stretching over weeks, but Zubair’s brother
Zeeshan informed Ghosh in December, two months after this hearing, that Zubair was still
being held in Jammu. The family had been told that Zubair needed to be bailed out in all 21
pending FIRs, and he had at that time been bailed out in two of them. He was awaiting the
next bail hearing in the lower court in their district. In their final conversation some months
later, Zeeshan informed Ghosh that Zubair had been transferred to their district and was still
being bailed out in the 21 FIRs, circulating between the criminal court and police detention
facilities as he was re-arrested immediately as he was bailed out in every case. His wounds from
the shotgun injuries had still not healed, and required urgent medical attention, but they were
glad they could at least meet him in the local police lines, which doubled as a sub-jail.
This script follows the contours of dozens of such encounters that Ghosh observed, where
specific courtroom representations about the procedural legality of detentions and rights of
detainee were subsumed under the sign of the disorderly “habitual” offender. In many such
encounters, this was further emphasized through courtroom talk couched in languages of pater-
nalism, persuasion, and pacification rather than punishment through the criminal justice system.
The constitutional courtroom became a staging grounds for judicial performances of militarized
humanitarianism and counterinsurgency governance that characterize techniques of popula-
tion-centric counterinsurgency warfare, aimed at winning over Kashmiri “hearts and minds,”
with the absent body of the youthful yet maimed Kashmiri stone pelter a specter of hope, peace,
and transfiguration (Bhan 2013; Bhan and Trisal 2017).
Both lawyers and judges engaged in the scripted performance with the outcome – the
quashing of the illegal order – already known. For instance, certain lawyers would ask fami-
lies to always be present in person at hearings in lieu of their absent sons and loved ones.
Lawyers underlined the importance of the family’s presentation of abjectness before the
judges, pointing to their age, infirmity, distress, and poverty. Judges in response would ask
123
parents to monitor the future conduct of their “delinquent” and “miscreant” wards, scolding
them for failing to properly parent their offspring and asking them sternly to ensure their
orderly conduct on pain of further detention. In this performance, judges would studiously
avoid mentioning the political nature of the acts that had ostensibly led to the detentions,
indexed in the PSA dossier’s repeated references to “secessionist ideology” and “anti-national
elements.” Instead, courtroom talk emphasized themes of “misguided youth,” “reformation,”
and “normalcy.” In one exchange, the lawyer and the judge both agreed that the boy must
find a nice girl and get married so that he would “settle down and stop indulging in such
activities.”
Conclusion
Emergency laws including national security and preventive detention laws in contemporary
South Asia do not represent tensions, contradictions, or the extra-constitutional, unconstitu-
tional, or exceptional suspensions of the rule of law. Rather, they operate as constitutive and
permanent features of violent political regimes of containment and exclusion in constitutional
democracies (Kalhan 2010; Nesiah 2010). As Reynolds (2017: 213) writes, “the filtering of
colonial violence through (normalised colonial emergency) law aims to legitimise its perfor-
mance for both external and internal audiences.” On the one hand, India frames Kashmiri
political mobilizations as secessionist, anti-national, and terrorist threats to public order and
national security, thereby necessitating its imposition of emergency legality across decades.
On the other hand, India must demonstrate its constitutional and democratic commitments,
both domestically and internationally, through representations of rule of law, the availability of
effective domestic judicial remedies, and the existence of a robust and independent judiciary.
In Kashmir, legal discourses and performances of preventive detention law and habeas corpus
hearings are premised upon Kashmir’s coercive integration within Indian jurisdiction, even as
they exclude Kashmiris from constitutional protections of life and liberty available to citizens
under Indian law. Instead, judicial performances of constitutionalism and humanitarianism
function as modes of obscuring questions of illegal custody and collective punishment, draw-
ing custodial bodies and profiled communities further into the carceral grid of counterinsur-
gency law.
Iterative courtroom performances of constitutionalism in habeas corpus hearings provide
judges with the opportunity to intervene “objectively” to routinely and repeatedly quash
illegal detentions based on the minutiae of the individual file, while remaining seemingly
blind to the politically contingent and fictionalized trajectories of the documentation and the
inevitability of the endless cycle of state terror and collective punishment it serves to conceal.
Courtroom performances juridicalize the relationship of persuasion and punishment that lies
at the heart of counterinsurgency lawfare. Whether the habeas corpus challenge is successful
or not, the courtroom proceedings illuminate the workings of the counterinsurgency state
aimed at pacification of a popular resistance movement, through population-centric military
policy and doctrine. In this context, the maneuvers of suspension, tactics of everyday delay
and deferral, reproductions of contingency, and invocations of humanitarian concerns and
constitutional norms in judicial discourse serve to draw Kashmir into the force field of Indian
jurisdiction, authorized through India’s terrorizing and permanent stranglehold over their
bodies. Such discourses reconfigure the violence of the counterinsurgency state that sees the
political Kashmiri as a security threat to the Indian nation who must be marked as a suspect
and thereafter neutralized by permanent excision from social and political life through incar-
ceration or coercive transformation.
124
Works Cited
Agrwaal, Ashok. 2008. In Search of Vanished Blood: The writ of Habeas Corpus in Jammu and Kashmir: 1990–
2004. SAFHR Paper Series 17. Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights.
Amnesty International. 2019. Tyranny of a ‘Lawless Law’: Detention without Charge or Trial Under The J&K
Public Safety Act. Bengaluru. www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2016402/PSA-Report_15-FINAL-LOW-
Version-2.pdf.
Berda, Yael. 2017. Living Emergency: Israel’s Permit Regime in the Occupied West Bank. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
London: Routledge.
insurgency in Indian-controlled Kashmir.” Critique of Anthropology 37(1): 67–92.
Bhawnani, Gaurav. 2018. “Rule of the ‘Lawless Law’: Detentions under the Public Safety Act in Kashmir.”
Economic & Political Weekly 53(20).
Bisharat, G. E. 1995. “Courting Justice? Legitimation in Lawyering under Israeli Occupation.” Law &
Social Inquiry 20(2): 349–405.
Comaroff. John L. and Jean Comaroff. 2006. “Law and disorder in the Postcolony: An Introduction.”
In Law and Disorder in the Postcolony, edited by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, 1–56. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
49(3): 314–337.
Duschinski, Haley and Bruce Hoffman. 2011. “On the Frontlines of the Law: Legal Advocacy and Political
Protest by Lawyers in Contested Kashmir.” Anthropology Today 27(5): 8–12.
Fazili, Gowhar. 2018. “Police Subjectivity in Occupied Kashmir: Reflections on an Account of a Police
Officer.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and
Cynthia Mahmood, 184–210. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Geva, Maayan. 2016. Law, Politics and Violence in Israel/Palestine. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ghosh, Shrimoyee Nandini. 2020. “Crisis Constitutionalism, Permanent Emergency and the Amnesias of
International Law in Jammu and Kashmir.” Third World Approaches to International Law Review, Reflections
#19, May 28. https://twailr.com/crisis-constitutionalism-permanent-emergency-and-the-amnesias-of-
international-law-in-jammu-and-kashmir/.
Ghosh, Shrimoyee Nandini and Haley Duschinski. 2020. “The Grid of Indefinite Incarceration: Everyday
Legality and Paperwork Warfare in Indian-controlled Kashmir.” Critique of Anthropology 40(3): 364–384.
Hajjar, Lisa. 2005. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
dictional Contestation of Militarized Governance in Indian-Controlled Kashmir.” Social & Legal Studies
29(5): 650–678.
Hussain, Nasser. 2003. The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law. Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press.
Jauregui, Beatrice. 2014. “Provisional Agency in India: Jugaad and Legitimation of Corruption.” American
Ethnologist 41(1): 76–91.
Kalhan, Anil. 2010. “Constitution and ‘Extraconstitution’: Colonial Emergency Regimes in Postcolonial
India and Pakistan.” In Emergency Powers in Asia: Exploring the Limits of Legality, edited by Victor V.
Ramraj and Arun K. Thiruvengadam, 89–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lokaneeta, Jinee. 2021. “Rule of Law, Violence and Exception: Deciphering the Indian State in the
Thangjam Manorama Inquiry Report.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 17(1): 71–91.
Malik, Inshah. 2020. “In Memory: Mir Shafqat Hussain, the People’s Lawyer.” Stand With Kashmir,
January 17. https://standwithkashmir.medium.com/in-memory-mir-shafqat-hussain-the-peoples-
lawyer-5c05ed111ff0.
McEvoy, Kieran. 2011. “What Did the Lawyers Do during the War – Neutrality, Conflict and the Culture
of Quiestism.” Modern Law Review 74(3): 350–384.
Narayan, Shivangi. 2020. “Predictive Policing and the Construction of the Criminal.” The Polis Project,
January 30. www.thepolisproject.com/predictive-policing-and-the-construction-of-the-criminal/#.
YXIB-VXMIuU.
125
———. 2021. “Guilty Until Proven Guilty: Policing Caste Through Preventive Policing Registers in
India.” Journal of Extreme Anthropology 5(1). https://journals.uio.no/JEA/article/view/8797.
Nesiah, Vasuki. 2010. “The Princely Imposter: Stories of Law and Pathology in the Exercise of Emergency
Powers.” In Emergency Powers in Asia: Exploring the Limits of Legality, edited by Victor V. Ramraj and
Arun K. Thiruvengadam, 121–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Physicians for Human Rights. 2016. Blind to Justice: Excessive Use of Force and Attacks on Health Care in
Jammu and Kashmir, India. https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/Kashmir-Report-Dec-2016.pdf.
Raman, Bhavani. 2018. “Law in Times of Counter-insurgency.” In Iterations of Law: Legal Histories from
India, edited by Aparna Balachandran, Rashmi Pant, and Bhavani Raman, 120–146. New Delhi:
Reynolds, John. 2017. Empire, Emergency and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Singha, Radhika. 2015. “Punished by Surveillance: Policing ‘Dangerousness’ in Colonial India, 1872–
1918.” Modern Asian Studies 49(2): 241–269.
Talwar, Sanya. 2020. “It is Time for All Wounds to Be Healed and Look to the Future: Supreme
Court.” Live Law, July 30. www.livelaw.in/top-stories/kashmir-it-is-time-for-all-wounds-to-be-healed-
and-look-to-the-future-supreme-court-160718.
126
9
TRADE, BOUNDARIES, AND
SELF-DETERMINATION
Aditi Saraf
Introduction
In Kashmir, the political and symbolic importance of trade outstrips calculative statistical out-
comes. Rather, the past and present of economic regulation in Kashmir, the political activism of
traders’ collectives, and the importance of the marketplace as a site for protest activities clarifies
the political importance of trade in being deeply entangled with ideas of sovereignty. In my
broader research, I argue that the networks of trade and exchange map out the political geogra-
phy of a frontier, connecting the Kashmir region with heterogeneous highland spaces in Tibet,
Xinjiang, and Afghanistan. Once trade partners in trans-Himalayan caravan networks – currently
sundered by Asia’s most militarized and intractable borders – these spaces bear out thorny
relationships with forms of nationalism imposed upon them. In this context, trade concerns
not only political economy but also serves to re-politicize the realm of the spatial conceived as
“social relations stretched out” (Massey 1994).
A concept that provides a corresponding heuristic is that of “the frontier.” The term is gener-
ally used to refer to geographical and cultural peripheries: zones that are viewed as both politi-
cal barriers and sites of contact and exchange. At the same time, the frontiers are also deeply
implicated in histories of colonial violence, expansion as well as resistance. As such, frontiers
dramatize unsettled questions of borders, identity, and community by manifesting histories and
practices that had to be discounted in order to establish the self-presence of more dominant
forms of space and identity, such as that of a bounded nation-state (Saraf 2020a). Kashmir’s
historical trade relationships that radiate beyond present-day borders into the highlands of south
and central Asia offer a lens into precisely such material and affective geographies that extend
national boundaries. Tracing the history of mobile trade networks, and efforts to control, usurp,
or redirect them also helps us understand the paradox of the lines of control that territorially
demarcate Kashmir as simultaneously violently entrenched and irrepressibly disputed.
Recent years have seen a renewed interest in frontiers as spaces of indeterminacy and volatil-
ity, conditions that are relevant to understanding the constraints and possibilities amidst which
the work of trade occurs in the Kashmir region. Kashmir has been a zone of enduring struggle,
both as site of an ongoing movement for self-determination and intense territorial rivalry since
the Partition of British India in 1947. Three wars caused the lands of the former Himalayan
kingdom to be divided between India, Pakistan, and China. The highly militarized Line of
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-12 127

Aditi Saraf
Control (LoC) serves as the de facto border between the Indian and Pakistan administered parts
of the former Himalayan kingdom. After years of disenchantment with Indian rule, a popular
armed movement for freedom – azaadi – was launched in the Kashmir Valley in 1989 and
resulted in more than a decade of armed militancy. Met with direct state violence and emer-
gency laws that grant immunity to Indian military forces, various legal and extra-legal forms of
coercion, torture, detention, and killings have constituted a “permanent state” of emergency
(Duschinski and Ghosh 2017) for subduing the dissident population of an unstable border state.
Since August 2019, the unilateral mutilation of Article 370, the removal of land rights and the
bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir has heightened the violent forms of political intransigency
and uncertainty that have characterized the Kashmir dispute since the beginning of the Azaadi
movement.
The Moral and Political Economy of Trade

My fieldwork in Kashmir was provoked by the question of how quotidian activities of buying
and selling, provisioning and payments, are publicly and privately sustained during prolonged
political violence. Pursuing this query in the marketplaces of Kashmir, it became clear that one
way of maintaining public lives and relationships was through reliance on historical trade rela-
tionships (Saraf 2020b). Cutting across rigid categories of communal identity and militarized
boundaries, such networks are based on diverse religious and ethnic communities engaging
in the common goals of exchange and provisioning. Supply chains for commodities and the
material sediments of their human and nonhuman agents – brokers, but also bills, advertising
pamphlets, and trade directories – extended networks not only into the Indian mainland but
also westward and northward across heavily militarized borders, activating a field for expressing
alliances and empathies that were not permitted in polarized political languages of the main-
stream. Intersections of trade, commerce, and livelihoods in Kashmir, as elsewhere at frontier
outposts, produced internal logics of autonomy and self-sufficiency that did not depend on
external recognition for legitimacy (Hansen 2005). Training focus on the work of trade, as
expressed in this setting, provided significant ways of marking the history of Kashmir as a
frontier prior to its splitting and subsequent absorption by the Indian state – a history that is
important for understanding contemporary idioms of freedom (azaadi) envisioned by traders
as cross-border mobility and the ability to trade freely with all partners. Despite the hardening
of de facto boundaries and the criminalization of crosscutting connections, frontiers are not
coincident with national borders.
Inhabiting the space of the frontier had a changing impact on the work practices of traders
who never fully assimilated into the nation-state and its territorial legal regimes. Despite having
to work consistently amid violence and indeterminacy that visibly curtailed trade, the flow of
goods and payments persisted as traders participated in multiple networks – ethnic, historical,
national, and para-statal. Participation in these networks in turn, allowed traders to sustain their
practices in a contested zone where legal and regulatory institutions taken for granted elsewhere
are rendered unstable, and forms of surveillance and security are all pervasive. At the same time,
trade networks – past and present – also enable expressions of solidarity with Kashmiris living
in areas under Pakistan’s administration, as well as connections with communities beyond the
geopolitical entities of “India” and “Pakistan” – such as in Kabul and Kashgar – in the highlands
that forged what I call the trans-Himalayan trade-ecumene.
In the context of the self-determination movement, this was particularly evident during the
agitation that followed the Amarnath Land transfer in 2008, when the administrative decision
to transfer about 100 acres of forest land for the construction of temporary facilities for Hindu
128
Trade, Boundaries, and Self-Determination
pilgrims caused the Muslim majority Kashmir Valley to erupt in protests against what was
perceived as religiously motivated encroachment upon their lands. In response, an “economic
blockade” was imposed on by the Hindu-majority neighboring district of Jammu by cutting off
all transport and cargo on the Jammu-Srinagar highway, the main vehicular channel connect-
ing the Kashmir Valley to the Indian mainland. Protestors in Kashmir then took out massive
marches to the Line of Control (LoC), chanting slogans that expressed the desire to “break the
LoC” and exchange in the markets of Muzaffarabad and Rawalpindi: cities in Pakistan that were
conjoined with Srinagar in regional webs of trade before the partition of British India. Traders’
collectives entered the political sphere with vigorous demands to be allowed to trade freely with
all partners. I was told during informal conversations in 2013 that due to the Amarnath land
agitation, relations between the respective traders’ collectives in Kashmir and Jammu deterio-
rated to a point where their members stopped talking to their counterparts. Apparently, rela-
tions thawed only after intervention and mediation by their colleagues and trade delegates from
Azad Jammu Kashmir (under Pakistan administration). In this way, trade and traders’ networks
were a field for both expressing and mediating the politics of self-determination. These events
also led to the inauguration of the regulatory artifact of “cross-LoC trade” that I discuss later
in the chapter.
Reflecting on the widespread food riots in the English countryside in the late eighteenth
century, the English historian E.P. Thompson (1971) elaborated the term “moral economy”
to show how markets both dramatize and generate political and moral evaluations rooted in
exchange communities. Thompson argued that political acts by the English peasants sought to
establish commonly held notions of fair price, just exchange and right to charity that drew on
feudal values to oppose the risks and uncertainties of the free market economy. Rather than
think the moral economy as entrenched within an enclosed community, I conjugate the con-
cept of the “moral economy” with that of “the frontier” to emphasize potentials for studying
mobility together with the transecting nature of trade networks and social movements. That
such concerns underpinned key aspects of sovereign control escaped neither the princely durbar
nor the colonial and postcolonial state. Recognizing that trade networks were crucial for diplo-
matic mediation, economic provisioning, and self-sufficiency, colonial and postcolonial strate-
gies of occupation and integration continue to be shaped by strategies of blocking, controlling,
and redirecting networks of exchange.
In what follows, I first describe conceptual links among frontiers, mobility, and territorial-
ity. I then describe how the marketplace or bazaar becomes a productive site for investigating
social movements and solidarities. Finally, I show how colonial and postcolonial governments
used the control of trade networks and routes to consolidate contested boundaries and argue
that the contemporary scrutiny, surveillance, and suppression of trade and traders has become an
increasingly important component of the Indian state’s militarized governmentality in Kashmir.
Frontiers and “Itinerant Territoriality”

Against global upheavals, frontier ethnography conspicuously moved from colonial concerns
around how to govern an unruly people toward engagements with frontier regions as sites for
studying political order outside the nation-state (Leach 1954; Phanjoubam 2015). Rather than
view frontier societies as primitive or stagnant, such ethnographies adopted a synchronic and
historical perspective to elaborate distinctive indigenous forms of order that emerge from a
dynamic and unstable interface with broader political configurations, as well as “institutional-
ized dissidence” (Gellner 1969), self-consciously maintained through a balance between reli-
gious and secular authority.
129
Aditi Saraf
Correspondingly, frontiers also emerged as privileged arenas for studying the formation and
transformations of ethnic groups as well as the relations between them. In the 1969 publication
of Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Barth and his colleagues rejected the view that ethnic groups
were organic bounded entities that were ecologically situated and shared a common culture.
Drawing on his fieldwork amongst Pathans in the Swat Valley as well as among nomadic peoples
in Kurdistan, Barth emphasized the mutual maintenance of boundaries and boundary-crossing
flows and exchanges, arguing that boundaries were simultaneously stable and in constant flux.
Barth’s theoretical framework emphasized the continual negotiation of boundaries and ongo-
ing interaction with proximate others in the process of group formation – in other words, that
boundary production and boundary-crossing were two sides of the same coin. This resonated
with Uberoi’s structural configuration of the Hindu-Kush Himalayan region as a “wall [that] is
also a corridor,” a “revolving door” rather than an “open and shut gate” (1978). Observing that
human activity invariably “leaks” through boundaries (2000), Barth argued that the productiv-
ity of boundary zones provided opportunities not just for state-like entities such as military
and customs officials, but also refuge and retreat for political dissidents. In the more quotidian
dimension, boundaries activated a constant field of “affordances” for “mediators, traders and
middlepersons of all kinds” (28–29).
These “affordances” ascribed to the frontier by Barth mark it out as a site of exchange, cir-
culation, and mobility. Movements through frontiers and their crossings produce contingent
notions of licit and illicit exchanges. Writing on endogenous ideas of space and boundaries in
Africa, Achille Mbembe (2000) highlights the “relative lack of congruence between the terri-
tory of the state and areas of exchange,” arguing that rather than being delimited by boundaries
in the classical sense, political entities were formed by “an imbrication of multiple spaces, con-
stantly joined, rejoined and recombined through wars, conquests and the mobility of goods and
persons” (263). Mbembe coins the term “itinerant territoriality” to designate precolonial ter-
ritoriality operating through “thrusts, detachments and scissions,” but the analytic of itinerancy
extends well into the postcolonial present.
Bringing the preceding perspectives to critically bear upon Kashmir studies helps to under-
stand how mobile trade networks sustained social movements under repressive regimes. In addi-
tion, following these networks allows us to discern alternate geographies of belonging that cut
across rigid categories of communalized identity and militarized boundaries. In Kashmir, the
political dispute is seen in terms of territorial rivalry between India and Pakistan, correspond-
ingly acquiring communal overtones of warfare between antagonistic categories of Hindus and
Muslims. While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the markets of Srinagar, however, I came
across ideas of space and identity that questioned and subverted such statist discourses. They ges-
tured toward alternative political claims and attachments forged in the distinctive regional histo-
ries of trade. For instance, through a striking riparian metaphor, one of my interlocutors urged
me to visualize Kashmir as a tributary of the “Silk Road” imagined as a river, with Kashmir as
part of a tributary that yoked together the “Kaaf ” states [whose names began with the urdu let-
ter kaaf]: Kabul, Kashgar, and Kashmir. As I encountered representations of spatial imaginaries
hat bypassed the cartographic entities of India and Pakistan, I was also struck by how many of
these places – former trade partners such as Kabul and Kashgar but also Yarkand, Khotan, and
Lhasa strain against forms of contemporary nationalism imposed upon them.
This focus on boundaries and movement (Aggarwal 2004; Sökefeld 2015) by engaging trade
networks also intersects scholarship under “Indian Ocean” and “inter-Asian” studies of connec-
tion, circulation, partiality, and trans-regionality beyond the analytic foci of globalization, and
which are extended into historical patterns of interaction and exchange. Such patterns occur
between societies that have recognized each other over centuries, through social and religious
130
infrastructures that long precede the establishment of nation-states (Chatterjee 2013; Duara
1995; Ho 2017). Yet a focus on Kashmir also challenges some of the emphasis on mobility in
this literature (Marsden 2018), where in the current context traders in Kashmir operate amidst
an overwhelming sense of confinement amid curfews, communications blackouts, and milita-
rized boundary maintenance through checkpoints, blockades, and the unyielding nature of the
Line of Control.
The Public Life of Resistance

The bazaar or the marketplace has been a historically important public arena for investigating
interaction, communication, and exchange in Muslim societies (Baig 2014; Gilmartin 1988;
Gilsenan 1982; Geertz 1979; Javed 2018) – perhaps unsurprising given the doctrinal defense
of commerce as useful and worthy within Islam and the role of the mercantile classes in the
spread of Islam around the globe. The space of the market is considered to be an important
arena of sociability and organization of communal life in the city outside the kinship group.
The “bazaar-mosque” dyad has been an important trope in this regard, signaling not only
the spatial proximity of the two but also the fact that the purpose of business calculations far
exceeded exchanges of material commodities and assayed religious, political, and cultural val-
ues. Of course, in South Asia this is not unique to Islam – other historians have spoken of the
temple and bazaar too as a central knot in the social fabric of cities (Freitag 1989; Ostor 1984).
As a node of traffic for various persons and modes of exchange, the marketplace is thus both
locally embedded and outwardly exposed. As a place without a single locus of authority, where
exchange and politics interact in dynamic ways, bazaars become sites of investigation for forms
of urban solidarity and collective action that ground and often develop into broad-based social
movements (Keshavarzian 2007; see also Spector 2017).
In Kashmir, the built environment as well as everyday exchange activities in the marketplace
directly register the imprint of political violence and resistance – material traces of marches
and massacres, the shifting terrains of “normalcy” and losses caused by curfews and shutdowns.
The resurgence of the azaadi movement since 2008 witnessed mass rallies and public protests
against Indian rule gaining immense popular support (Kak 2011). In the summer of 2010, news
of civilians being killed in yet another “fake encounter” caused the Valley to erupt in massive
demonstrations. Cyclical waves of protests against civilian killings followed the incident, leading
to further civilian mortality caused by the police and paramilitary forces opening fire at protest
demonstrations, which in turn led to bigger processions.
The protests, programmed around calendars, often commenced in the summer to coincide
with the rise in economic activity, and gained momentum around landmark symbolic anni-
versaries such as Martyr’s Day on July 13 and the Independence Days of Pakistan and India
that fall on August 14 and 15, respectively. The calendars marked out periods for suspension
of businesses, the shutting down of markets, banks, schools, and universities and indicated days
of “slackening” (dheel) with concessions for shopping, fasting, and celebration of local festi-
vals. The marketplace thus became an important site for publicly expressing and registering
resistance against state authority. The bazaar and its inhabitants did not just comply with the
shutdowns – indeed, their participation was essential to the success of the protests – but various
traders’ collectives also vigorously implemented strikes or hartals of their own to suspend market
transactions and frame political demands.
One of my key field sites, Srinagar’s main retail center Lal Chowk, adjoined the state secretar-
iat as well as the volatile neighborhood of Maisuma (Sharma 2020), the location of the Srinagar
office of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF) – an important component part of the
131
Aditi Saraf
Hurriyat coalition. Thus Lal Chowk was an important venue for carrying out protest marches,
for implementing defiant hartals and shutdowns and for gauging ordinary responses toward the
ongoing dispute. My interlocutors considered Lal Chowk to be a metonym for protests against
Indian rule, particularly because of attention it received in TV news media: “Whenever there’s
an uprising here, flocks of cameras descend upon Lal Chowk and beam it to drawing rooms in
Delhi – most Indians know Kashmir through images of Lal Chowk.”
Traders in Lal Chowk generally complied with the hartal calls given by political leadership
of traders’ bodies. Sometimes these extended for months, leading to losses amounting to mil-
lions of dollars for the trade and business communities and affiliated workers. In markets not as
central or visible as Lal Chowk, I observed that traders, shopkeepers, and clients often adapted
their daily rhythms with an eye to the shutdown: for example, by changing their opening and
closing time to the period between the pre-dawn fajr prayers and sunrise, or by exchanging from
the backdoor for a couple of hours in the day while staying shuttered down in order to maintain
optics of the total hartal.
Upon asking how they remembered the long summer of protests in 2010, I occasionally
received divided, ambivalent responses from some traders in Lal Chowk. While no one disputed
the importance of the tehreek (movement), the role of class in shaping these responses was strik-
ing. Well-to-do traders with long, intergenerational practices and resources that saw their families
through the furlough period remembered the protests enthusiastically. Some insisted that local
networks of mohalla (neighborhood) committees and bait ul-maal (house of wealth/provisions)
mobilized to ensure workers (mazdoor) who carried out tasks like lifting, weighing, and transport-
ing goods did not suffer from lack of food or shelter. Some who were visibly less prosperous, and
more precarious, hinted at elements of coercion and fervently hoped never to experience such
disruption again. The threat to livelihoods that long periods of shutdown posed has also been
actively mobilized as a punitive counterinsurgency strategy, evinced in prolonged curfews and the
lockdowns enforced by the Indian state apparatus. The lockdown that followed the mutilation of
Article 370 in August 2019 reportedly cost the economy in Kashmir more than 2.4 billion dollars
(Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry, notification dated December 17, 2019).
Undoubtedly Lal Chowk is space of not just commercial but also immense symbolic poten-
tial. Traders often mentioned the area’s political significance for the liberation movement:
named after the Red Square in Moscow, this is where India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal
Nehru, following the Dogra accession in 1947, publicly promised that Kashmir’s political future
would be “decided by the people.” Viewed as the promise of plebiscite, it was subsequently
aggressively revoked. Since, Lal Chowk has witnessed some of the most explosive confronta-
tions of the azaadi movement. The ruins of the Palladium Cinema – that now functions as a
bunker where soldiers keep watch behind barricades and barbwire, is a prominent feature of
the space. In 1985, I was told, crowds that filed out from Palladium after watching the Lion of
the Desert – a historical action film based on Omar Mukhtar, the Libyan Bedouin leader who
fought the Italians in the Second World War – were inspired by the protagonist’s story to launch
an armed insurrection against Indian rule.
The clock tower, Ghantaghar, was another important landmark. The tallest structure situated
in the market’s square, it zoomed into focus in the Indian mainstream media in the early 1990s
when the president of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) insisted on hoisting the
Indian flag on top of the tower, particularly to mark the culmination of an infamous rath yatra –
“chariot pilgrimage” – undertaken in a Toyota truck bedecked like an Aryan chariot to extend
the sacred cartography of Hindu India into Kashmir ( Jaffrelot 2009). For a while thereafter,
the ghantaghar became the locus of competitive flag-hoisting by state officials, Indian soldiers
and Kashmiri rebels until the ritual of flag-hoisting at the clock tower was disallowed in 2009.
132
Lal Chowk’s terrain carries marks of devastating state violence. The Lal Chowk fire of
April 1993 was allegedly started by soldiers from the Border Security Force (BSF) in retaliation
for local residents burning down an abandoned army bunker (Report by Human Rights Watch
1995). More than a hundred civilians were killed in the blaze, which was followed by indis-
criminate shooting – many died while trying to escape by jumping into the nearby river Jhe-
lum. The graves of some of the victims lie on the banks, close to the market. Over the decades,
several establishments in the area had witnessed deaths and destruction following grenade attacks
and exchange of gunfire between rebels and state forces. Tracks of violence accumulated on the
material landscape of the market and became a part of local teratology. At a different location,
the decrepit red-brick facade of the Qausa building overlooked a busy crossing in downtown
Srinagar. The building was once used as a torture and interrogation center by the state forces,
and since then no one dared inhabit it again. The owner of the shop at the opposite corner said
that on certain nights, disembodied screams from tortured souls emanated from its empty shell.
These public, prominently located structures served as reminders of the horrors inflicted on
ordinary people in the ongoing war, especially by the state’s brutal counterinsurgency strategies.
The marketplace did not simply bear witness to performances of state power and resistance.
Traders’ networks also kept up the flow of essential provisions during prolonged curfews, strikes,
and other forms of depredation. Commodities were secured through informal networks as well
as informal practices of “credit” or deferred payment. Traders were also cognizant of political
influences that seeped in from beyond the geographical coordinates of subcontinental South
Asia. Recalling the rise of the armed movement in 1989, some traders suggested that the pro-
test in Kashmir were inspired by independence movements that were being launched in parts
of central Asia around the breakup of the Soviet Union. The political significance of trade and
the political activism of traders can be better understood against the history of the enduring
entanglements of commerce and sovereignty in the region, that we turn to in the next section.
Manipulating Boundaries, Redirecting Trade

At least since the colonial era, regulatory fabrications that suspended ordinary trade in order
to redirect goods and people – what I term “trade artifacts” – were regularly deployed in the
Kashmir region. As such, trade artifacts were harnessed to imperial, national as well as ver-
nacular projects of boundary-making. Focusing on “reorientations” in the northern areas of
Gilgit-Baltistan, Chad Haines writes how the “structuring of circulation” both constituted and
transformed the frontier under colonial rule (2004). Rather than the mappable space, Haines
describes how the frontier demarcated a “sphere” of state policy, in which ensuring access to
trans-Karakorum trade (routes, ease of transport, availability of fodder for pack animals, and
espionage) initially consumed colonial anxieties and insinuated colonial domination. Territorial
demarcations remained vague and more importantly, manipulable, until the establishment of the
Gilgit Agency encoded frontier spatiality through administrative reforms, the control of trans-
frontier linkages, and integration of the region through new routes and their securitization (see
also Ali 2019; Gupta 2019). Haines also notes that such transformations offered new possibilities
to the inhabitants of these spaces while cutting off others.
After independence and partition of British India, the control of routes and access intensi-
fied along with increased militarization and securitization of the disputed region. Partition
blocked off historical caravan trade routes extending from Kashmir through lands presently
under territorial control of China and Pakistan. As part of the territorializing project, the
Indian state made strategic infrastructural interventions in Kashmir and Ladakh to secure con-
nectivity against its rivals Pakistan and China and redirect routes of access, provisioning and
133
Aditi Saraf
mobility exclusively to the Indian mainland. Territorial control also became closely associated
with economic integration through allocating massive economic packages and developmental
spending, thereby producing a heavily indebted state economy in Jammu and Kashmir (Schaffer
2005). Simultaneously, the disputed rims of the former Himalayan kingdom were built up,
militarized, and rigidified in contrast to the manipulability of mid-colonial boundaries. Schol-
ars working in Kashmir have described the impact of such developments not just on borderland
residents but also as a way of theorizing the operations of a paranoid state apparatus (Bhan 2013;
Robinson 2013; Zia 2019). At present the highly militarized Line of Control (LoC) divides
Indian-administered from Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Despite not being an internation-
ally recognized border, the de facto nature of the LoC has dire implications for inhabitants on
either side.
What follows is a brief description of a recent trade artifact colloquially termed as “cross-
LoC trade” that was evolved as a “confidence building measure” in the bitterly contested region.
Cross-LoC trade was established in 2008 against the backdrop of long-standing economic
dependency and civilian anger toward state violence. A Joint Chamber was established to pro-
mote economic interaction, with representatives from the business elite from both India and
Pakistan administered areas of Jammu Kashmir. Following several talks, meetings, and media-
tions, two Trade Facilitation Centres or TFCs were opened on one of Asia’s most hostile bor-
ders. One connected Chakan da Bagh in the Jammu sector to Rawalkot in AJK, and the other
Uri in the Kashmir sector to Muzaffarabad in AJK. Publicized with much fanfare, cross-LoC
trade was welcomed as a “pragmatic” and “normalizing” gesture to enhance goodwill and social
interaction across the LoC.
With both India and Pakistan claiming authority over the highland region through dis-
tinct framings, strange customs were evolved to ensure that protocols of exchange were not
legally tantamount to acknowledging the LoC as an international border. Therefore, trade
was restricted to bartering in primary produce procured “originally” in either part of divided
Kashmir. Special care toward language meant goods were “traded in” and “traded out” instead
of “imported” and “exported,” and the exchange was not monetized. As non-monetized bar-
ter trade, no customs or taxes were paid on the goods that complied with the “origin clause”
of being produced locally either part of divided Kashmir, although contentiously, non-local
goods often formed the bulk of cross-LoC exchange. Furthermore, neither formal banking nor
phone communication linking the divided region. Statistically speaking the actual commerce
was negligible but the exchange was suffused by outsized symbolism, particularly for supposedly
facilitating “social” connections across the LoC. As a regulatory fabrication, it was relegated to
a remote and highly militarized border region cordoned off from everyday spaces of exchange,
watched over by several security and intelligence agencies, and circumscribed by highly speci-
fied and cumbrous “standard operating procedures.”
For more than a decade, despite several logistical and political setbacks, cross-LoC trade was
sustained by numerous traders and civil society actors, particularly those inhabiting areas adjoin-
ing the LoC and deeply invested in fostering and reviving cross-border kinship and social ties
through economic exchange (Hussain and Singla 2020; Kira 2011). Since “blind trade” through
barter had to be carried out without financial infrastructure or face-to-face interaction, much
of cross-LoC exchange was carried out by traders with relatives across the de facto border –
members of divided families – which itself, however, resulted in increased scrutiny and suspi-
cion (Mir and Gattoo 2018; Qadri 2013). Traders’ representatives too also refused to impose or
pay tax on contentious non-local goods coming in from the “other side,” insisting that divided
Jammu Kashmir was to be treated as a single “free economic zone” (personal communication,
February 2013).
134
On April 18, 2019, India’s Ministry of Home Affairs announced the sudden, indefinite
suspension of cross-LoC trade, citing that the trade routes were being “misused by the Pakistan
based elements for funneling illegal weapons, narcotics and fake currency etc” (MHA notice).
Timed to demonstrate the central government’s resolve to erase cross-border support for mili-
tancy before the national elections commenced, in Kashmir the suspension caused prices of
high-demand commodities like dates and prayer mats that were sourced through the trade and
affected the livelihoods of traders, transporters, and laborers engaged in cross-LoC trade.
Many lamented that cross-LoC trade was doomed from the beginning due to its genesis in
a “political” rather than an “economic” decision, that is, in being oriented toward generating
social connections across the LoC rather than developing business relationships (Drabu 2019).
While cross-LoC trade was definitely more a political than commercial exercise, I suggest that
with its bizarre protocols it was less significant for producing cross-border social connections
than for managing contested sovereignty in this deeply disputed frontier region. As an artifice
of highly securitized, non-monetized and therefore non-taxed barter trade, it became important
for enacting forms of boundary construction around questions of the payment or non-payment
of customs, what commodities were to be permitted for barter trade, and for surveying and
regulating mobility across the Line of Control. Since 2014, the rise of the BJP at the center
and aggressive suppression of Kashmiri political demands made cross-LoC trade increasingly
vulnerable. Right-wing politicians lobbying for its closure attacked cross-LoC trade as a threat
to national security, a conduit for drugs as well as informal hawala transfers that funded anti-state
activities from Pakistan. After demonetization in November 2016, financial intelligence and
anti-terror agencies became particularly active in Kashmir and Uri, subjecting a large number
of traders both at the LoC and elsewhere to increased scrutiny, investigations, and arrests.
Conclusion
The bizarre protocols of cross-LoC trade thus become comprehensible as being devised and
enforced primarily to repress older geographies of contiguity and commerce in the borderlands
for establishing the self-presence of nation-states. In this functional-farcical role of manag-
ing conflict, cross-LoC trade falls into an arena of political-economic negotiations over – and
performances of – sovereignty, thus partaking in the history of political control through trade
in the frontier borderlands. For the Indian state, it offered a means to defer the political prob-
lem of Kashmir’s self-determination by “connecting” a divided region though trade, thereby
suppressing the history of its violent severance. It also provided the state ample possibility for
criminalizing the same “connections,” depending on political expedience. For traders, however,
who engaged cross-LOC commerce in all its absurdity and elasticity, its artifactual form served
to activate transversal ideas of belonging, community, profit within an undivided political-
economic zone, that are not permissible under the national regulatory regimes of rival states.
Thus, what looks like an aberration from the vantage of international trade takes on new
significance when set against the archive of trade and politics. The establishment of cross-
LoC trade was yet another attempt to control, redirect and trespass upon the vital networks
of exchange that have historically ranged across the region, mixing political and cultural with
economic exchange. As a canvas for expressing alternative forms of sovereignty, community, and
belonging, networks of exchange and boundary making have consistently challenged colonial,
princely, and postcolonial nation-statist authority. Presently, the sudden demise of cross-LoC
trade is congruent with a more aggressive approach toward occupying the frontier, through the
removal of all regulatory artifacts in which contestations of state sovereignty may be expressed,
including Article 370 and 35A. Establishing intensified forms of economic integration (national
135
Aditi Saraf
marketing agencies such as NAFED India taking over the procurement of horticultural pro-
duce), resource extraction (exclusive mining rights granted to external companies), and punitive
measures (criminalization of traders engaged in cross-border trade), the Indian state has dem-
onstrated its intransigence toward the rivaling potentials expressed in crosscutting networks of
trade and exchange. Yet, since the history of trade persistently accounts for the region’s political
defiance, the impact of the various laws put in place for its control and regulation cannot be
assessed from a perspective confined to the present moment.
Works Cited
Aggarwal, Ravina. 2004. Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh,
India. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ali, Nosheen. 2019. Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan’s Northern Frontier. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baig, Noman. 2014. God and Greed: Money and Meditation in Karachi’s Marketplace. Doctoral Thesis submit-
ted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin, December 2014.
Barth, Frederik. 1969. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Boston:
Little, Brown.
———. 2000. “Boundaries and Connections.” In Signifying Identity: Anthropological Perspectives on Bounda-
ries and Contested Values, edited by A. P. Cohen. London and New York: Routledge.
London: Routledge.
Chatterjee, Indrani. 2013. Forgotten Friends: Monks, Marriages and Memories of Northeast India. New Delhi:
Drabu, Haseeb A. 2019. “Suspension of J&K LoC Trade is a Regressive Step and Lost Opportunity.” Indian
Express, April 25.
Duara, Prasenjit. 1995. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China. Chicago:
49(3): 314–337.
Freitag, Sandria B. 1989. Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism
in North India. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1979. “Suq: The Bazaar Economy in Sefrou.” In Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society:
Three Essays in Cultural Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gellner, Ernest. 1969. Saints of the Atlas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gilmartin, David. 1988. Empire and Islam: Punjab and the Making of Pakistan. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
Gilsenan, Michael. 2008 (1982). Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East. London;
New York: I.B. Tauris.
Gupta, Radhika. 2019. “ ‘There Is Never a Peace Time, It Is Just No War Time’: Ambivalent Affective
Regimes on an Indian Borderland.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 39(3):
475–489.
Haines, Chad. 2004. “Colonial Routes: Reorienting the Northern Frontier of British India.” Ethnohistory
51(3): 535–565.
Hansen, Thomas Blom. 2005. “Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Authority in urban India.”
In Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants and States in the Postcolonial World, edited by T. B. Hansen and
F. Stepputat. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ho, Engseng. 2017. “Inter-Asian Concepts for Mobile Societies.” Journal of Asian Studies 76(4): 907–928.
Human Rights Watch. 2006. “Everyone Lives in Fear”: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir. New
York: Human Rights Watch. www.hrw.org/reports/2006/india0906/.
Hussain, Afaq and Nikita Singla. 2020. “Unilateral Decisions Bilateral Losses: Assessing the Impact of the
face-off between India and Pakistan in 2019, on Border Economies.” Report by BRIEF India, January.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2009. “The Hindu Nationalist Reinterpretation of Pilgrimage in India: The Limits
of Yatra Politics.” Nations & Nationalism 15(1): 1–19.
136
Javed, Umair. 2018. Profit, Piety and Patronage: Bazaar Traders and Politics in Urban Pakistan. Doctoral Thesis
submitted to the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, January 2018.
Kak, Sanjay, ed. 2011. Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir New Delhi: Penguin.
Keshavarzian, Arang. 2007. Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kira, Altaf Hussain. 2011. “From Line of Control to Line of Commerce.” Economic and Political Weekly
46(40): 16–18.
Leach, Edmund. 1954. Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: G.
Bell & Son Ltd.
Marsden, Magnus. 2018. “Civility and Diplomacy: Trust and Dissimulation in Transnational Afghan Trad-
ing Networks.” Anthropological Theory 18(2–3): 175–197.
Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 2000. “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa,”
translated by S. Rendall. Public Culture 12(1): 259–284.
Mir, Khalid Fayaz and Muneeb Hussain Gattoo. 2018. “Cross LOC Trade between India and Pakistan-
Contours and Dynamics.” Pakistan Business Review 19(4): 843–860.
Ostor, Akos. 1984. Culture and Power: Legend, Ritual, Bazaar, and Rebellion in a Bengali Society. New Delhi:
Sage Publications Pvt. Ltd.
Phanjoubam, Pradip. 2015. The Northeast Question: Conflicts and Frontiers. New Delhi: Routledge India.
Qadri, Asgar. 2013. “India Pakistan Hostility Kills Trade on Kashmir Border.” New York Times, October 23.
Robinson, Cabeiri deBergh. 2013. Body of the Victim Body of the Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of
Kashmiri Jihadists. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Saraf, Aditi. 2020a. “Frontiers.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by M. Aldendorfer.
New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2020b. “Trust Amid ‘Trust Deficit’: War, Credit and Improvidence in Kashmir.” American Ethnolo-
gist 47(4): 387–401.
Schaffer, Teresita. 2005. Kashmir: The Economic of Peace Building. Washington, DC: The Center for Strategic
and International Studies (CSIS).
Sharma, Sarbani. 2020. “Laboring for Kashmir’s Azadi: Ongoing Violence and Resistance in Maisuma,
Sökefeld, Martin. 2015. “Jammu and Kashmir: Boundaries and Movements.” Contemporary South Asia
23(3): 251–265.
Spector, Regine A. 2017. Order at the Bazaar: Power and Trade in Central Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Thompson, Edward Palmer. 1971. “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd on the Eighteenth Cen-
tury.” Past and Present 50: 76–136.
Uberoi, J. P. S. 1978. “The Structural Concept of the Asian Frontier.” In History and Society: Essays in Hon-
our of Professor Nilanjan Ray, edited by D. Chattopadhyaya, 67–76. Calcutta: KP Bagchi.
Zia, Ather. 2019. “The Line ‘Out’ of Control in the Region of Kashmir.” American Quarterly 71(4):
1037–1043.
137
10
SENSORY REMEMBRANCE
Retelling the 1990s in Downtown Srinagar
Bhavneet Kaur
Introduction
In September 2015, I navigated through the lanes of Shamaswari locality in the Khanqah area of
downtown Srinagar1 to trace the families of those who were killed during the armed movement
of the 1990s, popularly known as the namtich tehreek.2 Sabia,3 one of my research participants,
was unable to engage in a detailed conversation about the political killing of her brother but
exhibited an embodied response. Just as I was leaving her home, she started telling me: “Bohot
dard hota hai. Iske bare main soch kar, andar se dard uthta hai. Gehri chott hai yeh, kabhi nahi bharegi
(It pains me deeply. Even the thought of it causes gut-wrenching pain. It is a deep wound that
will never heal).” She broke down after saying this, her body started shivering, and her low
voice dissolved into faint sobs. Keeping her hands tightly wrapped around her chest and staring
blankly at the small patch of a vegetable garden in her maternal home that she was visiting at
the time of the interview, she said,
today I have heard someone say my brother’s name after many years. I do not even
speak about him with my other brothers and sister because saying his name out aloud
makes it unbearable. But that does not mean I don’t remember him, entire Kashmir
can forget about him, but I can’t. Even today I can’t sit alone in a room because these
thoughts and images start haunting me.
The memory of her brother was not anchored in concrete details of his killing – when, why,
and by whom4 – but was condensed into the pain that she still carries for him. His death is
documented not through dates but through the effect of grief, an enduring and continuing
sentiment of mourning for the prematurely and violently killed younger brother. Her grief
becomes a testimony. It did not lend itself to the material conditions under which the killing of
the brother took place, but it opened up a form of remembrance, reminiscence, or what Serem-
etakis calls “a third stream of anamnesis” (2019: 34) that casts a longer shadow over the lives of
people where memory can take forms outside or at the margins of speech.
This weaving together of the memory of a violent past by Sabia in the form of an embod-
ied visceral pain, 25 years after the killing of her brother, compelled me to ask: how do we
might locate these emotional, intimate, and often invisibilized practices of remembrance within
138 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-13

Sensory Remembrance
the larger political movement? Sabia’s incipient vignette produces an alternate affectivity of
remembrance, and therefore resistance, that is too unbearable to find home in language (Das
1995: 183). Her brother’s violent death has become a private shrine in which she is the solitary
mourner. Through her and other similar isolated shrines of grief spread all over downtown,
I explore the question of how one might interprets remembrance that lies at the margins of
speech, in the form of gaps, silences, and embodied pain?
The broader political context allows us to understand that the killing of Sabia’s brother
was not an aberration or mistake, but in fact was what death under occupations often are:
“arbitrary, automated and requiring no plausible reason to occur” ( Junaid 2018b: 32). The
beginning of the armed movement for self-determination in Kashmir in the late 1980s and
the concomitant military occupation by the Indian state fundamentally altered the topogra-
phy of downtown Srinagar wherein each day familiar, intimate sites of sociality were being
transformed into zones of unrelenting violence and vulnerabilities, resulting in an endless
spiral of killed and disappeared bodies (Chatterjee et al. 2009). In this social space, extraordi-
nary violence takes on an ordinary and routine texture precisely because it offers no tangible
break from this “continuum of violence” (Scheper-Hughes 2008). Through the imposition of
a disciplinary regime of control along with the extrajudicial powers and legal impunity that
it has through draconian laws,5 the Indian state attempts to coerce, stifle, and erase alternate
histories of people and their lived experiences. In this context, memory becomes the only
way to challenge hegemonic narratives and preserve counter histories. This compelled me
to pursue a primary line of inquiry in this chapter, that is, what are the complex practices
of remembrance through which people retell the past that is sedimented with continuing
inscriptions of violence?
Many scholars from Kashmir (Duschinski et al. 2018; Falak 2018; Junaid 2013; Zia 2019)
have foregrounded and engaged with the question of memory and the complex forms that it
takes. One critical investigation of memory by Zia (2019) in her recent work on enforced dis-
appearances is particularly useful here. By examining how traditional wedding songs, wanawun,
were transformed post-1990s from being songs of celebration to being interlaced with motifs
of loss, grief, and political assertion, she asks: “the essential question is not only how memory
becomes in times of oppression and war but also what becomes of memory?” (2019: 200). Draw-
ing from my own ethnographic fieldwork in downtown Srinagar, I seek to inquire into the var-
ied forms, dispositions, and textures that “telling” of memory takes. Underlying the challenge
of memory or of retelling the past in downtown Srinagar, one of my research participants, Peer
Yousuf, told me in 2015, “people will not talk about tehreek because they do not want to talk
about it anymore, they do not want to visit their wounds again” (emphasis added). While there
was a consensus among people that namtich tehreek was the darkest period of political violence
they have lived through, there was a simultaneous denial of any concrete personal memory or
information6 because of the persistent political climate of fear and repression. The fear of state
backlash and the entrenched network of collaborators initially led to reticence, silence, and
denial during some of the conversations, but some of these silences were mandated through
something other than fear, as we saw partially in Sabia’s vignette. These silences are political
enactments that may remain on the peripheries of or overlap with the visible, collective, and
tangible sites of remembrance. The wedding songs in Zia’s ethnography become one such
sensory site where the embodied memory of loss overlaps and intersects with the visible and
collective practice of singing traditional songs.
The retelling of the precarious violent past during my own fieldwork from 2015 onwards
was suffused with a montage of overlapping and intersecting remembrance practices that I col-
lated ethnographically from local shopkeepers and residents of downtown. In capturing this
139
Bhavneet Kaur
subjective experience of memory, I arrived at practices of remembrance that were more cul-
turally mediated and tangibly observed, such as visual sites of martyrs’ graveyards ( Junaid
2018a: 248),7 memorial taps (Parrey 2011), public exhibition of photographs of martyrs, and
individual testimonies/narratives, but I also come across a range of “incipient and inchoate”
( Jackson 2015: 456) practices that were intimate, incomprehensible, and embodied experi-
ences of suffering. Through an immersion into these quotidian practices, I argue that “tell-
ing” does not necessarily entail a verbal or a definitive form, instead it takes on and animates
all forms and remnants of remembrances through which the social world of the 1990s in
downtown can be re-imagined by those who lived through it. A family remembrance of their
martyred kin can be through a diverse assemblage of forms ranging from visiting the tangible
site of the martyr’s graveyard to having intangible “visitational dreams” (Falak 2018: 80) where
there is a reunion with the dead.
By drawing attention to and incorporating the sensory, embodied, and intangible forms of
remembrance, we can see that the everyday emotions, experiences, rhythms, and vulnerabilities
cannot be mediated completely through speech, memorials, and tangible remnants. The affec-
tive world of remembrance that these sensory forms, such as snippets of folksongs, an obscure
artifact, a broken refrain, or a silent dream create corresponds to the ethos of the past as it was
lived, embodied, endured, feared, and lost. Later I focus on two such sensory forms of remem-
brance: one, the intermediate or transitive world of dreams oscillating between life and death,
and, two, preservation of memory through intimate everyday artifacts such as pheran8 (Kaur
2020), currency notes, a vegetable, a song, and a radio. I refer to both these forms as the extra-
linguistic or sensory perceptions of remembrance.
Sensory Remembrance
The purpose of exploring these extra-linguistic and sensory circulations of remembrance of
namtich tehreek is to suggest that, in the unending political struggle for self-determination in
Kashmir, everyday social life becomes permeable to political forces and produces what I call a
perpetuity of grief. What is distinctive about this grief is that political violence is continuous, so it
is not an event that can be restricted to the past but it encapsulates and inundates entire life spans
of people and the subsequent generations. This perpetuity of grief is foregrounded in multi-
ple research interviews wherein participants would frequently describe how the experience of
tehreek became a fundamental and inalienable part of their everyday lives. From the same area
of Shamaswari, one of the participants, Hameeda, told me in 2015, “humne apni poori zindagi
bas tehreek dekhi, aur kuch dekha hi nahi (we spent all our life witnessing the political movement,
we did not see anything else).” I argue that the nature of violence that is being examined here
does not allow a re-assembling of life; on the contrary what comes across is the very striking
nature of pain or grief itself as perennial and ineffaceable, that extends itself onto everything and
therefore acquires forms of remembering that cannot always be neatly framed or interpreted
within dominant frames of memory.
This imbrication of the political with the intimate social lives of people is also resonant of the
Palestinian struggle wherein Segal (2016) undertakes an ethnography of endurance that testifies
to “the slow grind of violence that is not spectacularly catastrophic, not generally categorized by
immediate and large-scale death. What is most violent about the situation in occupied Palestine
is that it continues without end” (2016: 16). In this context, where framing and articulation
of grief in the form of a narrative or a story has become a “standing language” (Segal 2016:
6) for representing memory of the past in Palestine, Segal (2016) compels us to think of what
140
Sensory Remembrance
lies outside these established pre-fixed forms? And what practices of remembrance acquire the
property of being sayable and what remain unsayable?
Thus, the social anthropology of tehreek is not a compilation of the iconic events and dates
of violence that sometimes provokes us to capture Kashmir as a state of exception, but it is an
affective mediation into what Seremetakis calls “a sensorium of trauma (and grief ) as an eve-
ryday practice” (2019: 7). Through this I address a gap in the anthropology of remembrance in
conflict spaces wherein compulsive attention to the tangible and sayable undermines and invisi-
bilizes9 the sensate or sensory recalls of the past that are either intricately interwoven with the
former or exist as singular practices that demand equal representation and weight. I argue that
the conceptual category of remembrance not only partakes of that which is visible, tangible, and
sayable but also that which accounts for what Stoler and Strassler call “the emotional economy
of the everyday” (2000: 6). It refers to sentiments and sensory perceptions that “provide traces of
dispositions and sentiments often found beyond narrative availability” (ibid.: 39). This form of
remembrance excavates alternate affectivities that have been unexamined before but are critical
to the ethnographic task of retelling the past.
Artifacts as Sacred Memory Forms

During fieldwork in downtown, some everyday objects in research participants’ homes acquired
a unique sensory dimension as memory forms. These objects that came to the surface were not
symbolic artifacts that speak for themselves or encapsulate histories of resistance such as a kangri10
in the context of Kashmir. During the resistance movement against the powerful Dogra empire
and subsequently against Indian regime, the kangri as a material artifact assumed a collective and
symbolic dimension of resistance, but the constellation of artifacts that were unearthed during
field interviews were devoid of any such collective symbolic representation. On the contrary,
these everyday objects record memories in their bodies and very crucially “allow experience to
retain its strangeness and untranslatability” (Marks 2000: 199) but their sensory dimension has
remained largely effaced and undermined. I will now discuss three artifacts that emerged dur-
ing field interviews and that trigger deep emotions: pheran (cloak), bumtschoent (quince apple),
and currency notes.
Pheran as a Prayer Mat

When I entered the tiny courtyard of their Battamaloo home, Ruksana’s hands were lathered
with soap from the clothes she was washing. She was not expecting a stranger to break the
monotony of her morning chores with questions about Nasir. She stood near the frothy bucket
full of clothes, silently, perhaps ruminating what memories of Nasir should she recount: those
from when he was alive or those that tormented her after he was killed. Ruksana rummaged
through the oft-repeated details, stoically: “her brother Nasir Iqbal Shah, roll number card for
1st year exams, taking the bus to Nawakadal degree college, bomb blast at Battamaloo bus stop,
dead body in their courtyard, 1st May 1991, Wednesday and a pheran” (Kaur 2020).11 These
were details that were chiseled into her heart, she just had to read them aloud in the form of a
narrative and get back to washing clothes. Both the acts, of remembering her dead brother and
washing clothes, coalesced seamlessly into the terrain of everyday life. Even though her mother
refrained from participating in the conversation, her grief for the dead son was palpable because
memory is both: a silence and a storm. Memory moves, sticks, slides, and opens up emotions
that are shaped by contact with objects (Ahmed 1994: 18). For Ruksana’s mother, that particular
141
Bhavneet Kaur
object was Nisar’s pheran (cloak) that became the only available anchor of remembrance for her
to register the death of her violently killed young son. Ruksana says,
It was a Wednesday morning. Since then, for last 26 years, our mother remembers him
from the hour of fazr prayer in the morning to isha namaaz at night. She has replaced
the jai-namaaz12 with Nisar’s pheran. He was wearing this pheran when he was killed
and when he was last brought to this courtyard. My mother considers this pheran as an
artifact of her dead son’s palpable life: to be preserved, to be nurtured, to be prayed on.
(quoted in Kaur 2020)
Here, an attempt is being made to delineate that even after 25 years of Nasir’s killing his mother
and sister have distinct practices of remembering the painful event of the past. Their grief is
constantly re-actualized and circulated in the everyday through narratives/verbal testimony in
the case of Ruksana, and through objects and silences in case of her mother. In the ethno-
graphic vignette delineated earlier, it is the pheran/cloak of the dead son that was preserved and
embodied with layered memories of the past. The usage of the pheran as a prayer mat by the
mother invokes a sensory and divinatory anthropology of remembrance wherein articulation of
grief in the form of speech is suspended and transcended to a disposition of silence through the
very conduit of faith in Islam, the prayer mat or the jai-namaaz. The extent to which an artifact
is entangled with local cultural practices, history, politics, and memory is reflected through the
silent dialogues that occur between a grieving mother and a prayer mat. The pheran-prayer
mat, therefore, acquires a sensory dimension that allows us to locate remembrance as a culturally
and politically mediated practice. This nonverbal form of remembrance through an object does
not become an iconographic representation of namtich tehreek but allows an immersion into the
quotidian that remains sensorially un-examined in the context of downtown Srinagar. By itself,
the pheran as a piece of clothing has a sanctioned cultural meaning and a pre-defined condition
of consumption but the pheran as a memory form “becomes the carrier of surplus meanings”
(Seremetakis 1996: 11). It is this surplus meaning produced by the sensory object that becomes
crucial for the work of remembrance wherein a pheran can embody multiplicities of sensory
circulations: a piece of clothing, a symbol of Kashmiri cultural identity, a symbolic source of
warmth in winter, and a prayer mat.
Bumtschoent: The Last Uncooked Meal

In another ethnographic vignette, the bumtschoent (quince apple) emerged as a memory form
through which Noor Jehan, mother of Sharib (a civilian killed by Border Security Force in his
bakery shop at Naid Kadal on August 30, 1999), recapitulates the last exchange between them
through the kitchen window. She says, “at one moment he was standing here at the kitchen
window joking with us and giving us bumtschoent and mutton that he got for dinner.13 Just a few
moments later, he was lying dead on the floor of the bakery” (2016). The lingering memory of
the last uncooked meal of mutton with bumtschoent becomes the sensory anchor around which
the narrative of his death is shared. It remains an indelible and painful sensorial experience for the
family to remember Sharib through a vegetable. These sensory memories of the past were not
the ethnographic pursuits of fieldwork, yet their complex integration and interplay with other
forms of remembrance became a crucial mode of encountering the social world of downtown
Srinagar. What becomes important here is that the sensory memories of bumtschoent do not
efface other remnants of the past but supplement them by overlapping with other memories
142
Sensory Remembrance
such as the tangible remains of the bullet marks still preserved on the doors and shutters of the
bakery shop where Sharib was killed. By illustrating this, I argue that forms of remembrance
oscillate or overlap between the visual/tangible/linguistic traces of the past and an inarticulate
and incomprehensible world wherein “the senses provide an alternate entry point into the
history of memory, a site for recovering forgotten or erased experiences that re-integrate the
sensorial with the material” (Porcello et al. 2010: 54).
Currency Notes as Nishaani

In re-imagining the social world of 1990s and its afterlife in downtown Srinagar where political
killings have become a part and parcel of everyday sociality, it becomes necessary to understand
that memory is a culturally mediated practice.14 In the locality of Malaratta in downtown Sri-
nagar in 2017, another ordinary object resurfaced that embodies the visceral lived relationship
between two brothers. Ten months elder to him, Ali, recalls his 12-year-old brother Aamir
who was killed on September 22, 1991, in the cross-firing between the Indian army and local
militants. Ali resurrects the micro-details of the last conversation between them, before Aamir
left home that morning:
We collected Rs 9 each to buy an audio cassette of Ataullah Khan Eskhelvi’s “nazm”/

poetry, “ishq main hum tumhein kya bataein” to play on father’s tape-recorder because it
was Aamir’s favourite, he would keep singing that song. In the morning he wore my
slippers to go to our uncle’s home nearby and told me that we will go buy the cassette
in the evening. But the same afternoon, he was killed in cross firing and his dead body
was brought back home on a vegetable cart. I keep remembering part of the lyrics of
this song, ae lehat apni mitti se kehde, dag lagne na paaye kaffan ko (O Grave, tell your soil
that there should be no stain on the shroud). These words feel powerful and presci-
ent of what happened to him, he became a part of the song. He was not wearing the
slippers, but he still had his share of the cassette money, Rs 9, in his pocket. One note
of Rs 5 and two notes of Rs 2. I have kept that money safely in a box because it has
become a nishaani for me. . . . We call it tobruk . . . a pure thing.
In religious places such as mosques and shrines in Kashmir, the sacralized peace offering made
to God/the local saint is distributed amongst people as tobruk because it is considered sacred and
pure. It can range from a simple offering of dates or shelled almonds to an elaborate meal of tehri
(yellowed rice) and kehwa (saffron tea). However, in the unique context in which Ali equates a
material artifact to the status of tobruk provides an anthropological insight into remembrance in
itself as a blessing, a divine benediction that can be embedded in objects that trigger deep emo-
tions. Coupled with the other description, nishani, which means a sign, mark, or imprint, the
three ordinary currency notes that were to potentially contribute to the purchase of a favorite
audio cassette became a sacred and a divine marker of the violence in Kashmir in which human
life has become perishable and disposable.
The circulation of these sacralized objects of the everyday in homes of downtown Srinagar
and their sensory embodiments allowed a different kind of retelling of the tehreek that was not
dependent on archival records, testimonies, memorials, or photographs. The recovery of these
artifacts allows us to posit that the imperceptible layer of memories and sensory exchanges
between the object and the person generates a surplus of meanings that transforms them from
their mere physical existence as things or objects to multisensory memory forms.
143
Bhavneet Kaur
The Sociality of Dreaming: In-Between Life and Death

While tracing the multiple sensory circulations that operate within the intangible world of
remembrances in downtown Srinagar, I arrived at narratives that were initially beyond the soci-
ological grasp of this research and could only be understood as an incongruous occurrence of
divinatory nature. Since the ethnographic work was focused on the political movement starting
from the late 1980s onwards, tracing the families of those who were subjected to political kill-
ings by the Indian state apparatus became particularly tough as most of the parents had already
passed away. Conducting fieldwork interviews in the absence of the parents of those subjected
to political killings was difficult and I had to rely on the surviving family members (either an
elder son, a daughter, or a daughter-in-law) who would share the memories of the parents and
in doing so, very crucially, recreated the pivotal moment of the passing away of these parents.
In some of these surviving relatives’ accounts, what emerged as the most viscerally expe-
rienced and embodied form of remembrance was the figure of the dying parent in a verbal
dialogue with the absent and dead son. In these sensitive moments just before their own deaths,
the grieving parents, mostly mothers, remembered through their dreams. These dreams featured
lucid visions and verbal exchanges with a son who was killed many years ago. In one such eth-
nography from Bohri Kadal area of downtown Srinagar in 2015, Ruhi remembers the day her
mother passed away in 2000:
That afternoon in her sleep my mother started muttering “Bilal, aa jao chai piyo” (Bilal,
come have tea). She asked me in her subconscious state to make tea for Bilal, my
brother who was killed in 1994. When she opened her eyes and could not see him,
she asked me, “Woh aaya tha na, kahaan gaya?” (He had come, where has he gone?) Just
within a few hours of this dream, she passed away the same day.
The dream becomes a vision or a warning sign that allows an immersion into the sensory and
embodied dimension of remembrance. The appearance of the dead son in the dream is consid-
ered as a sacred form of communication between a grieving mother and a violently killed son.
I argue that this moment of transitory meeting encapsulates a “sociality of dreaming” (Seremetakis
2019: 168) that allows submerged sentiments and emotions to come to the surface through the
“involuntary circuit of the senses” (Seremetakis1996).
In the second account that I came across in Kailashpora locality in 2015, a daughter-in-
law, Saima, explicated the lives of her in-laws who lost two sons during the armed movement
of 1990s. She said, “unke liye toh duniya hi jal gayi thi” (for them the world itself had burnt to
ashes). The father-in-law, Mohammad Idris, used to have a conversation with the photos of
his sons, asking them rhetorically what has happened to them and where have they gone. One
day as he was returning after offering fateh khwaani (remembrance prayers for the dead) for his
younger son buried in the Khanqah martyrs’ graveyard, he got a heart attack and died the same
day in 1997.
However, for her mother-in-law, Razia Bano, the experience of violent pain and the feeling
of loss could not be catalogued and narrated into linguistic forms. Therefore, she would hold
the pillows from her bed on her lap and start singing lullabies for her two lakht-e-jigars (beloved
sons), Bilal and Urooj:
maye chanye rovun raat doh

ho ho bukaryo yur walo
144
Sensory Remembrance
Because of you my love, my days and nights are exhausted

I am asking you to come back.
Razia nursed hope and despair concomitantly, for 12 years. Through her murmured singing all
day, she offered a phonetics of grief in a world where the intensity of violence had made unavail-
able the syntax for pain, the language for grief. The sensorial entanglement of hope, despair,
and wait opened a new extra-linguistic and embodied register for remembrance. When lan-
guage cannot assimilate a human experience, what are the ways in which memories of the past
can be made shareable; however surreptitiously or momentarily?
The silence Razia enforced upon herself after the violent killing of her two sons had induced
a certain opaqueness to her experience. At the same time, the lullabies she sang kept afloat the
refrains of her hope, of her remembrance: ho ho bukaryo yur walo (I am asking you to come
back). Saima recounted that her mother-in-law would sing songs, borrowed from folklore,
sung and hummed, for her absent sons. For her, remembrance through songs was not a flash of
painful memory or an “irruption” in the order of things; rather it was an embodiment of grief,
of viscerally storing memory into the interstices of her being, a dull pain emanating from the
wound of loss, relentlessly, and seamlessly, making it the rhythm of her incorrigible life. These
reverberations of death of her young sons offered Razia no break, no tangible escape from the
sweep of their memory. It unfolded, perhaps, like the trauma of Partition, wherein Das says,
“one could become voiceless – not in the sense that one does not have words – but that these
words become frozen, numb, without life” (2006: 8). Razia would plaintively sing or murmur
Kashmiri folksongs all day about absence, about longing, about pain, about hope on her old
Philips radio. It became the only artifact onto and through which she could register the inte-
riority and intensity of her pain. She would passionately sing or pleadingly murmur a famous
folksong, Roshay, to not allow a break in the communication she was furtively having with her
absent sons. The lyrics of this song became the phonetics of her grief.
Tsolhama roshay roshay

Walo myeun poshay madno
You have run away from me and gone far off my beloved,
Come back, my love, my flower.15
The singing of lullabies and folksongs as a mode of communication with her dead sons is a
prelude to the sociality of dreaming wherein the alternate world of seeing the sons acquires a
reality, even if for a few fleeting moments. The idea of communicating and speaking with the
dead son becomes an involuntary and embodied form of remembrance. Saima recalls that one
early Sunday morning in 2005 when a Kashmiri song started playing on the radio, “Khabar tscha
subhuk ye dam rozea na rozea” (Don’t know whether my breath will last till tomorrow morn-
ing),16 Razia started telling Saima something uncanny, “yeh aaya hai Urooj” (Urooj has come),
“uska rooh aata hai” (his spirit keeps appearing). Saima said, “after this we knew that something
was about to happen to her. At around 12am that night she got a heart attack and on the way
to the hospital she died.”
It can be said that for the aging grieving parent, the world of dreams and divination is a
mediating space, a threshold between life and death, between the real and the illusory that they
inhabit simultaneously. Is it possible to register these sensory perceptions of dreaming and see-
ing spirits as sensory forms of remembrance or are they just seen as hallucinations? How do we
145
Bhavneet Kaur
understand remembrance that culminates in dreams? Falak (2018: 80, emphasis added) ascribes
a share of history to these dreams by saying that,
for many women, dream-visions remain significant ways of maintaining ties with the
dead and the disappeared. Walter Benjamin (1996) reminds us that “Dreaming has a
share in history.” In this context, I understand dreams as everyday practices of resist-
ance and memory, which are shaped by the political conditions and in turn have political
implications.
Therefore, the anthropology of dreams allows us to interpret the body of the grieving parent
as occupying two distinct temporalities that locate them simultaneously in the rhythms of the
present as well as in the irretrievable loss of the past. Rather than interpreting or translating the
language in the dream, I argue that the dream itself needs to be located as a sensory, social, and
political text through which repressed, unvoiced, and embodied memories of the namtich tehreek
leak through the cracks of history and become inheritable.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have identified sensory and extra-linguistic practices of remembrance to ask
what happens when material memorials obliterate and when narratives fail? To understand the
perpetuity of grief which is embodied by families whose kin were violently killed during 1990s,
I argue that a narrative or a testimony that allows violent experiences of the past to be formu-
lated into words is crucial, yet it cannot be an all-encompassing singular form of representation
of memory. Therefore, I have foregrounded “an emotional economy of the everyday” (Stoler
and Strassler 2000: 6) through the narratives/snippets of the research participants. These sensory
practices of remembrance such as sacralization of artifacts, embodied dreams, and phonetics
of folksongs allow an alternate recounting and retelling of tehreek by capturing emotions that
were viscerally sensed, felt, embodied, and remembered but were at the margins of or outside
linguistic and tangible forms.
Notes
1 Downtown is the main city or old part of Srinagar city and has historically been known as Sheher-
e-Khas. I chose to identify it as the primary site of ethnographic enquiry because it is considered to
be the axiomatic precipitator of tehreek, particularly post-1947 and during the armed movement in
early1990s.
2 Namtich tehreek is a composition of the Kashmiri word “namtich,” which means the 1990s, and the
Urdu word “tehreek,” which means movement. Namtich tehreek or the political movement of the 1990s,
although a temporal event within the larger political movement (tehreek), is also significantly different
because it acquired an armed configuration.
3 All the names used in this chapter are changed to protect the identity of the research participants.
4 The author was informed that Sabia’s brother was killed by the armed forces. A shopkeeper near their
home in Shamaswari gave a tentative list of names, based on oral memory, of those who were martyred
in 1990s from this locality. But Sabia herself did not speak about the circumstances that led to the
killing.
5 AFSPA or Armed Forces Special Powers Act was implemented in 1990 in the state of Jammu and
Kashmir along with other acts such as Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act and Jammu and
Kashmir Public Safety Act (already implemented since 1978). The corpus of these laws provides extra-
judicial powers and impunity to the armed personnel that has led to a regime of preventive and indefi-
nite detentions, custodial killings and enforced disappearances in Kashmir (see Duschinski and Ghosh
2020).
146
Sensory Remembrance
6 This denial of personal memory can be understood in another context. Das, in her work on violence
and the work of time, analyses stories of partition that were “framed by the anonymous collective
voice: ‘it was heard those days’, or ‘strange were the stories one heard’. No one ever authored those
stories; they were only heard” (2006: 88).
7 In his work on the social imagination of martyrs’ graveyards in Kashmir, Junaid proposes that graveyards
are not “quiet remnants of violence, passively receiving dead bodies” (2018a: 249) rather he conceptu-
alized epitaphs of graveyards as “counterhistories.”
8 A traditionally loose warm cloak worn by people in Kashmir during winters.
9 Seremetakis (1996) addresses this gap by saying that historical experience is relegated to forgetfulness
because “the senses as the bearers and record-keepers of involuntary and pervasive material experience,
and therefore as potential sources of alternative memory and temporality are precisely that which is
frequently subjected to social forgetfulness and thereby constitute the sphere of hidden historical other-
ness” (1996: 20).
10 Kangri is a Kashmiri indigenous heating device used in winters in which an earthen pot filled with hot
coal is used under the pheran/cloak to warm the body. During the Dogra regime when unarmed civil-
ians were attacked by the Dogra army, people would throw the kangris they were using in the direction
of the soldier. This form of resistance acquired a gendered dimension in the post 1980s context when
Indian army would conduct crackdowns and do mass illegal detentions of young boys. At that time
women have been reported to unfurl their kangris in the direction of the soldier to allow the boys to
escape. However, it is not a common practice because doing so would put the person at a grave risk
because the soldiers were armed and clearly more powerful. Yet the image of kangri retains this sym-
bolic resistance attached to it over the years.
11 This ethnographic vignette has appeared in the article, “Politics of Emotions: Everyday affective circu-
lation of women’s resistance and grief in Kashmir” (Kaur 2020).
12 A prayer mat.
13 In Kashmir, mutton cooked with quince apple is a delicacy at homes. Sharib was going to attend a
wedding lunch in the afternoon before he was killed, so the mutton and quince apple that he procured
in the morning and gave to his mother were in preparation for dinner that night.
14 Seremetakis (1996) argues that “mnemonic processes are intertwined with the sensory order in such a
manner as to render each perception a re-perception . . . Memory cannot be confined to a mentalist
or subjective sphere. It is a culturally mediated material practice that is activated by embodied acts and
semantically dense objects” (1996: 9)
15 Verses from a popular Kashmiri song, Roshay, written by Habba Khatoon (a female poet and wife of
Yousuf Shah Chak, the last independent Muslim ruler of Kashmir).
16 Verses from a popular Kashmiri song, Ganimat Shaam-e-gham.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 1994. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Benjamin, Walter.1996. “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism.” Selected Writings 2: 3–5. Cambridge:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Bloch, Maurice. 1998. “Time, Narratives and the Multiplicity of Representations of the Past.” In How
We Think They Think: Anthropological Approaches to Cognition, Memory and Literacy, edited by Maurice
Bloch, 100–113. Colorado: Westview Press.
Chatterjee, Anjana, Parvez Imroz, Gautam Navlakha, Zahir-Ud-Din, Mihir Desai and Khurram Parvez.
2009. Buried Evidence: Unknown, Unmarked, and Mass Graves in Indian Administered Kashmir: A Prelimi-
nary Report. Srinagar: International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian Admin-
istered Kashmir.
Das, Veena. 1995. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
———. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
147
Bhavneet Kaur
Duschinski, Haley and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh. 2020. “The Grid of Indefinite Incarceration: Eve-
ryday Legality and Paperwork Warfare in Indian-Controlled Kashmir.” Critique of Anthropology 40(3):
364–384.
Falak, Uzma. 2018. “The Intimate world of Vyestoan: Affective Female Alliances and Companionships of
Resistance in Kashmir.” Economic and Political Weekly 53(47): 76–82.
Hirsch, Marianne. 2008. “The Generation of Post-Memory.” Poetics Today 29(1): 103–128.
Howes, David. 2003. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press.
Jackson, Michael. 2015. “Life and Concept.” In Living and Dying in the Contemporary World: A Compendium
edited by Veena Das and Clara Han, 449–462. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2013. “Death and Life under Military Occupation: Space, Violence, and Memory in
Kashmir.” In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, edited by
Kamala Visweswaran, 158–190. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2018a. “Epitaphs as Counterhistories: Martyrdom, Commemoration and the Work of Graveyards
in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia,
and Cynthia Mahmood Junaid, Mohamad. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2018b. “Disobedient Bodies, Defiant Objects: Occupation, Necropolitics and the Resistance in
Kashmir.” The Funambulist 21, December 20. https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/21-space-activism/
disobedient-bodies-defiant-objects-occupation-necropolitics-resistance-kashmir-mohamed-junaid.
Kaur, Bhavneet. 2020. “Politics of Emotion: Everyday Affective Circulation of Women’s Resistance and
Grief in Kashmir.” Ethnography (March). https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1466138120907931.
Langer, Lawrence. 1998. “The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity.” In Social Suffering,
edited by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lockwood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Marks, Laura. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Parrey, Arif Ayaz. 2011. “A Prologue to Memory.” Kafila, October 31. https://kafila.
online/2011/10/30/a-prologue-to-memory-arif-ayaz-parrey/.
Porcello, Thomas, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and David Sameuls. 2010. “The Reorganization of
the Sensory World.” Annual Review of Anthropology 39: 51–66.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2008. “A Talent for Life: Reflections on Human Vulnerability and Resilience.”
Ethnos 73(1): 25–56.
Segal, Lotte Buch. 2016. No Place for Grief: Martyrs, Prisoners and Mourning in Contemporary Palestine. Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Seremetakis, Nadia. 1991. The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
———. 1996. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago and London:
The University of Chicago Press.
———. 2019. Sensing the Everyday: Dialogues from Austerity Greece. New York: Routledge.
Severi, Carlo. 2015. The Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and Imagination, translated by Janet
Lloyd. HAU Books: Paris.
Stoler, Ann Laura and Karen Strassler. 2000. “Castings for the Colonial: Memory Work in the ‘New
Order’ Java.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42(1): 4–48.
Taussig, Michael. 1992. The Nervous System. New York: Routledge.
Zia, Ather. 2019. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: Uni-
148
SECTION III
Memories, Futures, Imaginations

Deepti Misri
The chapters in this section consider the relationship between the imagination of Kashmir’s
many pasts and the political futures envisioned explicitly and implicitly by Kashmiris. They also
exemplify the methodological breadth of Kashmir studies, as authors turn to fictional and eth-
nographic narratives, as well as embodied and gestural archives such as children’s play and food
preparation practices to explore how Kashmiris remember their past and dream their future.
A number of chapters in this section take up literary and poetic texts as sites for the articula-
tion of Kashmiri aspirations. Amit R. Baishya scrutinizes Kashmiri artists’ revisitation of Saadat
Hasan Manto’s iconic Partition story “Tetwal ka Kutta” (The Dog of Tetwal). Detailing the
intertextual resonances across Manto’s text, Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir, and
Arif Ayaz Parrey and Waseem Helal’s “Tamasha-e-Tetwal” (Cacophony Over Tetwal), Baishya
details how the latter artists implicitly point to Manto’s own erasure of Kashmir as a disputed
territory and seek to recraft the geographic imagination around Kashmir through their own
fictions. Whereas Kashmir is an “absent presence” in Manto, appearing merely “as a bone of
contention between India and Pakistan,” the latter Kashmiri artists depart from that scheme.
Drawing on animal studies, Baishya examines the figure of the stray dog in all of these fictions,
showing how Sajad, Helal, and Parrey also move beyond Manto’s use of the dog as a figure for
the indeterminacy of “no man’s land,” to instead present stray dogs as a material presence in the
zone of occupation.
Huzaifa Pandit revisits the iconic Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, breaking with
a generation of celebratory approaches to Ali’s poetry and its powerful calls to freedom, in
order to situate Ali’s poetics within a sobering and complex analysis of the poet’s own class
and caste lineages in Kashmir. Pandit situates Ali as a member of the local upper-caste Kash-
miri Muslim elite, a landowning class whose interests have historically been at great odds with
the peasant and artisan classes who comprised the majority of Kashmiri Muslims, and whose
labor was extracted by upper-caste Brahmins as well as elite Muslim families such as the Syeds,
Naqshbandis, and Aghas during the Afghan, Sikh, and Dogra eras. Taking up Ali’s renowned
collection of poems The Country Without a Post Office, Pandit carefully interrogates Ali’s use of
images steeped in a colonial nostalgia for the markers of such elite status, notwithstanding the
overall anti-colonial tenor of his poetry. Such images range from the colonial “Villa of Peace” in
“A Pastoral,” with its cedar stands and ornate staircases to the Koran wrapped in a jamawar shawl
(a prohibitively expensive artifact produced under extractive conditions by Kashmiri Muslim
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-14
Deepti Misri
male shawl weavers), laid on a walnut table in his poem “Return to Harmony 3.” Pandit’s read-
ing of Ali’s oeuvre asks us to attend to how counter-colonial imaginaries may be enmeshed
with hegemonic class and colonial imaginaries, and it is the reader’s task to watch for such an
enmeshment in poetic as well as other modes of imagining a decolonial future.
Like Pandit, Rakhshan Rizwan is interested in detailing how a close critical attention to
fictional, poetic, and other artistic forms may push us toward more complex and nuanced
understandings of anti-colonial imaginaries and their articulations with other discursive modes.
Rizwan takes up the Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
(2017). Examining the novel in light of literary scholarship on the genre of the human rights
novel, Rizwan observes the novel’s construction as “a narrative super-container” that encloses
a range of genres associated with human rights documentation. Rizwan details how Roy’s
fictional text complicates human rights narratology, with its straightforward representations of
victims, bystanders, and perpetrators. Roy’s novel instead, Rizwan writes, deliberately “add(s)
layers of emotional noise to the cut and dry findings that characterize a traditional human rights
report.” For example, Roy restages the actual story of Major Avtar Singh, an Indian army official
accused of murdering human rights defender Jalil Andrabi and other Kashmiris who had wit-
nessed the killing. In her fictional treatment of this incident, Roy shows how perpetrators may
use their own intimate knowledge of state violence to easily mimic testimonial language and
present themselves as victims. The text thereby trains us to scrutinize the markers of veracity and
realist description that are often taken as signifiers of truth in human rights reports.
Haris Zargar explores the intimate memories of the kin of killed militants to interrogate the
state’s figuration of militants as members of an “erratic fringe.” Noting the need to take seriously
the motivations and aspirations of those who take up arms and lay down their lives in the con-
text of occupation, Zargar presents material from detailed interviews with the family members
of three well-known militant commanders, in order to consider how family members recol-
lect the values and choices of their rebellious kin. Zargar asserts the value of oral testimony in
interrupting the depersonalizing and dehumanizing discourses of the state, which presents them
either as brainwashed “victims” of ideology or as villainous antisocial figures. Across the inter-
views, Zargar notes how family members of militants emphasized “the caring and ‘compassion-
ate’ nature of their rebel member,” offering circumstantial details that explained the decisions of
the Kashmiri youth to join militant outfits. Against the dominant Indian state and media narra-
tives of militant youth as violent and terroristic, the family members of slain militants sought to
foreground aspects of their personalities with care, self-awareness, introversion, and empathy for
others. In other words, they are figured as agents of revolutionary love rather than of violence.
Moving away from textual and oral narratives, Sarbani Sharma looks at the embodied prac-
tice of children’s play in the Eidgah neighborhood in Srinagar, not far from the martyr’s grave-
yard, and thereby a space suffused with a memory of violence. In particular, Sharma considers
the “fictive frames” of children’s play in this context, where the (male) children cast themselves
as playing on the Pakistani cricket team rather than an Indian one, and affectionately imagine
one of their batsmen as “our Shahid Afridi.” Sharma considers how this complex construction
of affinity for Pakistan among the children runs counter to “what they learn in their school,
families, and Indian national media,” and at the same time interrupts the Indian imagination
of the Kashmiri child as either innocent victim or as a criminal agent on par with adults.
Sharma’s chapter also implicitly opens up the question of what girls’ play looks like in Kashmir;
what affective affiliations might be embedded therein; and whether and how girls’ play also
imaginatively mediates the relationship between Kashmiri and Indian nationalisms in similar
or different ways.
150
Memories, Futures, Imaginations
Finally, Anisa Bhutia turns our attention to food, as she considers the practices, associations,
and memories around food among the Khache, a community that traces its lineage to Kashmiri
Muslim traders who settled in Tibet around the fifteenth century, and “returned” to Kashmir
following the Dalai Lama’s flight to India after the 1959 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule.
Bhutia presents food practices as a conductor of memory and histories of travel across Kashmir
and Central Asia. Her examination of the menu and décor of the Lhasa Restaurant as well as
of Khache food preparation practices at home reveal a complex negotiation between Tibetan
and Kashmiri identities and selves—in the absence of pork on the menu and the presence of
wazwan, for instance; or the fact that in the domestic kitchen, Kashmiri dishes like hakh and
Tibetan logo momo are served together, while Indian staples such as rice and dal are also favored,
an imprint of the community’s passage through the Indian state. In light of the histories of
regional cosmopolitanism and movement across Tibet, Kashmir, and India, Bhutia’s chapter
also raises key questions about who is a “Kashmiri.” Herself from the Khache community and
born in Kalimpong, Bhutia had ties to Kashmir through her relatives, which have deepened
through her own scholarly visits to Kashmir. As she writes: “As years have passed, I have found
some form of understanding of myself as Kashmiri.” Her grounded and contextual understand-
ing of Kashmiri identity and location invoke a cosmopolitan imagination of Kashmiriness that
transcends state-centric histories and geographies.
151
11
DOGS OF WAR, WAR DOGS
The Afterlives of Manto in Two Kashmiri
Graphic Novels
Amit R. Baishya
Introduction
Saadat Hasan Manto’s Urdu short story “Tetwal ka Kutta” (2007) (Translation: The Dog of
Tetwal; henceforth “Tetwal”) has had afterlives in two contemporary graphic productions from
Kashmir – Malik Sajad’s künstlerroman Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) and Arif Ayaz Par-
rey and Waseem Helal’s graphic-segment “Tamasha-e-Tetwal” in the anthology This Side, That
Side: Restorying Partition (2013).1 This chapter analyzes the intertextual resonances and critical
departures from Manto in the two Kashmiri graphic productions via two perspectives: (1) the
polyvalent circulation of stray dogs as symbols, material presences, and interspecies cohabitants,
and (2) the erasure of Tetwal/Kashmir as historically specific locales in Manto’s oeuvre.
While dogs are among the most humanized of animals, their status teeters ambivalently
between sentimental anthropomorphism, images of bestiality, and/or sheer abjection.2 This
ambivalence impacts their representations in literature and cinema where their presence is often
read through the registers of symbolism or allegory (for example, the stray dog as a substitute for
the figure of the refugee in “Tetwal”). Humans identify sentimentally especially with domesti-
cated dogs by endowing them a human “face.” Humans also other dogs by denying them face or
endowing them a feral face. Phrases such as “like a dog” – an important one for this chapter –
are signifiers for their abject status.
The ambivalence toward dogs becomes even more prominent if canines are strays. Many
Euro-American cultures see dogs
only as faithful companions and helpers in a large number of human activities. . . . We

tend to see dogs as a product of the human capacity to bend nature to our needs and, as
such, we like to think that dogs are acceptable only as far as they are under our full control.
(Boitani 2014: v–vi)
Stray dogs in Euro-American contexts often invoke images of sheer abjection or of untamed
feralness. These views on stray dogs do not map isomorphically to South Asian contexts,
although the spread of neoliberal forms of pet ownership in urban India, allied with biopolitical
measures enacted against the menace of “stray” populations have changed interspecies relation-
ships.3 South Asian urban and rural locales are “trans-species” environments (Narayanan 2017:
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-15 153

Amit R. Baishya
3). Populations in such locales interact with stray dogs through a wide continuum of affective
relationalities ranging from disgust to care.
This ambivalence toward stray dogs also emerges in a militarized zone like Kashmir, where
street dogs have been considered “tools” of the Indian occupation. Bhan and Bose (2020: 4)
write: “Kashmiris have appropriated canines as a metaphor for the brutality of the state as evi-
denced by the pervasiveness of urban graffiti demanding ‘Indian dogs return to India.’ ”4 The
personhood endowed to dogs runs parallel to the depersonalization of Kashmiris.
However, there are other ways of relating to street dogs in Kashmir. Consider the ambiva-
lence in the following passages from Ather Zia’s article “Of the Dog Days in Kashmir” (2012):
Since 2005, there have been seven fatal attacks and the Srinagar hospital has received
more than 20,000 dog bite cases. People are afraid to step out alone after hours for the
fear of being attacked. . .
In early days of militancy it was common for the Indian troops to raise stray dogs
around the bunkers. These dogs became default guard-dogs – a kind of animal mili-
tia. . . . Kashmiris are not dog people, if anything they hate them. . .
Nowadays the presence of dogs in Kashmir . . . is deeply metaphoric of what is hap-
pening or what has happened to Kashmir. The way dogs run amok in the city, in large
packs during the day and especially at nights gives an impression of being in a jungle.
Two aspects are worth highlighting here: (1) the figure of the stray dog as a feral presence and
tool of the military, and (2) the presence of stray packs as the metaphorical sign for the erasure
of the boundary between urban space and the untamed jungle (given the conditions of milita-
rized occupation in Kashmir, “jungle” has specific connotations of the suspension of law and
the prevalence of terror). However, Zia’s unequivocal statement that Kashmiris “hate” dogs can
be complicated by placing it alongside another passage in her essay:
It is quite usual to spot a fresh litter mewing at alley corners. People despite the prob-
lems they face on account of the unbridled dog aggression, will try to keep the young
pups and their mother comfortable especially in the cold winter. They collect rags,
gunny bags and cardboard pieces to make a snug nest, and make sure that the mother
has a meal to eat.
What this passage highlights are the convivial relationships between humans and stray canines
that cohabit urban space. It would not be incorrect to say that in Kashmir, comparable albeit not
the same as in other South Asian locales, stray dogs oscillate ambivalently in a wide spectrum
of relationships in the interzone between “nature” and “culture.” Bhan and Bose write: “Indian
street dogs . . . acquire multiple meanings (in Kashmir), simultaneously encompassing asso-
ciations with militarized violence, a virulent version of neoliberalized Hinduism, and spirited
resistance to the national security state” (ibid.: 6). Analyzing the multiple meanings that accrue
from human-canine interfaces will be a major task of this chapter.
My second task here is to analyze the critique of Manto’s erasure of the specificity of Kash-
mir. The critique is relatively oblique in Munnu but is directly stated in “Tamasha-e-Tetwal.”
The geopolitically important Tetwal (or Tithwal) is in the Neelum Valley which is
some 90 miles long. It rises as the Kishenganga in the mountain complex to the west
of Dras, between Kargil and Srinagar. It then runs north-west, crossing the LOC into
154
Dogs of War, War Dogs
Pakistani-administered Kashmir, then west before running to the south, and again
turning to the west before joining the Jhelum river just by Muzaffarabad.
At several points the Neelum is the LOC between Indian and Pakistani positions;
and much of the Valley is overlooked by Indian positions. The Indians also command
the heights above Tithwal sector, while the Pakistanis sometimes command strategic
heights overlooking Indian positions. The Neelum has been a front-line between two
hostile neighbours since 1948.
(Evans 2005: 40)
The phrase “since 1948” hides a traumatic history of partition and spatial rearrangement. The
Neelum River, known as the Kishenganga in Indian-occupied Kashmir, is the dividing line
between the towns of Tetwal in India and Nauseri in Pakistan. Discussing the historical and
spatial dislocations engendered by partition, Ershad Mahmud (2018: 215) writes:
Before 1947 Tithwal was a major hub of trade and social activities for the entire
region, with families in Neelum Valley sending their children across the bridge span-
ning the Neelum River to attend the Tithwal High School. Local people in Neelum
Valley and GilgitBaltistan traveled and traded along this route, passing through Tith-
wal on the way to Leepa Valley. . . . Since 1947, people traveling between Neelum
and Leepa Valleys have been forced to traverse a long route that takes thirteen long
hours rather than a more direct route through Tithwal, which takes no more than
four hours.
Cut here to Manto, whose two Tetwal-front stories – “Tetwal” and “Aakhri Salute” (2019)
(Translation: The Last Salute) – erase this complex history of interconnection altogether. Fur-
thermore, the two Tetwal-front stories, although set in Kashmir, do not have a single Kashmiri
character. Kashmir is represented as a bone of contention between India and Pakistan. The
claims of nation(s) over contested territory are naturalized.
Kashmir/Kashmiri is mentioned 33 times in Manto’s satirical “Pundit Manto’s First Letter
to Pundit Nehru” (1996) (both Manto and Nehru trace their origins to Kashmir). For a letter
from one “Kashmiri” to another, an omission occurs when partition is mentioned: “It was the
time when Radcliffe had turned India into two slices of a single loaf of bread. It is regrettable
that they have not been toasted yet. You’re toasting it from that side, and we, from this side”
(165). The image of a single loaf of bread cut into two slices erases Kashmir as a specific locale
with its own history. The erasure of Kashmir’s specificity is one of the unfortunate afterlives of
Manto’s legacy and both graphic productions contend with it critically.
Kutte ki Maut: “Tetwal”

The dog that arrives from elsewhere into the diegetic space of “Tetwal” is a stranger without
history. In a previous publication, I critiqued the overwhelming tendency toward allegorical
interpretations of “Tetwal” that easily substitute the stray dog with the refugee.5 Focusing on
the dog’s responsive bark and the communicative aspects of its wagging tail as “living signs” via
Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) biosemiotics-inflected anthropological approach, I attempted to free the
canine from an allegorical interpretation. This is not my focus here as I tarry with the allegorical
reading of “Tetwal” and focus on the homologies between human and canine personhood and
subsequent depersonalization.
155
Amit R. Baishya
The pastoral setting of the story, reminiscent of the representation of Kashmir as “paradise”
in the colonial Indian imaginary, seems idyllic:
The weather was pleasant; the wind wafted across, spreading the scent of wildflow-
ers . . . nature was immersed in its necessary work – the birds chirped as before, the
flowers continued to bloom.
(Manto 2007: 80)
The discordant note in this idyll comes from “occasional bursts of fire” from the entrenched
Indian and Pakistani soldiers: “Each time a shot echoed in the hills, the chirping birds would
cry out in alarm and fly up” (ibid.: 80). After these jarring interruptions, the pastoral idyll seem-
ingly continues. We get a glimpse of the Pakistani and Indian army camps and learn that there
is a space in-between that functions as a no-man’s zone. The lone traveller across this no-man’s
zone is a stray dog, that suddenly appears, leaves and reappears in the two camps as a “bin bulaye
mehman” (uninvited guest) (ibid.: 84).
The first entrance of the dog is through the sonic dimension – the Indian soldiers hear the
dog bark (bhaukna) (ibid.: 82). The subsequent call-and-response of songs and barking show that
the dog is not simply a “reactive” being, but one that responds to the call of the other.6 This
depiction of reciprocal responsiveness and the phrase – bin bulaye mehman – are key as the story
poses the questions: what hospitality is due to the stranger who arrives from an indeterminate
elsewhere? What is the form of relationality that can be forged with an “uninvited guest”? The
possibility of violence is ubiquitous – “Subedar Himmat Khan picked up a pebble and threw it
at the dog” (Manto 2007: 84). However, a significant portion of “Tetwal” shows a fragile form
of relationality shaping between the dog and the soldiers. The sharing of food, addressing the
dog with songs and hearing it bark in response, and the wagging of the dog’s tail emerge as the
indices of this fragile interspecies relationality. It seems like the “bin bulaye mehman” has been
allowed to stay.
Things change suddenly and terrifyingly from the point where the unnamed dog is endowed
a national “identity.” This endowment of quasi-legal identity to the stranger by the soldiers
accentuates its status as fungible property. This mock-endowment of a legal persona by the sol-
diers of the two countries show how, within the law, the paradox of simultaneous ignobility and
absolute goodness endowed to canines becomes “the working definition of the dog: so empty
of substance that it can accrue to itself all kinds of projections” (Dayan 2011: 232). The Indian
soldiers put an “ID card” (this term is absent in “Tetwal,” but I am gesturing toward Munnu)
around its neck that states: “This is a Hindustani dog” (Manto 2007: 84). The Pakistani soldiers
respond by writing: “This is a Pakistani dog” (ibid.: 84).
This act of endowing the dog an “ID Card” is a mock-serious attempt at giving it a legal
persona. Hannah Arendt (1977: 97) writes that in its original theatrical sense, the Latin persona
was “the mask affixed to the actor’s face by the exigencies of the play.” The mask hid the actor’s
“natural” face and replaced it with a representational one through which the voice sounded.
The word became a metaphor and travelled from theatrical usage to legal terminology:
The distinction between a private individual in Rome and a Roman citizen was that
the latter had a persona, a legal personality . . . it was as though the law had affixed to
him the part he was expected to play on the public scene, with the provision . . . that
his own voice would be able to sound through. . . . Without his persona, there would
be an individual without rights and duties, perhaps a ‘natural man’ – that is a human
being or homo in the original meaning of the word, indicating someone outside the
156
range of the law and the body politic of the citizens . . . but certainly a politically
irrelevant being.
(Ibid.: 97)
Rights and identity markers like cards and passports are a modality of modern legal personae
that the law affixes on a subject. They are forms of protective persona-as-mask that enable us to
participate in a “human artifice” like the state, an incorporation into (national) community that
is mock-seriously attached to the dog in “Tetwal.”
These actions of endowing quasi-legal personhood to the dog as it shuttles between the
two camps leads to a volley of bullets being exchanged by both sides with the dog caught in-
between. As it is fired upon by both sides, the dog stops, runs with its “tail between its legs,”
and flaps its ears violently (Manto 2007: 86). This reference to the tail caught between the
legs is the last time we witness this communicative corporeal organ in the diegetic space. The
disappearance of the tail from the story coincides with the obliteration of hospitality to the
“bin bulaye mehman.” Moreover, when a bullet strikes the dog in its leg, “its cry (cheekh) pierced
the sky” (ibid.: 86). The specific tenor of the dog’s barking (bhaukna) is translatable within the
discourses of hospitality and interspecies reciprocity. But the cheekh becomes mere background
noise (phone) that is rendered outside the realm of the political. The pain and terror of the other
brooks no response.
Besides the treatment of the dog as an empty slate, two statements accentuate how it is
treated like a dog. I imply here the descent into what Jacques Derrida (1995: 267) calls the
“noncriminal putting to death” of the animal figure. To be relegated to this status is to be placed
outside the orbit of the law. This process is inaugurated early when Jamadar Harnam Singh
(a character who recurs in “Tamasha-e-Tetwal”) says: “Like the Pakistanis, Pakistani dogs will
be shot” (Manto 2007: 83). The chilling imperative is that the enemy other is like a dog that
can be noncriminally put to death. This aspect is accentuated by the Pakistani Subedar Him-
mat Khan, who says: “Look, friend, don’t commit treachery . . . the punishment for a traitor
is death” (ibid.: 85). The juxtaposition of “friend” with the injunction against treachery reveals
how an absolute friend-enemy distinction characterizes the striated realm of the political in this
zone of war.
After the dog is killed and its corpse lies inert in the no-man’s zone, “Tetwal” concludes with
laconic reports of the reactions of the soldiers:
Subedar Himmat Khan expressed regret. “Tch tch . . . the poor thing became a martyr
(shahid)!”
Jamadar Harnam Singh took the warm barrel of the gun in his hand and said, “He
died a dog’s death (kutte ki maut).”
(Ibid.: 87)
With typical irony, Manto juxtaposes two expressions that have radically different significations –
shahid and kutte ki maut. In the Qu’ran, the word “shahid” means “both witness and martyr”
(Cook 2007: 16). This latter sense of shahid-as-martyr became more prominent in the Had-
ith and jihad literature parallel with and subsequent to the Qu’ran and has had different and
complicated histories in the Sunni, Shiite, and Sufi traditions. What is common to the wide
semantic range of the word is that to be shahid is to be inserted into an economy of sacrifice.
Sacrifice presupposes value, an aspect that can be contrasted with the value-less kill of the
dog. The dog is killed but not sacrificed, and therein lies the cruel irony of Harnam Singh’s
pronouncement.7
157
Amit R. Baishya
“Kutte ki maut,” in contrast, signifies a particularly degraded form of death. I discuss else-
where how this invocation of a degrading form of death draws from cultural grammars of
disgust concerning “lowly” canines in South Asia, drawing from the long cultural histories of
both Hindu and Islamic traditions (Baishya 2019: 56–58). Harnam’s Singh’s statement is also the
last statement in “Tetwal,” and captures how the unnamed dog is produced as bare life, a mere
natural being whose ephemeral juridico-legal persona is stripped away, rendering it faceless and
devoid of relationality. It is abandoned as meaningless matter in a no-man’s zone. The fragile
possibility of hospitality and interspecies cohabitation is shattered by the imperatives of hyper-
masculine predatory nationalisms.
Like a Dog: Munnu

While street dogs inhabit many panels in Munnu, I am interested in exploring the ambivalence
in the phrase “like a dog” here. Sajad has discussed how Manto’s “courage” inspired him (Ravi
2015). This debt to Manto is evident in the two direct references to “Tetwal” in Munnu. The
story is directly referenced when a book by Manto lies open on Munnu’s bedside. The story he
is reading is “The Dog of Tithwal” (Sajad 2015: 241). More importantly, it comes back in the
panel (see Figure 11.1) on the exigencies of being a journalist in Kashmir.
We notice two dogs with placards that read “Identity Cards” (a meta-textual reference to
Sajad’s career as a comics journalist) referencing the signs on the dog’s neck in “Tetwal” (ibid.:
163). The ID card, a “signature of the state” (Das 2006: 162–183), endows the subject with a
persona in conditions of militarized occupation. Not to have one means that the subject can
be transformed into bare life. The bleed between human and canine personhood is ironically
shown by the figural substitution of the dog for the human/Hangul in the cartoon. If humans
are treated like dogs by the colonial occupiers, the inverted intertextual reference in Munnu
ironically shows that the fictional endowment of IDs to dogs function as a metaphor for deper-
sonalization at large in a permanent state of siege. The biopolitical and zoopolitical bleed into
each other.
Munnu also captures mundane modalities of quotidian existence, encompassing both subju-
gation and resistance, in an urban situation of “late modern colonial occupation” – a “concat-
enation of multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical” (Mbembe 2003: 29).
Achille Mbembe uses the Schmittian concept of the state of siege to describe conditions of
everyday militarized occupation. Its features include the lack of distinction between internal and
external enemies, freedom given to military commanders to kill or maim, the destruction of
local civil institutions, and severe restrictions on movement in public spaces (ibid.: 30). Critical
Kashmir Studies scholars have deployed this term to describe the situation in Kashmir as one of
the “in-betweenness of occupations, their construction as a ‘place’ that is neither at war nor at
peace, and . . . on . . . temporality as ruptured time (that) bring(s) to fore the lived experience
of military occupations” (Bhan, Duschinski and Zia 2018: 13).
Munnu documents the lived experience and ruptured temporalities of militarized occupa-
tion in Kashmir. Two commonly represented quotidian practices in Munnu are walking and
(the adult) Munnu riding his bike through the heavily policed streets of Srinagar. Munnu’s
many encounters with Srinagar’s street dogs occur when he walks through the city. Mohammad
Junaid (2019: 3) uses “counter-mapping” to describe how Kashmiris, when walking through
streets, “had developed instinctive cartographic strategies, including verbal and bodily practices
of information sharing, to create a situational awareness of the occupation, allowing them to
evade military’s control and surveillance.” I use counter-mapping to read a key scene in the lat-
ter half of Munnu, when the eponymous protagonist has to evade military checkpoints to get
158
Figure 11.1 Munnu as Journalist
his sick mother to hospital. Munnu wears his press ID, which sometimes gives him a layer of
security as he passes through checkpoints. However, he tells his mother that he will “shave” and
asks her to wear colorful clothes so that they can be spotted from a distance. His mother suggests
that they should put her MRI film over the headlights and carry all their medicines as an extra
layer of security. If the military stops them, she will show them her stitches. Improvising in this
way, Munnu and his mother set off. Munnu tells her that when he shouts “pothole,” she should
hold her breath to avoid the jolts (Sajad 2015: 322–323). Munnu and his mother are stopped
multiple times. Once he is almost beaten up. However, the instinctive cartographic strategies
159
Amit R. Baishya
devised by him in cahoots with his mother along with them performing rituals of subjection at
the checkpoints enable them to slowly wend their way.
At a pivotal moment during their journey, the actual presence of street dogs and a representa-
tion of animalization merge to take us back to “like a dog” (see Figure 11.2).
Figure 11.2 Images of Motherhood and Care in Munnu
160
The image in the first panel is archetypal – we notice a street dog suckling her puppies.
In contrast, while Munnu’s mother has been an agent of care throughout, the baton passes
from mother to son. The image in the third panel is that of animalized abjection. Munnu is
on all-fours before an Indian soldier, seemingly about to lick his boots. If, as a child, Munnu
is disgusted by dogs fornicating and the subsequent revelation by his friend that canines lick
their own vomit (ibid.: 95–97), this representation of the prostrate figure of the adult Munnu
shows how he is willing to abase himself like a dog to give his beloved mother a chance for
treatment.
In a perceptive reading of J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (2000), Calina Ciobanu (2012) offers a
different interpretation of “like a dog.” Focusing on the double iteration of “like a dog” first by
Lucy and then by David Lurie, Ciobanu says that Coetzee’s “posthumanist ethics”
derives from the possibility of taking a phrase like “like a dog” and making it mean
something new – something that levels hierarchies and stresses the elements of same-
ness in the simile (“like a dog”) over its points of exclusion and difference (“like a dog
[as opposed to a human]”).
(Ibid.: 687)
What Ciobanu says fuses with a key ethical insight from critical animal studies that to claim ani-
mal is to open imaginaries of “human” selfhood for encounters with alternative ways of being
and existing in the world.8 I find this shift of emphasis from “like” to “a dog” suggestive, and
wager that the remarkable closing sequences of Munnu invite us to take a congruent ethical leap
(see Figure 11.3). In my previous iteration of Munnu (Baishya 2018), I read this scene through
the bridging of the interspecies divide between the brutalized, disabled woman and a pack of
street dogs through the modalities of the voice and of haptic contact (Munnu comes across her
being sexually assaulted by a Kashmiri auto-driver and his companions as he runs away from a
snarling pack of street dogs during a dark night).
But what if we reconsider this scene by making an imaginative leap into a perspective of
canine otherness? If we consider that possibility, the attribution of feral-ness transfers from the
“animals” to the “humans” (the Kashmiri “brothers” who assault the woman). Furthermore, if
the dogs are able to connect with the abject woman, then Ciobanu may be correct in suggesting
that such scenes reveal “the radical potentiality of the literary, that to be ‘like a dog’ in this new
world is not necessarily to be subhuman” (Ciobanu 2012: 686). I suggest that Munnu closes by
asking us to consider the destabilizing potentials of such a radical ethical overhaul that upends
traditional distinctions between “human” and “animal.” Bhan and Bose (2020: 3), I think, ges-
ture at something similar when they write that instead of
treating dogs and humans as mutually distinct entities. . . [they] . . . take cues from
multispecies ethnography to show the “effects of [human] entanglements with other
kinds of living selves,” and their implications for what it means to be human in
fraught political contexts of racism, slavery, mass incarcerations, genocide, occupa-
tion, and war.
While Munnu is a powerful representation of states of dehumanization in necropolitical zones, it

also shows how becoming human is imaginable through unprecedented and contingent inter-
species connections with nonhuman selves.
161
Amit R. Baishya
Figure 11.3 Concluding Coda of Munnu
War Dogs: “Tamasha-e-Tetwal”

A direct critique of Manto emerges in “Tamasha-e-Tetwal.” The first five panels of this seg-
ment unveil a scene of everyday life in the border town of Tetwal. A stray dog wakes up and
walks slowly across a hilly landscape, later revealed to be in the Indian side of the border. We
move to the first panel on the next page where a group of Pakistani soldiers in a bunker directly
162
echo lines from Manto’s story: ‘ “A dog, janab.’ ‘Waiting for the bus, I suppose.’ ‘No janab, a real
dog’ ” (Helal and Parrey 2013: 115). Segueing into a panel that shows us what the soldier spies
from his binoculars, we notice the head and tail of the dog in the foreground, and three human
figures, one standing and two sitting, in the background. Of the seated figures, one is a Muslim
and the other a Pandit. The standing figure, a bearded man soon revealed to be a reporter from
elsewhere is referred to as the “dog,” showing the bleed between processes of othering and spe-
ciesism. Metaphorical and actual dogs seem to share the same space.
The intertextual echoes with Manto are accentuated on the second panel on the next
page, where two specimens of writing occupy the background (ibid.: 116). The first one is a
glimpse of a file titled “Harnam Singh Case Files” and a newspaper fragment with the headline
“Kashmiri Local of Tetwal Shot Dead. Protest in Area.” It is possible that Harnam Singh was
investigated because he gave the Kashmiri local what he would probably call “kutte ki maut.”
A segment of a photograph of what seems like a border-post and a bridge over a river spills out
from the space behind the case file. This peering photographic segment is reproduced in the
immediately succeeding panel. We are again in the physical space of Tetwal. The no-man’s zone
is the Kishenganga river. A bridge connects the two sides, one lying in Pakistan and the other in
India. Two megaphones are superimposed on the photograph on opposing sides, each blaring
nationalist slogans in Urdu and Hindi. The noxious legacy of religious-linguistic nationalism in
the subcontinent [Hindi as Hindu/Indian; Urdu as Muslim/Pakistani] visually divides the panel
into two Manichean units that separates the “geo-body” (Winichakul 1997) of one national
space from another. As Haji Sahib, the aged person and repository of community memory that
the reporter has come to meet says, the “whoosh of the river” which “was the constant music
of our lives” is relentlessly assaulted by the “terrible babel of propaganda” in both languages
(Parrey and Helal 2013: 120).
Stray dogs reappear as the reporter’s gaze falls on a woman who is talking to someone on the
Pakistani side. By this time, the reporter’s interview with Haji Sahib is over, and he is waiting
for a bus to take him back. In two full-page spreads, we see the Pakistani side and the Indian one
(a dog follows the woman on the Indian side) (ibid.: 122–123). The use of two full-page spreads
with distinct frames and with the negative space of the gutter spilling from one page into the
other accentuates the real-life separations of national boundaries. The reporter witnesses how
quotidian contacts between populations on the two sides persist despite the rigidity of bounda-
ries. The woman and the man exchange news about their children, and then the man throws a
sack of mushrooms across the river. The woman informs the reporter that “the mushrooms are
much greener and bigger” on the other side (ibid.: 125). The no-man’s zone as terra nullius in
“Tetwal” emerges as an improvised transit of exchange – a counter-mapping of the ordinary in
a border-zone. The last view of the dog is in the background of the second panel of the same
page, as it seems to be looking intently toward the other side (ibid.: 125). While the dog moves
easily across and through the space of the panels in its counter-mapping of Tetwal, the river
as no-man’s zone marks a limit it seems unable to ford. Conversely, the dog’s fluid movement
across panels as opposed to the constricted movement of the human figures who are trapped
within panels could also be a gesture, to adapt Mona Bhan and Haley Duschinski’s (2020) reso-
nant phrase about Llandudno goats, that “inspires hope for future freedom from the violent time
and space of the postcolonial nation.”
In a series of wordless panels at the end, we see the reporter taking his camera out and
clicking pictures of the idyllic-looking landscape with the bridge fording both sides just before
he alights the bus (Parrey and Helal 2013: 126). The loudspeakers meanwhile blare on (see
Figure 11.4).
163
Amit R. Baishya
Figure 11.4 Conclusion of Tamasha-e-Tetwal
In the “mute” photograph which is reproduced in a slightly askew fashion as the last panel
of the first page, two white birds fly from opposite sides and converge in the middle (ibid.:
125). The sound of warfare disturbed the birds in the idyllic opening of “Tetwal.” Are these
two birds disturbed by the propaganda blaring from the loudspeakers in what is a visual refer-
ence to the opening of “Tetwal”? Contrarily, if we eliminate the sonic background, which the
“mute” capture by the photograph does, do these white birds symbolize the futility of Mani-
chean border-making and gesture toward possibilities of peace? Detached from context, that is
what the picture-postcard quality of the photograph may communicate. The placement of the
photograph in a slightly askew fashion however maintains the ambiguity of the mise-en-scene.
Metaphorical dogs reappear in the full-page spread on the last page (ibid.: 126). Crucially,
framing is dispensed with, signifying the never-ending aspect of the conflict. The background
of the image is dominated by the gigantic figures of two feral dogs fighting. The metaphorical
representation of two national behemoths as feral dogs counterpoints the slow rhythms of the
quotidian existence of an actual dog at the beginning.
The Strange Case of Missing Kashmir in Manto: Footnotes of History

To approach “Tamasha-e-Tetwal” ’s critique of Manto further, let’s return to what Haji Sahib
tells the reporter (see Figure 11.5).
In the second panel, the Manichean division of national space signified by the loudspeakers
blaring Urdu and Hindi fuse in the airspace into a sonic babble. While land becomes the nomos
for the nation-states (Schmitt 2006), air seems to unbind Manichean spatial divisions in the
164
Figure 11.5 Conversation With Haji Sahib
165
Amit R. Baishya
comic-fragment (the birds meeting halfway, sounds merging into each other).9 The terrestrial is
a site of intense conflict, but airspace may be a fugitive herald of freedom.
Haji Sahib’s subsequent musings are a critique of “Tetwal,” especially interpretations of the
dog. Taking a swipe at legions of interpretations of the story (“too much noise”) that read it as
the representation of a dispute between the behemoths of India and Pakistan, the old man cri-
tiques the erasure of Kashmir as territory. Hence, the satirical edge to the title – in the tamasha
(noise) around the story, the actual condition of Tetwal/Kashmir is elided. Hence the attempt
to show via the mushroom episode that quotidian contact among populations across the border
persist and endure despite the cleavages instituted by the official geo-bodies of the two postco-
lonial nation-states.
“Tamasha-e-Tetwal” shares an agonistic relationship with Manto’s famous story. But what
of Munnu, given that Sajad has publicly stated his debts to Manto? To tease out this critique,
we should consider the anxiety of influence that another figure imposes on the character of
Munnu: Joe Sacco. The illustrious Maltese-American graphic novelist, a gold standard for com-
ics journalism, is presented as a model for Munnu to emulate. “Brother” presents Sacco’s The
Fixer (2003) as a paradigm of nonfictional comics reportage (Sajad 2015: 220–223). Munnu
goes on a mission to collect testimonials for writing a possible Sacco-like text (ibid.: 226–235).
Although Munnu is eventually forced to “sell” his story with the reductive title “Kashmiri Inti-
fada,” the culminating point of his artistic coming-of-age is when he refuses to make his text a
pale shadow of Sacco’s Palestine (2001). Moreover, his choice to present Kashmiris as anthro-
pomorphized hangul – “endangered species” – is also a refusal to mimic Sacco’s photorealist
documentary style (Sajad 2015: 333–335). Munnu’s growth as an artist and his gradual forging
of a distinct voice emerges via him shedding the anxiety of influence cast by Sacco’s looming
shadow.
However, Sajad surreptitiously critiques Manto through a strategic deployment of Sacco. In
a chapter titled “Footnotes” in Footnotes in Gaza (2009: 8–9), Sacco’s narrator says:
This is the story of footnotes to the sideshow of a forgotten war. The war pitted Egypt
against the strange alliance of Britain, France and Israel in 1956; the sideshow was the
ongoing raids and counter-raids across the Gaza border. . . . And the footnotes . . .
well, like most footnotes, they dropped to the bottom of history’s pages, where they
barely hang on. History can do without its footnotes. Footnotes are inessential at best;
at worst they trip up the greater narrative.
We can trace a direct line between what Sacco writes and Sajad’s narration of a history of
Kashmir from mythic to contemporary times in the chapter titled “Footnotes” (Sajad 2015:
197–211). What is crucial in “Footnotes” is an image of militarized space that is reproduced
twice – first on the title page of the chapter (see Figure 11.6), and then again with narrative
commentary within the chapter:
The UN resolution was never acted upon, and the ceasefire line was renamed the line
of control (L.O.C.) in 1972 and demarcated with a dotted line on the map. . . . The
L.O.C. blocked traditional routes and people from both sides of the fence were cut off
from each other.
(Ibid.: 209)
Colonial occupation, as Frantz Fanon (2005: 1) writes, is the violent imposition of a tabula
rasa on lands that have prior histories of their own. The preceding visual representation of
166
Figure 11.6 Militarized Space in Munnu
Kashmir is a representation of the tabula rasa created by continuing colonial occupations. Kash-
mir is militarily designated as either Indian or Pakistani space, with a marked cleavage in between
that represents the L.O.C. Histories prior to this colonization of space, like the ones Ershad
Mahmud evokes about Tithwal, are erased or, in Sacco’s terms, drop to the bottom of history’s
pages. The visual representation of the bifurcation of Kashmir and its militarization and the nar-
ratorial comments in “Footnotes” represents this process of erasure that is constantly at work.
Unfortunately, one of the participants in this “racket of partition” may not simply be the
“rulers,” but Manto himself. Caught within the “imaginary” Manichean binary instituted by
partition’s racket, Manto, despite all his wisdom, misses the “real” historical specificity of Kash-
mir. As for the war-dogs of the two bread-slices that periodically threaten to release the dogs of
war, with hypernationalist tamasha as an unnecessary bonus, the less said the better!
167
Amit R. Baishya
Notes
1 I also follow the Hindi version of “Tetwal” published on rekhta.com. The Hindi/Urdu terms used in the
text are cited from this source.
2 For well-known treatments of dogs from a variety of perspectives in critical theory (feminist, queer,
post-humanist, critical race) see Haraway 2007; Kuzniar 2013; Boisseron 2018; Dayan 2018; McHugh
2019; Weaver 2021.
3 See Bhan and Bose 2020 for neoliberalization and pet ownership. For stray dogs in Indian urban spaces,
see Narayanan 2017; Srinivasan 2019; Nadal 2020.
4 The image of “Indian Dogs Go Back” also appears in Sajad (2015: 66).
5 See Baishya 2019.
6 For the distinction and deconstruction of response and reaction, see Derrida 2008.
7 For bare life (vita nuda) and life that can be killed and not sacrificed, see Agamben 1998.
8 For the term “claiming animal” see Taylor 2017. Sunaura Taylor is a disability studies theorist/activist
who works on the intersections of disability and animality.
9 Airspace, of course, is a nomos of its own. It isn’t a space of unbridled freedom and can be a locus of
control. See Graham 2018.
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1977. On Revolution. New York: Penguin.
Baishya, Amit R. 2018. “Endangered (and Endangering) Species: Exploring the Animacy Hierarchy in
Malik Sajad’s Munnu.” South Asian Review 39(2): 50–69.
———. 2019. “Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Animalities.” In Postcolonial Animalities, edited by Suvadip
Sinha and Amit R. Baishya, 48–69. London and New York: Routledge.
Bhan, Mona and Purnima Bose. 2020. “Canine Counterinsurgency in Indian-Occupied Kashmir.”
Critique of Anthropology: 1–23. DOI: 10.1177/0308275X20929395.
Bhan, Mona and Haley Duschinski. 2020. “Kashmiri Goats, Imaginaries of Freedom and the Planetary
Pandemic.” September 2. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2020/09/02/kashmiri-goats-imaginaries-
of-freedom-and-the-planetary-pandemic/.
Bhan, Mona, Haley Duschinski, and Ather Zia. 2018. “ ‘Rebels of the Streets’: Violence, Protest, and
Freedom in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan,
Boisseron, Bénédicte. 2018. Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. New York: Columbia University Press.
Boitani, Luigi. 2014. “Foreword.” In Free Ranging Dogs and Wildlife Conservation, edited by Matthew
Gomper, v–vi. London: Oxford University Press.
Ciobanu, Calina. 2012. “Coetzee’s Posthumanist Ethics.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 58(4): 668–698.
Coetzee, J. M. 2000. Disgrace: A Novel. New York: Penguin.
Cook, David. 2007. Martyrdom in Islam. London: Cambridge University Press.
Das, Veena. 2006. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Dayan, Colin. 2011. The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. Princeton, NJ:
———. 2018. With Dogs at the Edge of Life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “ ‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” Translated by Peter Connor
and Avital Ronnell. Points: Interviews 1974–94, edited by Elizabeth Weber, 255–287. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
———. 2008. The Animal That Therefore I am. Translated by Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Evans, Alexander. 2005. “Kashmir: A Tale of Two Valleys.” Asian Affairs 36(1): 35–47.
Fanon, Frantz. 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.
Graham, Stephen. 2018. Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers. London: Verso.
Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Junaid, Mohammad. 2019. “Counter-maps of the Ordinary: Occupation, Subjectivity and Walking Under
Curfew in Kashmir.” Identities: 1–19.
168
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University
Kuzniar, Alice. 2013. Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on our Animal Kinship. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Mahmud, Ershad. 2018. “The Contingencies of Everyday Life in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.” In Resisting
Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood,
Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1996. “Pundit Manto’s First Letter to Pundit Nehru.” Translated M. Asaduddin. The
Annual of Urdu Studies 11: 163–166.
———. 2007. “The Dog of Tetwal.” Translated by Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint. Manoa 19(1): 80–87.
———. 2019. “The Last Salute.” Translated by Muhammad Umar Memon. Scroll. Accessed May 2, 2019.
https://scroll.in/article/914960/the-last-salute-saadat-hasan-mantos-story-of-a-battle-in-kashmir-
asks-again-why-wars-are-fought.
———. 2020. “Tetwal ka Kutta.” Accessed July 15, 2020. www.rekhta.org/stories/tetwaal-ka-kutta-
saadat-hasan-manto-stories?lang=hi.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15(1): 11–40.
McHugh, Susan. 2019. Dog. London: Reaktion.
Nadal, Deborah. 2020. Rabies in the Streets: Interspecies Camaraderie in Urban India. University Park, PA:
Penn State University Press.
Narayanan, Yamini. 2017. “Street Dogs at the Intersection of Colonialism and Informality: ‘Subaltern
Animism’ as a Posthuman Critique of Indian Cities.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
35(3): 475–494.
Parrey, Arif Ayaz and Wasim Helal. 2013. “Tamasha-e-Tetwal.” In This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition,
edited by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, 112–127. New Delhi: Yoda Press.
Sacco, Joe. 2009. Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan Books.
———. 2001. Palestine. New York: Fantagraphics.
———. 2003. The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo. New York: Drawn and Quarterly.
Sajad, Malik. 2015. Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir. London: HarperCollins.
Schmitt, Carl. 2006. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated
by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.
S. Ravi. 2015. “No Child’s Play.” The Hindu. Accessed December 11, 2015. www.thehindu.com/features/
metroplus/no-childs-play/article7977224.ece.
Srinivasan, Kritika. 2019. “Remaking More-Than-Human Society: Thought Experiments on Street Dogs
as ‘Nature.’ ” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 44(2): 376–391.
Taylor, Sunaura. 2017. Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation. New York: The New Press.
Weaver, Harlan. 2021. Bad Dog: Pitbull Politics and Multispecies Justice. Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Winichakul, Thongchai. 1997. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of the Nation. Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press.
Zia, Ather. 2012. “Of the Dog Days in Kashmir.” Accessed March 21, 2012. www.mantlethought.org/
other/dog-days-kashmir.
169
12
COSMOPOLITANISM, FOOD,
AND MEMORY
The Lhasa Restaurant of Srinagar
Anisa Bhutia
Introduction
My happiness knew no bounds when a steaming plate of momo (dumplings) and thukpa (noodles
with soup) welcomed me in the Lhasa Restaurant. It reminded me of the food in my home.
I was thousands of kilometers away from my hometown Kalimpong in the Eastern Himalayas.
But I was in another stretch of the Himalayas, another beautiful landscape of mountains in Sri-
nagar, Kashmir. Today, I was not here in the restaurant for an interview but just to assuage my
hunger pangs. I was a customer in this restaurant. As I looked around at the decor of the res-
taurant, I could clearly see the different cultural influences. Contrary to the assumption of how
momo – at least in India – are usually made by Tibetan Buddhist communities,1 this restaurant
was started by a Muslim, specifically a Khache (loosely translated as a Tibetan Muslim).2
People who travelled from Kashmir to Tibet were called Khache in Tibet, but whether the
term means “Kashmiri” or “Muslim” in general is not clear (Yoeli-Tlalim 2011: 4). The use of
the word Khache in this chapter is specifically for the Tibetan Muslim community who have
repatriated to Kashmir from Tibet and the Himalayan regions of Kalimpong, Darjeeling, and
Nepal.3 As I have noted elsewhere, “It is important here to note that the meaning of Khache
differs from people to people and period to period” (Bhutia 2018: 29). Drawing from Tibetan
studies scholar José Cabezón’s work, Singh (2015: 4) recounts that there were two important
ways that Islam entered Tibet: first by the eastern trade networks from the Silk Routes, and sec-
ond from the western route via Ladakh. Further, Gaborieau (1995: 21) provides another possi-
ble route for the entry of Islam into Tibet from South Asia, via Kashmiri merchants who settled
in cities such as Lahore, Calcutta, and Dhaka. During the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, Khache
became more prominent in Tibet. They received tax-free land, they were exempted from eat-
ing meat during the Buddhist festival, and they were provided land where they ultimately built
a mosque (Batt 1990: 28). All of these different instances showed that they were outsiders in
Tibet. Atwill (2016: 601) mentions that “Khache were some sort of perpetual non-native.”
It was during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, that the Khache community got recogni-
tion through land in Tibet ( Jest 1995). All the Khache community members till date refer to
the Dalai Lama as a King, possibly out of respect for providing them land where the commu-
nity lived and also built the first mosque of Tibet, “in the garden called the Khache-lingka”
(ibid.: 8). When in Tibet, the Dalai Lama and the kashag (governing council of Tibet) did not
170 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-16

Cosmopolitanism, Food, and Memory
interfere with the Khache, the Poonj/Paanch (a five-man committee) looked after the welfare
and administrative issues of the Khache community (Nadwi 2004: 112). It was during the time
of the Cultural Revolution when Tibet was under the Chinese occupation and religious free-
dom was curbed, that they decided to approach the Indian Consul General at Lhasa.4 Tibetan
Muslims ultimately came to Kashmir after rigorous negotiation with the Indian government in
the 1960, the back and forth of which is recorded in the White Paper entitled “List of Heads
of Families of Muslims of Indian Origin Residing at Lhasa and Other Places of Tibet for Trade
Purpose.”
The first place that they came to was Kalimpong, a frontier town in the current West Bengal
state of India, where a smaller population of the community still resides. It was the Poonj/Paanch
committee that decided for the community to settle in Kashmir, their ancestral place. When
they reached Srinagar city, they were given a piece of land for refurbishment and the houses
were established in Eidgah and Hawal. The sites were adorned with big boards that proudly
claimed it as an establishment for the “Tibetan Refugees.”
The central and state forces categorized this community in different ways, such as refugees
and outsiders. Though the categories help us understand how they came into being, they tell us
little about their everyday lives. This chapter moves away from state-given categories to examine
how this movement from Kashmir to Tibet and then back to Kashmir has shaped their lives.
I elaborate on how the Tibetan and Kashmiri identity of the community plays out through a
focus on food.
Food provides stories of migration and entangled histories of displaced or even repatriated
communities. I argue that food has the capacity to tell the history and the present of a com-
munity. Using food as a lens, I examine the lesser-known cosmopolitan history of the Khache
community. For the Khache community food becomes a way of connecting, but also a way of
navigating the different territories and nation-states. Food then ultimately becomes a way of
bringing alive the “imagined community.”
Through a historical study of trade in Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, Fewkes (2012:
279) argues that Ladakhi traders played an important role in trading networks as they “under-
stood multiple perspective and culturally relevant contexts, becoming cosmopolitan in order to
be successful.” Appiah (2005: 213) argues that cosmopolitan means the “universal morality” and
a responsibility of being a “world citizen,” whereas Notar (2008: 618) argues that cosmopolitan
means openness to the world and an interaction among different cultures, where movement is
not always compulsory.
While the Khache community were called Kashmiri Muslims in Tibet, in Kashmir, they are
referred to as Tibetan Muslims. This shift shows their connection with Kashmir as well as Tibet,
adding to their various other networks, which all shaped their cosmopolitan understanding of
the world. Harper and Amrith (2014: 8) claim that “cosmopolitanism [is] messy, inconsistent,
lived rather than theorized.” Taking forward this argument of lived cosmopolitanism, I present
a study of the Lhasa Restaurant, Khache, and Kashmir. I further argue that it is through the
engagements of such sites and their everyday practices that we can understand the importance
of individual and social history of people and places.
Recent scholarship has challenged the narrative that only “global cities” produce cosmo-
politan individuals or spaces. Notar (2008: 619) argues that the “cosmopolitanism and other
forms of identification (religious, ethnic, regional) are mutually exclusive and may reinforce
each other.” Taking the case studies of cafe owners in Dali (Northwestern Yunan in China), he
explores the possibilities of different forms of cosmopolitanism: local, political, borderland. In
all these explorations, he considers “cosmopolitan” as a part of an openness to the world. On the
other hand, referring to Shami (2000), Marsden (2008: 235) explores the idea of how “peoples
171
Anisa Bhutia
older experiences of mobility” shapes their current cosmopolitan trans-regional networks. For
me this idea of cosmopolitanism gets performed in the everyday lives of food.
My research on the Khache community, apart from being a lifelong personal journey, started
academically in 2012.5 In this chapter, I build upon narratives that I conducted during my
fieldwork in Srinagar city in 2015.6 I begin the next section with the location of the Lhasa
Restaurant, followed by a discussion of its menu. The restaurant has made a name for itself and
is important in the cultural setting of Kashmir as a place where one can find authentic “Tibetan
momo.”
Journey of the Lhasa Restaurant

As I walked alongside the beautiful Dal Lake that is located in the central tourist area of Srinagar,
a small board on the road read: “For Lhasa Restaurant turn right.” I noticed it for the first time
when I was walking by the Dal Lake for my interview that was to be conducted in the restaurant
with Faiz Shah, the owner of the restaurant.7 His father had started the restaurant after their
arrival in Srinagar. The restaurant opened in 1976 to introduce Tibetan cuisine in the Valley.
As I approached the restaurant, a very small faint sticker entitled “Save Tibet” welcomed me.
Probably, it was Faiz’s father who had stuck it on the entrance of the restaurant. It acted as a faint
reminder of the fact that the community had come from Tibet.
Faiz had never seen Tibet, but he had lived it through his father’s memories and conversa-
tions. It was an imagined Tibet, which he had heard about through the voices of many elderly
people. During one of our initial interviews Faiz mentioned, “My dad was very patriotic; he
named the restaurant the Lhasa Restaurant. He was very strict in not allowing any other kind of
food to be made here except Tibetan.” This showed his father’s love for the region where he was
born, a place he had to leave during the Tibetan Cultural Revolution of 1959. Tibet as a place
was always cosmopolitan with traders from different parts of the world and so was Kashmir. As
Kashmir scholars Bhan and Duschinski (2020) write, “Kashmiri cosmopolitan identities are
deeply rooted in their dense cultural, religious, and economic exchanges with regions in Cen-
tral Asia.” While discussing the importance of Tibet and its frontiers in international history of
the cold war era,Wasif Sulmaan Khan (2015: 99–100), takes the case of “Hamite . . . a Tibetan
Muslim of Kashmiri ancestry . . . and how difficult it was to categorise people in Tibet. He was
Tibetan, Kashmiri, Indian and Chinese.”
Like his father, it was the elderly people in the community who were attached to Tibet.
They were trying to keep alive the memory of Lhasa in different ways. For Faiz’s father, it was
naming the restaurant the Lhasa Restaurant. For many elderly women in the community, it was
wearing chuba (Tibetan traditional dress) with a hijab. These were emotional ways of paying
homage to the place where they once lived. The elderly people, when they came from Tibet,
considered the repatriation as a temporary fix. The idea of home was fluid for them, attached
largely to different memories. In the beginning, the community replicated what their ances-
tors once did, when they came to Tibet from Kashmir and other regions. While keeping these
memories alive and acting on them, the people also in turn are keeping their cosmopolitan
lives alive.
Memories of Lhasa in Kashmir

The idea of home for some meant Tibet, the place which they had to leave, to come and settle
in India. Tibet was attached to their everyday lives through memory, food, dress, and language.
And when in Tibet so was Kashmir, as some of my respondents mentioned: they used utensils
172
like samovar (kettle) and trami (traditional arrangement of food in a serving plate), tradition-
ally used for cooking and serving food in Kashmir. These were the ways the community
kept their Kashmiri tradition alive in Tibet. This simple division of the transnational com-
munity of Tibetan Muslims in two distinct categories of Tibetan and/or Kashmiri is prob-
lematic, however, because each of these identities is reproduced in complex ways on an
everyday basis.
Kashmir has always been home to different communities. Khache is just one community that
I have discussed in this chapter but there are many other communities in Kashmir that add to
its cosmopolitan image. Bhan, Misri, and Zia (2020: 297–299), through the curated narratives
of people’s lived experience in Kashmir, show how food played an important role in forging
or impeding everyday relationships across communities. Bamzai (2020: 311) shows how food
was shared between individuals from two religious communities, sometimes even against soci-
etal norms (ibid.: 315). Wahid (2001: 219), through his personal narratives of belonging to a
Ladakhi Muslim family, explores his history and elaborates how the “stories of bandits,” “the
trans-Himalaya trade,” “was a way of life that was lost to us.” Home kept shifting for trading
communities like the Khache.
Even when in Kashmir as far back as the 1950s, many Khache still considered Tibet to be
their home. This was largely the reason why the elders did not want to be Kashmiri “State
Subjects,” a political identity for the people of J&K, which was granted to them by the former
chief minister of Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, during his initial years in power. Various respond-
ents told me that, “it was a mistake our elders made because they were illiterate and did not
understand the value of the documents.” The Khache community were mostly traders who had
been doing business in Tibet and the state subject documents did not hold much relevance
for them. Bhutia (2017) writes, “for the older generation, the documents would merely be a
piece of paper and nothing more, it did not determine who they were.” Additionally, Khan
(2015: 66) mentions that traders and travellers “moved as easily between identities as one did
through the mountain passes.” But documents have started to play an important role, especially
in contemporary nation-states, as they become an important part of claiming nationality and
citizenship.8 On the one hand, the community has documents in the form of White Papers,
which allows them to claim Kashmiri ancestry, but on the other hand, not having the “state
subject” document creates a dilemma. They feel trapped in such a situation where their Kash-
miri ancestry is doubted. In the words of McGranahan (2010: 24), it could be argued that
the community lives in the “arrested history” of being in Tibet even after returning to their
homeland. McGranahan (ibid.: 19) argues that history and memory, though connected, are
two different things: history is narratives with a proper beginning, middle, and end, whereas
memory does not have any such pre-assigned forms. “History is narrative and . . . memory
is what drives this narration” (McGranahan 2010). Many of my respondents mentioned, “We
never had any land in Tibet,” problematizing a singular narrative of their history of home
meaning Tibet. But these arrested histories are questioned and adjusted in spaces of homes
like the kitchen. Further, it is food that has the capacity to slowly capture the history of move-
ments of communities. This history also keeps changing and reformulating itself in different
ways through different actors.
The Restaurant’s Menu and Its Trajectories

It was only after Faiz’s father passed away that he started introducing other cuisines in the res-
taurant, namely, Indian, Kashmiri, and Chinese. With the rise in competition, there was a dire
need to change things to bring something new to his customers. As he noted, “earlier it was the
173
Anisa Bhutia
foreigners who visited the restaurant. Nowadays there is a mixed crowd, they want choices for
their food. This was the reason for introducing different cuisines in the restaurant.”
After his father passed away, he has tried to keep the “imagined Tibet” alive by not chang-
ing the inscription at the entrance of the restaurant, keeping the interiors the same. It is the
intergenerational memory that exists in the community. Although Faiz has never seen Tibet;
he has imagined it through his elders’ recounting. The imagination, however, was not as strong
as the lived reality of the people. This is probably why he was not so insistent on keeping the
same menu as his father.
Memory plays an important role in the community as it is passed on by elders through their
conversations, and mostly for women through their food in the kitchen. Zutshi (2015) writes
that it was the Kashmiri cuisine that helped her share the past of her grandparents and mother
in Kashmir. Similarly, I see Faiz respecting the shared memory of his father by retaining the
Tibetan cuisine in the menu. Bringing out the complex nuances of belonging through food,
Kikon (2015: 322) elaborates on the making of Akhuni, a delicacy enjoyed in the Eastern Him-
alayas and argues that it presents “a kind of sensory imagined community.” Anderson’s (2006: 6)
idea of imagined communities that are bound by sovereignty is problematized by Kikon (2015:
331) through the “dietary map of the eastern Himalayan societies.” Further, food when cooked
at a domestic space of kitchens at home has a different meaning than when cooked in the
restaurants.
The New Menu of the Restaurant

With the increasing demand of the customers, new foods were getting a place on the menu of
Lhasa Restaurant. In recent years, it was no longer only a place located right in the center of
the Dal Lake where you get decent momo, but a place where customers wanted to experience
different cuisines and the restaurant’s beautiful interiors. It is important to note that there have
been many changes in the decoration and even the menu of the Lhasa Restaurant since I last
visited Srinagar. The menu I observed was in the year 2015, one year after a devastating flood
had destroyed many businesses in Srinagar. In 2015, the Lhasa Restaurant was going through
refurnishing after the flood as the water had damaged the restaurant.
When you open the menu of the restaurant, you are welcomed with an exquisite calligra-
phy and a brief description of Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. In the description, Lhasa is referred to as
a “terra incognito,” “nowhere land,” and “roof of the world.” Further it mentions the different
cuisines that can be found in the restaurant namely, “Kashmiri, Tibetan, Chinese, and Indian.”
The amalgamation of different cuisines is also guided by the philosophy of Yin and Yang in
the menu. Between the Tibetan Menu and Chinese menu, the symbol of Yin and Yang repre-
sents the restaurant as exotic and oriental. In Tibetan cuisine you have gyathuk (noodles made
with eggs, flour and bone soup), thukpa, momo, and others. Unlike the momo with pork, beef,
and chicken filling that you get in Majnu ka Tilla, a predominantly Tibetan-populated area in
Delhi, in the Lhasa Restaurant you do not get pork momo. In the Kashmiri cuisine you have the
wazwaan and in Indian cuisine you have the palak paneer (spinach and cottage cheese) and some
vegetarian dishes. The availability of Indian cuisine provides an option for the Indian tourists
who come to Srinagar. Providing a diverse cuisine is a way for Faiz and his family to continue
to earn a livelihood. In addition to the Tibetan and Kashmiri cuisine, there is also the presence
of other cuisines based on the frequency of the travellers from a particular region.
The array of various dishes that you get in the Lhasa Restaurant is also an ode to the travel
that Faiz has done for his work and education. He was born in Srinagar, but he moved to
Kalimpong to pursue his education. He was in Kalimpong until high school; he enrolled in
174
a madrasa, and in one of the privately run Christian schools in Kalimpong, St. Augustine’s.
His college years were spent in New Delhi and later he came back to Kashmir to study hotel
management, only to be sent away to Nepal during the 1990s, when militancy peaked in
Kashmir.8
During our initial meetings, Faiz offered me food and asked, “What would you like to have
for lunch? Kashmiri, Chinese, Indian, all the delicacies are available in the restaurant.” I always
left the decision to him, and I remember there being chowmein (stir-fried noodles), chicken
fried rice, and chicken manchurian on the table. Through its different foods, the restaurant
reminded me of home, and I was always ecstatic to visit the Lhasa Restaurant and the people
who worked there.
Food has the possibility of connecting people and places. Aijazi (2019) writes that it is in
the kitchen that “women exert their power in the everyday, challenging stereotypes of their
lack of participation in Kashmir’s political and social life.” Focusing on Sudha Kauls novel, The
Tiger Ladies, a memoir and an autobiography, Rizwan (2020: 138) elaborates how cosmopoli-
tanism is enacted in private spaces like kitchens and homes. Rizwan (ibid.) writes, “Kashmiri
women in The Tiger Ladies have cosmopolitan ‘inner maps’ that cannot be changed by the
demarcations of postcolonial cartography.” When I was invited for food in everyone’s kitchen,
they were inviting me to their inner domestic spaces. The plate that was served to me was a
representation of their stories, their migrations and their life. The food cooked and served at
home has a history and labor (usually of women) that often gets overlooked. But it is differ-
ent from the cooking in the restaurant. Unlike the kitchen in houses, the restaurant is also a
means of earning livelihood. Thus, in this space food is also about generating an economy.
The chef and all the waiters were male in the Lhasa Restaurant. In domestic settings, it is usu-
ally women who merge different techniques of adapting to a new environment and cooking,
whereas in the restaurant it is the chefs who cook and male waiters who serve.
Vinod and His Cosmopolitan Service

I sat at a table for four waiting for Faiz. There were easily more than ten such tables in the room.
Slowly, customers arrived, and the restaurant was crowded, even for a weekday. Two middle-
aged people entered the restaurant; they smiled at Vinod. I gathered that they were regulars at
the restaurant. Vinod is the most sought-after waiter in the restaurant. He is the oldest waiter,
and has been working at the restaurant for 30 years, since the time of Faiz’s father.
The different style of cooking the food and knowing the food makes him a cosmopolitan.
Many times, as we ate our food, Vinod passed by, checking if there was anything that we
wanted. Once, he went to the table next to us and explained the difference between gyathuk (a
Tibetan dish) and wazwaan (a Kashmiri dish) to the tourists with such ease, as if he had made
it himself. In the meantime, two regular customers left the restaurant, thanking Vinod for
his wonderful service. We were seated at the table beside the aquarium; our food, which had
arrived hot, had already gone cold. Noticing this, Vinod asked us if we wanted it to be warmed.
He was an observant person who knew the regular customers, a new face and the researcher
who came to visit his boss.
Gidwani and Sivaramkrishnan (2003: 339) explore rural cosmopolitanism through the lens
of circular migrants, people who move in terms of work, by capturing their “invisible histories
of movements.” Vinod is from Nepal and travelled to Kashmir for work. Having stayed in Sri-
nagar for three decades, he is familiar with Kashmiri customers who visit the restaurant to eat.
When he visits home, he takes this cosmopolitan understanding of Kashmir through the Lhasa
Restaurant with him to his family members.
175
Anisa Bhutia
The cosmopolitan form of understanding is neither local, national, nor global, but an exclu-
sive form of identity that arises from the wider links referred to as “resolute localism” (Ho 2006:
68 quoted in Marsden 2008: 216). Faiz’s cosmopolitanism is in his travels and history that is
linked with trade, but Vinod is also equally cosmopolitan through his travel and understanding
of the different nuances of the food that he serves. Another time as I entered the Lhasa Restau-
rant, Vinod recognized me and told me, “Sir is not there today, he has gone to Delhi.” Faiz had
informed me that he would be visiting Delhi for some days. Regardless, my hunger pangs and
the close proximity to the restaurant had made me pay a visit.
Rehan and My Kashmiri(?) Identity

One of the waiters, Rehan, who is from Kashmir, gave me the menu and asked me eagerly, “Are
you also Kashmiri, madam?” I did not have an answer. I simply smiled and nodded along and
ordered a chicken thukpa. The nod was open for interpretation by the people; I did not know
what it was supposed to represent. I have not grown up in Kashmir, and due to personal reasons
managed to visit Kashmir only a few times. I was born and raised in Kalimpong but always
had heard of Kashmir and its importance in our community through conversations and shared
collective histories. What was the hesitancy in calling myself a Kashmiri? As years have passed,
I have found some form of understanding of myself as Kashmiri. The visits have increased; the
phone calls have started becoming frequent. It is no longer only a part of my collective history
but also a part of my everyday life. During fieldwork, I came across many new relatives that
I had not known of. It was a connection to my history, my family, and ultimately my com-
munity. I did not have an answer then and I certainly do not now as I write this chapter. But
I do know that some of my relatives and the community in Kashmir call themselves Kashmiri
and would have certain hesitation returning to Tibet even if Tibet becomes free. It is for them
that I write this chapter and for the community’s history to be recorded; be it through food or
otherwise.
The Outer Garden and Farima

Tashi Delek (greetings), a phrase in the Tibetan Buddhist language, could be seen at the end of
the garden, on a big poster. It welcomed me to another space of the restaurant, the backyard.
Tables and chairs surrounded the outdoor garden. Almost all the tables were full; there were two
foreigners sitting in one corner. Seated across them were people celebrating a friend’s birthday.
Next to them there was a person eating momo. We crossed all of them and came to his house,
which had its entryway behind the Tashi Delek poster. Faiz along with his Ammi and his broth-
ers stayed in this house, behind the restaurant. As we climbed the stairs, he showed me on the
left-hand side there was the kitchen where the food was made for the restaurant.
As his Ammi prayed, he asked me to wait in a room. I had met Farima, Faiz’s mother, when
I first visited Kashmir in March 2015. Shah had invited us to his home; I had met her in this
same room where I was waiting for her. The floor was covered with a carpet and there was a
sofa. As Shah went to check on his mother, I noticed on the back of the door lay some black
burqas. The house was at an elevated plane, it was a two-storied building behind Lhasa Res-
taurant. I could hear the footsteps of people approaching. The son and mother conversed in
Tibetan, when he needed to explain anything to her in detail. He introduced me as the person
who had come a few months back and was researching on the community.
Farima was born in Tibet; she studied in the madrasa in Lhasa. Faiz told me, “Ammi can
speak Urdu, Hindi, even Farsi. She learned Persian when in Lhasa.” Knowing different languages
176
was a prerequisite to be able to talk to different people who were largely involved in trading.
Through an ethnohistorical study of trade in Leh, where different ethnic communities were
involved in trading, Fewkes (2009: 69) argues that the mixture of tongues could possibly help
in the greater economic prospects and “the South and Central Asian traders had a common
trading vocabulary fashioned of a mixture of words from several regional languages and dialect.”
When I first saw her, she was sitting right beside my mom and me. We were conversing and
we asked Faiz, “When would your mother be joining us?” To this his reply was, “She is sitting
right beside you.” We had mistaken her for Faiz’s elder sister or a relative. She seemed young for
her age; but as she approached me that day, I could see the wrinkles on her face upon a closer
look, which were not visible from afar. Like Faiz, she was also very soft-spoken. When I asked
her about her health, she said that her body ached sometimes these days as the cold was setting
in, and the winter chills had started troubling her. As she was not well, after a cup of tea, I bid
them farewell and started approaching the backyard.
Insider/Outsider Dilemma
In one of my visits, Faiz asked me to join them for lunch in his house. I did not have to walk
up the stairs that day. Right beside the restaurant, there was the kitchen of the house. Faiz’s
mom was there with one of their relatives. We waited for Faiz to arrive; he had gone to the
restaurant to meet some people. While I was in the kitchen, his relative, a young woman, asked
me, “Are you Tibetan?” to which I replied yes. She continued, “But you do not look like us,
you look Kashmiri.” I did not know how to respond, so I just smiled. The question of being a
Tibetan or Kashmiri gets complicated for me as I have relatives here, but I have not lived here.
My everyday realities of being a Tibetan, Kashmiri, and Nepali get intertwined with these ques-
tions. This further elaborates on the insider-outsider dilemma that I have to encounter every
single time, as a researcher, as a community member, and a woman. Talking about her German
mother, Indian father, and further mixed background of both her paternal and maternal fami-
lies, Narayan (1993: 673) “wonders whether any person of mixed ancestry can so neatly be split
down in the middle, excluding all vectors that have shaped them.” The place where one grows
up and the social and cultural upbringing also equally plays a role in developing a person along
with one’s ancestry.
The community is spread mostly along the Himalayas and the everyday lives of the people
are different depending upon their locality, but the food mostly remains the same. It is the food
that provides an “imagined community” for the Khache. There are some foods that get attached
and some that get developed as and when people move. In my understanding, once a person
from the community starts researching their own, there is a certain sense of comfort but there
is also a sense of distance. Statements like “she looks like us,” “she is one of us,” “now you have
studied so much what kitchen work you will do,” were frequently heard during my fieldwork.
All this further strengthened my understanding that one can never completely be an insider/
outsider when researching one’s own.
When Faiz arrived, we started keeping the dishes on the dastarkhān (a cloth spread on the
floor or a table to eat meals). While eating, he said, “I like the Indian style food better; roti
[bread], daal [lentin soup], sabzi [vegetable]. What about you?” I simply thought about it for a
while and replied, “I like noodles and momo, but I don’t mind daal, chawal [rice] either.” That
day, the women of the house had cooked hak (locally grown collard greens, a staple in the Kash-
miri diet) and chicken. Supski (2013: 28) writes that cooking is an important part of enjoying
food because it captures so much of “everyday life, thought and activity across time, place and
generation.” The different influences of the movements of the community can be seen through
177
Anisa Bhutia
the Lhasa Restaurant and also through the kitchens of the households. In the Lhasa Restaurant,
this image of multiculturalism further gets heightened due to the different interiors of the res-
taurant, to which I now turn.
Symbols and Multiple Identities

When I was in the restaurant as a customer, I could see the Tibetan influences in its interiors.
When I was on my own, I noticed the eight lucky symbols in Buddhism that Shah had men-
tioned to me in our prior conversations. The vaguely familiar Tibetan interiors were on full
display. But Faiz had specified to me that they were the “eight auspicious symbols in the Tibetan
culture.” He further mentioned, “My uncle himself painted the interiors of the restaurant; start-
ing from the eight symbols to the walls, he painted all of them himself.” It was a way of honor-
ing the once lived life in Tibet. Knowing the details of it being auspicious symbols shows his
cosmopolitan understanding of the Tibetan Buddhist community.
As I started eating, I looked around the walls painted with these symbols. I had seen these
symbols when I was in Dharamshala during my internship in 2013. A friend had gifted me a
bag with these symbols; they had told me that these were lucky symbols (see Figure 12.1). It
Figure 12.1 Some auspicious symbols in the Lhasa Restaurant through paintings
Source: Photo by the author
178
was in Srinagar that I came to know about the importance of the eight symbols in the Bud-
dhist culture through Faiz. These symbols are called Asthamangala in Sanskrit. The word astha
means eight and mangala means auspicious. The origins of these symbols can be traced back to
Buddhism in India.
In Buddhism, these symbols represent the good fortune and offerings made by God to
Sakyamuni Buddha after he gained enlightenment. These symbols can be presented individually
or together; when used together they form a collective vase (Beer 1999: 171). It has immense
importance in Buddhist culture. These symbols could be seen in the Lhasa Restaurant, painted
on the walls, though the sharpness of the colors had faded largely due to the floods of 2014.
There were now only seven on the walls. The golden fish was the one that was missing. As if
compensating for its absence, there was an aquarium beside my table with two fish swimming
in it. It was the same table where I had sat with Faiz, on the first day of my fieldwork.
The victory banner represents a sign of a victory; the treasure vase refers to the inexhaustible
treasures of life. The wheel holds an important place in the Buddhist way of life, it is considered
auspicious according to Buddhist teachings. The wheel is literally considered to be the “wheel of
spirituality” and it symbolizes spiritual transformation (Beer 1999: 185). The golden fish refer to
the happiness and complete freedom that they receive in water; symbolically they also represent
fertility (ibid.: 176). The white conch shells represent the deep melodious sound that one can hear
when playing the conch; it has its linkages with the origins of the trumpet in India. The parasol
represents the symbol of both royalty and protection. It is supposed to protect the people from
the direct heat of the sun and wind chill. The eternal knot is supposed to represent the eternal
wisdom of the Buddha. The lotus symbolizes the purified body and mind and a blissful libera-
tion of both (Beer 1999: 173). The existence of these symbols in his restaurant speaks about Faiz
and his family’s close affiliation to the Tibetan identity. Maybe these are the symbols, but these
representations make Mehfuz – Faiz Shah’s brother – feel more Tibetan, as pointed out to me
by his friend during my encounters in the field.
After eating my thukpa, I moved to the bill counter to make my payment. Above the counter,
there was an Arabic calligraphy representing the family’s Muslim identity, and on the counter,
the sign of the endless knot representing their Tibetan identity. The presence of these symbols
shows the merging of the identity of the Khache. What we see is the envisioned Lhasa of Faiz
Shah; they are his negotiations of being a Tibetan and Kashmiri Muslim, and these symbols in
his restaurant remind him of his cosmopolitan past and present.
Conclusion: Logo Momo and Hak9

In this chapter, I have argued that Lhasa Restaurant comprises different forms of cosmopolitan-
ism. In order to make these claims, I have drawn upon my research on food and memory of
the Khache community. Specifically, in the Lhasa Restaurant, I show how food, memory, and
symbols play an integral part in making the site cosmopolitan. Additionally, through the food
cooked in kitchen spaces, I show how people engage in cosmopolitan imaginaries and practices
in their everyday life. The different cuisines that one gets at the Lhasa Restaurant are sometimes
cooked even in the households of the community members. But for obvious reasons, as the
restaurant is also an economic place, there are certain dishes that are sold in the restaurant only.
On the last day of my fieldwork, I was invited for dinner in one of the houses; the family had
made hak and logo momo. The logo momo represents Tibetan food whereas hak represents Kashmiri
food. With the different movements of the community, different foods get introduced in the
kitchen. In the Lhasa Restaurant, the addition of different cuisines shows the knowledge and the
travel of Faiz Shah’s movement through Kashmir, Kalimpong, Nepal, and Delhi. Additionally,
179
Anisa Bhutia
another aspect of cosmopolitanism can be seen through the lens of Vinod, the waiter. Unlike Faiz,
he has not travelled much but he is deeply familiar with different foods and their smells; how they
are cooked and served, and their historic, social, and cultural importance in the menu. Further,
the community’s rich history of trade and movement can also be witnessed through Faiz’s mother
and the multiple languages that she speaks. Additionally, the symbols present in the restaurant
remind us of the once lived memories of the older generations in Tibet. Moving away from the
state narratives, this chapter presents a case of an everyday life of practice in the form of food and
memories that often gets overlooked in the understanding of belonging and surviving in Kashmir.
Notes
1 In mainland India, it is not just the Tibetan Buddhist communities that make momo. In my hometown
of Kalimpong located in the eastern Himalayas, momo is largely made and consumed by the larger
Nepali population of the region. Any conversation with the people from the Himalayas brings forth a
heated discussion about where the dish originated.
2 For an elaborate discussion of how Khache came to be translated as “Tibetan Muslim” see Bhutia (2018).
3 There are various categories of Khache as Wapaling Khache, Barkor Kache, Gya Kache, Singpa Khache
etc. These meanings were sometimes associated with the regions and sometimes with nationality. For
a detailed analysis of this different meaning of Khache see: Yoeli-Tlalim (2011), Altner (2011), Akasoy,
Burnett and Yoeli-Tlalim (2011), and Atwill (2016).
4 Many respondents shared how no one sold them groceries in the bazaar as they were Muslims. Some
also shared instances of how their relatives were imprisoned. One of the most traumatic incidents was
when, as my interlocutor recounted, “some of our older community members were locked in a room
and asked to pray for food as we believed in religion.”
5 My first academic research journey of my community was during my Masters where I completed
research based on my fieldwork on Dharamshala and Kalimpong. For the masters dissertation see Bhutia
(2014).
6 The fieldwork conducted in 2015 in Srinagar resulted in my M.Phil dissertation. This essay builds upon
my M.Phil work and further elaborates on my field experiences. For my M.Phil dissertation see Bhutia
(2016).
7 The names of the respondents have been changed for the sake of anonymity.
8 We can see the importance of the documents increasing day-by-day with the recent National Register
of Citizens (NRC) by the government to document “real” citizens of India. In such cases communities
that have a history of movement and who live in borderlands face an uncertain future. For brief reading
on NRC see (Ghosh 2020; Schneidermann and Ghosh 2019).
9 Logo momo is pan fried and steamed bread.
Works Cited
Aijazi, Omer. 2019. “How to be an Ally with Kashmir: War Stories from the Kitchen.” The Conversation,
August 18. Accessed March 28, 2021. https://theconversation.com/how-to-be-an-ally-with-kashmir-
war-stories-from-the-kitchen-121801.
Akasoy, Anna, Charles Burnett, and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim. 2011. Islam and Tibet Interactions along the Musk
Routes. London: Ashgate.
Altner, Diana. 2011. “Do All the Muslims of Tibet Belong to the Hui Nationality?” In Islam and Tibet
Interactions along the Musk Routes, edited by Charles Burnett, Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim Anna Aksoy, 339–352.
London: Ashgate.
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities. London and New York: Verso Publication.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2005. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: University Press.
Atwill, David. 2016. “Boundaries of Belonging: Sino Indian Relations and the 1960 Tibetan Muslim
incident.” The Journal of Asian Studies 75(3): 595–620.
Batt, Masood. 1990. “The Story of the Tibetan Muslims.” Tibetan Bulletin 28.
Bamzai, Amit. 2020. “Relating Otherwise: Curated Narratives.” Biography 43(2): 306–322.
180
Beer, Robert. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs. Boston: Shambhala Publication.
Bhan, Mona and Haley Duschinski. 2020. “Kashmiri Goats, Imaginaries of Freedom, and the Planetary
Pandemic.” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, September 2. https://politicalandlegalanthro.
org/2020/09/02/kashmiri-goats-imaginaries-of-freedom-and-the-planetary-pandemic/.
Bhutia, Anisa. 2014. “Shonpa Bhoepa Kache: Tibetan Muslim Youth (Understanding Tibetan Muslim
Youth in Kalimpong).” M.A Diss. Mumbai: Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
———. 2016. “Identity, Belonging and Biography: A Study of Tibetan Muslims in Kashmir.” M.Phil Diss.
Mumbai: Tata Institute of Social Sciences.
———. 2017. “The IAPS Dialogue.” theiapsdialogue, July 6. Accessed March 15, 2021. https://theasiadia-
logue.com/2017/07/06/belonging-through-documents-kashmiri-muslims-of-lhasa/.
———. 2018. “Longing, Belonging and the Politics of Naming: The Case of the Khache.” Himalaya 38(2):
27–39.
Fewkes, H. Jacqueline. 2009. Trade and Contemporary Society along the Silk Road: An Ethno-History of Ladakh.
London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2012. “Living in the Material World: Cosmopolitanism and Trade in Early Twenteith Century
Ladakh.” Modern Asian Studies 46(2): 259–281.
Gaborieau, Marc. 1995. “Power and Authorities of Sufis Among the Kashmiri Muslims in Tibet.” The
Tibet Journal: 21–30.
Gidwani, Vinay and K. Sivaramkrishnan. 2003. “Circular Migration and Rural Cosmopolitanism in India.”
Contributions to Indian Sociology 37(1–2): 339–367.
Ghosh, Sahana. 2020. “Between Faith and Panic.” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, Septem-
ber 7. Accessed May 15, 2020. https://polarjournal.org/2020/09/07/between-faith-and panic/.
Harper, Tim and Sunil Amrith. 2014. “Introduction.” In Sites of Asian Interaction: Ideas Network and Mobil-
ity, edited by Sunil Amrith, Tim Harper, and Sunil Amrith, 1–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Ho, Engseng. 2002. “Names beyond Nations: The Making of Local Cosmopolitans.” Etudes Rurales (163–
164): 215–232.
Jest, Corneille. 1995. “Kha-che and Gya-kha-che.” The Tibet Journal: 8–20.
Khan, Sulmaan Wasif. 2015. Muslim, Trader, Nomad, Spy: China’s Cold War and the People of the Tibetan
Borderlands. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Kikon, Dolly. 2015. “Fermenting Modernity: Putting Akhuni on the Nation’s Table in India.” South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies 38(2): 320–335.
Marsden, Magnus. 2008. “Muslim Cosmopolitan: Transnational Life in North Pakistan.” The Journal of
Asian Studies (Association for Asian Studies) 67: 213–247.
McGranahan, Carole. 2010. Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA and Memories of a Forgotten War. Durham and
London: Duke University Press.
Narayan, Kirin. 1993. “How Native is a Native Anthropologist?” American Anthropologist 95(3): 671–686.
Nadwi, Dr. Abu Bakr Amir-uddin. 2004. Tibet and Tibetan Muslim. Dharamshala: The Library of Tibetan
Work and Archives.
Notar, Beth E. 2008. “Producing Cosmopolitanism at the Borderlands: Lonely Planeteers and ‘Local’
Cosmopolitanims in Southwest China.” Anthropological Quarterly 81: 615–650.
Rizwan, Rakhshan. 2020. Kashmir Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan. New
York and London: Routledge.
Shami, Seteney. 2000. “Prehistories of Globalization: Circassian Identity in Motion.” Public Culture 12(1):
177–204.
Singh, Rohit. 2015. “Reimagining Tibet Through the Lens of Tibetan Muslim History and Identity.”
Oxford Handbook Online: 1–28.
Schneiermann, Sara and Sahana Ghosh. 2019. “New Laws Weaponize Citizenship in India.” The Conversation,
December 22. Accessed May 15, 2021. https://theconversation.com/new-laws-weaponize-citizenship-
in-india-129027.
Supski, Sian. 2013. “Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia.” Food Cultures and
Amateur Economies 19(1): 28–49.
Wahid, Siddiq. 2001. “Ladakh: Political Convergence and Human Geography.” India International Centre
Quarterly: 215–225.
181
Anisa Bhutia
Yoeli-Tlalim, Ronit. 2011. “Islam and Tibet: Cultural Interactions: An Introduction.” In Islam and Tibet
Interactions along the Musk Routes, edited by Anna Aksoy and Charles Burnett, Anna Aksoy, and Ronit
Yoeli-Tlalim, 1–16. London: Ashgate.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2015. “Kashmir Journal: Celebrating Kashmiri Food.” Kashmir Connected, Novem-
ber 1. www.kashmirconnected.com/celebrating-kashmiri-food.html.
182
13
THE COUNTRY OF PRIVILEGE
Problematizing the Country Without
a Post Office
Huzaifa Pandit
Introduction
Agha Shahid Ali’s The Country Without a Post Office published in 1997 has often been reduced to a
catalogue of extraordinary topographies of trauma, loss, and death that erupted in Kashmir begin-
ning with 1990. However, this reductive reading does no justice to the complexity of the poems,
which offer a countermovement in the form of a nostalgia that is based on possession of privilege
and cultural wealth. The reading offered here draws attention to the contradictory longings in him,
resisting a binarizing and totalizing approach to imagining the nation: Kashmir/India, Oppressed/
Oppressor, Victim/Assailant, and draws forth the necessity of re-mapping Kashmiri identity in
historical space and time. This binary needs to be dismantled since it is a replication of the way
the state functions. The state functions by marking binaries of acceptability/non-acceptability,
accessible/inaccessible, civilian/terrorist, and marks spaces out clearly – camp, road, police station,
interrogation center, checkpoint, bunker, road. These spaces are opaque since the general Kashmiri
population is not permitted to access or be informed about these spaces as they are imposed on the
public without their consent. Moreover, since poetry conflates geographies and times, the contra-
dictions and contests in the text become an articulation of not the fixed space of a nation-state, but
a vehicle of potentialities – a disruptive and transformative space of contrapuntal trajectories where
divergent and distant spaces blend by aid of an imagination. This imagination exists in constant
negotiation and tension between routes and roots of subjugation and resistance. The narrations of
collective trauma, thereof, can be employed to generate a greater mutuality and inclusiveness. Such
spaces move beyond mere representative allegories, and actively debates and depicts the protean
politics of occupation, and resists portrayal of monolithic counter-responses.
The title poem “Country Without a Post Office” exhibits this contradictory movement and
draws from the images already used in the poem “A Pastoral,” which precedes it. The poem
transposes the images – the desolate homes, fire, the lamps being lit, smoke, the undelivered
letters, the maps and the Mirror, saffron, soaked blood, along with the sounds – the call for
prayer, the calling out to people lost – it’s Us, it’s Us, as well as the protagonists: The Muezzin,
the soldiers, the estranged friend who is now a refugee, and the speaker returning from exile:
I have returned in rain

to find him, to learn why he never wrote.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-17 183

Huzaifa Pandit
I’ve brought cash, a currency of paisleys

to buy the new stamps, rare already, blank,
no nation named on them.
. . .
When the muezzin
died, the city was robbed of every Call.
. . .
It’s raining as I write this. I have no prayer.
It’s just a shout, held in, it’s Us! It’s Us!
whose letters are cries that break like bodies
in prisons.
(Ali 2009: 177–178)
To this paraphernalia of images, Shahid adds the paisley. A paisley is a motif shaped like an
upturned tear drop with a curved upper end, and sometimes thought to represent an almond
or blossom. Both images traditionally signify feminine beauty: almond symbolizes shapely eyes,
and blossom delicacy of body and tender complexion. Unsurprisingly then the Kashmiri shawl,
a rage in colonial Europe especially France and England, became associated with paisley, since
its femininity gels well with the occidental gaze that feminizes the colony. This offers a reminder
that Shahid’s poetry must be examined in in a more critical way than it has been previously
studied. Paisley does not merely evoke the binary of oppressed versus oppressor, but also a his-
torical context. It is a reiteration of the oriental imagery of associating Kashmir with a passive
mother/beloved in need of rescue, and Shahid interposes his self to perform this messianic role.
Shahid offers cash, a currency of paisley to buy “new stamps, rare already, blank, no nation
named after them” in order to bribe his way to find the lost correspondent. This transaction is
a grim reminder of the commerce of occupation under which the occupational forces, local
police, and their accomplices especially the dreaded Ikhwan ran a well-oiled network of extor-
tion. Moreover, the transaction reenacts the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar, by which Jammu and
Kashmir was created and sold to Maharaja Gulab Singh in lieu of 75 lakh rupees (Nanak Shahi)
and the recognition of British supremacy among other things to be marked by a gift of three
pairs of Cashmere shawls.
Shahid affirms the symbolic value of the motif, the shawl and its role in colonial imaginar-
ies. By underscoring obtaining of news and recovery only after payment of paisley, the poem
invokes the material dimension of occupation, and the complicity of the elite Muslim class in
perpetuating it. Among other things the treaty had material effects. Gulab Singh intended to
make good his purchase of Kashmir and single-mindedly pursued a regime of extreme taxation
that “enlarged an already burdensome taxation system from the pre-Dogra period to such an
extent that his rapacity and avarice assumed legendary proportions.” It was said of Gulab Singh
in 1850 that, incapable of looking beyond “his money bags,” he imposed a “capitation tax on
every individual practicing any labour, trade profession or employment collected daily” (Rai
2004: 63). It is no coincidence that the first seeds of the anti-colonial movement were sown by
shawl weavers protesting penury, and the formal anti-colonial movement was “a confluence of
several shifting strands among which included a demand for Muslim empowerment and class
empowerment (the local peasant and artisan being the most impoverished and affected popu-
lace)” (Pandit 2015). By offering the currency of paisley as the price to redeem and recover the
precolonial pastoral in a “shrine of words,” Shahid reiterates the mercenary nature of occupa-
tion, and its ideological underpinning. Moreover, the speaker can afford to purchase new rare
stamps with paisley, when all other stamps are cancelled and the post offices dead. This privilege
184
The Country of Privilege
mirrors the privilege enjoyed historically by elite Muslim class in Kashmir. In a country where
the common Muslim faced deprivation, extreme poverty, no access to education, elite Muslim
families like Naqshbandis and Aghas during the Afghan, Sikh, and Dogra rule bucked this trend.
Similarly, Shahid’s forefathers enjoyed access to the court as royal physicians and important
police functionaries, while his father also worked in various capacities in the state administra-
tion, not to mention their sprawling jagirs including Ismwar Jagirs (retained for the lifetime) and
Hak-i-asami Jagirs (permanent hereditary) of 500 kanals in Mujgund and 120 kanals at Nawab-
Bagh Baghbanpora, Srinagar (Rizvi and Qizilbash 2017). In an interview Agha Ashraf Ali sup-
plied evidence of this privilege: “At his peak my grandfather was making 2500 rupees a month,
this at a time when you could get in Kashmir 64 large breads for a single rupee, which also
happened to be the average teacher’s salary at the time” (Lepeska 2020: 8). Similarly, the Naqsh-
bandis had jagirs worth Rs 2500, even as they lost a significant portion to the Dogra state, their
privilege of administering several shrines in Srinagar, particularly the shine of Khwaja Naqsh-
band Sahab and access to the considerable financial resources of the shrine remained intact. The
Shaals, similarly enjoyed ownership of lands, orchards, and houses spread over Kashmir (Zutshi
2012: 130). When Anjuman Nusratul Islam was founded to work for the cause of education
of Kashmiri Muslims, its sphere was limited and remained around Srinagar only. Out of 600
contributors to the school, only 20 were from outside Srinagar. The convocations were held in
Persian and Urdu, languages of the elites, neither of which were spoken or understood by the
lower classes (Arsilan 2018).
The possession of paisley currency then is a re-articulation of immunity from the routine
deprivation and violence of colonialism by virtue of location and class. It mirrors the return of
his predecessors, though this time it is not in service of the state, but rather against it. It is also
interesting to note that the location of peace in “A Pastoral” is a colonial style Villa with a large
garden and amply furnished, as indicated by the cedar stand (Ali 2009: 170–171):
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,

by the gates of the Villa of Peace
. . .
In the drawer of the cedar stand,
white in the verandah, we’ll find letters:
Similarly, in “Return to Harmony 3,” Shahid outlines the cultural and traditional capital of
his family:
The Koran still protects the house, lying strangely wrapped in a jamawar shawl where
my mother had left it on the walnut table by the fireplace. I pick up the dead phone. . . .
On my shelf, by Ritsos and Rike and Cavefy and Lorca and Iqbal and Amaichai and
Paz, my parents are beautiful in their wedding brocades, so startlingly young.
(Ali 2009: 200)
The prohibitively expensive Jamawar Shawl, the telephone (a rare luxury even in the 90s), the
cosmopolitanism of the reading list, and the brocade worn by the photographed couple (pho-
tography during that time being an expensive luxury) are sufficient indicators of Shahid’s class.
His gesture to nullify colonialism by blank stamps (which stamp out the seals of colonial trea-
ties and interventions) is rooted in a nostalgia for this privilege, even though it is employed as
a counter-colonial instrument. This seepage of class consciousness informs Shahid’s lament for
Kashmir – what is sorely missed first is this old elite bonhomie, and therefore his discomfiture
185
Huzaifa Pandit
with the movement that rose in Kashmir as it challenges the old class boundaries and disvalues
the old cultural wealth so dear to Shahid and his family. The world order envisioned by mili-
tancy is premised upon Sunni Islamic imaginaries, which has no use nor respect for the old cul-
tural Muslim elite. This is not to take away from the significance of Shahid’s poetry as a means
of archiving the conflict, and as a counter-colonial gesture but to simply acknowledge that like
every author, he is a product of particular historical forces and circumstances, over which he
could exert little control. As Moscaliuc (2017: 158) observes, “Writing does not happen within
a void but within histories regulated by asymmetrical power relations and often, as in Ali’s case
at the intersection of dissimilar and often conflicting cultures and traditions.” It is important
to account for these historical forces since they not only contextualize literary production, but
also offer an insight into the contradictions, intersections, and multiplicities of imaginaries of
histories of production. History, especially in counter-colonial imaginations, is sought to be
framed within hegemonic imaginaries of a common identity and belonging. This ignores the
rich complexities of histories, which are conceived by competing, contradictory and intersect-
ing vectors that defy easy and simplistic conceptions of identity, and history that coalesce into
“nationhood.” Shahid’s evocation of nostalgia is a reminder against viewing counter-colonial
gestures as motivated by a single, generic belief in a nationalist idyll, rather it is shaped by diverse
and often competing interests. It is an attestation of the contradictions manifest in Shahid that
caution against the unconditional celebration of his poetry as the voice of Kashmiri subalternity.
This recovery through nostalgia opens up one of the key debates in postcolonial criticism –
the subject of location of the author. Who is best placed to theorize and represent the resistance
against colonialism? The author within the colonized land and therefore materially and viscer-
ally affected by colonialism or the diasporic author affluent and trained in the cultural matrix
of the colonial metropolis, but retaining a strong bond of identification and empathy with the
homeland (even if not interested in a return as in case of Shahid), while possessing the advantage
of perspective and distance? In many postcolonial literary contexts, diasporic authors and poets
have been seen as capable of articulating the silences and fractures of colonial knowledge sys-
tems through their hybridized subjectivities. However, in the case of literatures engaging with
a postcolonial occupation like Kashmir, such as The Country Without a Post Office, the question
acquires a greater urgency and force. Poems like “Dear Shahid,” “The Correspondent,” and
“I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight” explore this dialectic of identity and location,
exploring simultaneously a collective experience and yet a continuous exile from that experi-
ence, owing to the poet’s own class position and privilege.
The poem “I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight” offers an example of this duality.
In this poem, Ali explores the collective trauma of Kashmir using the figure of Rizwan, a young
Kashmiri boy who has been shot dead by security forces. The poem exhibits a duality by draw-
ing from the collective experience of subalternity. At the same time, it also mourns a past that
is shaped by class privilege, and drew sustenance from the immense cultural wealth that accrued
to the class. Both aspects merit detailed examination.
Trauma is explored in the poem by setting the narrative in a liminal space, which allows a
convergence of Kashmir and Delhi. The speaker wills the distant mountains into glass so that
they reflect the reality of a Kashmir sunk into turmoil. The title of the poem sets the mood
of the poem, which is a lament not only on the tragedy of Kashmir, but also an elegy on the
demise of a cherished belief in the democratic fabric of independent India. Built after the
sacking of old city of Delhi by British, the city emerged as a signifier of colonial authority,
and continued to be so after Independence. New Delhi, therefore, is employed as a meto-
nym for government and political power, New Delhi being the site of the Indian parliament.
186
From Kashmir, the gaze of New Delhi is believed popularly to be a hostile one. By setting his
gaze from Delhi, Shahid acknowledges his former pride in the city which he celebrated as a
homeland in The Half Inch Himalayas. However, frozen recollections have been replaced by
exact representation. The timing of the poem is also allusive as midnight reminds of the time
when independent India came into existence on August 15, 1947. Nehru (2007: 21, italics
mine) famously said:
Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall
redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke
of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment
comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new,
when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.
The poem invokes this historical moment to draw the parallels between India and Kashmir,
reminding readers the soul of the Valley too has been long suppressed in want of utterance. Thus
in “After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan,” Ali (2009: 241) laments:
Freedom’s terrible thirst, flooding Kashmir,

Is bringing love to its tormented glass.
Stranger who will inherit the last night
Of the past? Of what shall I not sing, and sing?
Both poems employ the motif of glass to reflect the torment, the great pain of the Valley.
They offer the glass as an instrument to reflect back to the Indian nation its colonial reflection,
and evoke in it an understanding of its practices that are a mirror image of the colonial state’s
treatment of the Indian colony. The poems evoke Partition to draw parallels between the great
tragedy occasioned due to a brutal and insensitive occupation, and the tragedy playing out in
the Valley where partition was re-enacted as Kashmiri Pandits migrated from the Valley. The
poems evoke the night of August 1947 to invoke the promise of freedom, that both India
and Pakistan promised their tormented subjects but failed to extend. The last line “Of what
shall I not sing, and sing” evokes a disillusionment with the childhood and youthful loyalty to
the idea of India and Kashmir. As one rudely awakened from nostalgia, he must emerge as a
stranger to what was once well-known, and the link with the past severed. In the dry plains,
he must “wear dry ice” to cool off the passions of old loyalty and see in the mirror of distant
mountains the subject of his songs. Therefore, the epigram of the poem “I See Kashmir From
New Delhi at Midnight” quotes Yeats: “Now is time to be/ Whenever green is worn. . ./
A terrible beauty is born.” “Green” – the color of the Islamic flag – could be seen as a marker
of Shahid’s shifting nationalism yet the “terrible beauty” is sufficient to indicate his discomfi-
ture, as noted earlier.
The green taken with the terrible beauty must be taken with the rawness of the wound –
the wound of Kashmir and trauma that refuses to heal, but continually reiterates its own exist-
ence. Dedicated to close friend of Shahid’s father, Maulvi Hai, the poem is a dirge for his son
Rizwan, who stands as a metaphor for the wasted youth of Kashmir. Muzamil Jaleel (2016:
12) reports “18-year-old Rizwan was killed by soldiers near my village in Bandipore. Rizwan’s
father, Molvi Abdul Hai, was a close friend of Shahid’s father and the two families were close.”
Hameeda Nayeem adds, “He is among those unburied boys who never returned. His father
later on built a college in memory of his son, named Rizwaan College of Education, where
187
Huzaifa Pandit
the poor are given free education” (quoted in Shabir 2013). The poem envisions his restless
spirit haunting the Valley and the speaker enjoining him to shift his loyalties to Kashmir:
“Rizwan, it’s you, Rizwan, it’s you,” I cry out

as he steps closer, the sleeves of his phiren torn.
“Each night put Kashmir in your dreams,” he says,
then touches me, his hands crusted with snow,
whispers, “I have been cold a long, long time.” (Ali 2009: 179)
Like the ghost in Hamlet, the ghost of Rizwan signifies the rot in Kashmir, and extracts a promise
of revenge and remembrance. The shadowy ghost takes the speaker on a tour of the strife torn
Srinagar illuminating the various forms of the state brutality in the interrogation centers: “Drip-
pings from a suspended burning tire/ are falling on the back of a prisoner,/ the naked boy scream-
ing: ‘I know nothing’ ”; the curfewed roads at night: “From Zero bridge/ a shadow chased by
searchlights is running/ away to find its body”; the massacres and funerals: “I follow him through
blood on the road/ left behind, as they ran from the funeral,/ victims of the firing”; arson: “Black
on edges of flames/ it cannot extinguish the neighbourhoods/ the homes set ablaze by midnight
soldiers/ Kashmir is burning”; and more poignantly, the agony of parents crushed by death of
their children: “Don’t tell my father I have died, he says. . . . From windows we hear grieving
mothers” (Ali 2009: 178, 179). Although the funeral specifically refers to the funeral of Mirwaiz
Maulvi Farooq, who led Friday prayers at Jamia Masjid in Srinagar (also the workplace of Maulvi
Hai, who led prayers other than Friday), which was fired upon by armed paramilitary forces at
Hawal Srinagar leading to the death of 67 people and injuries to 200 others (Associated Press
1990), the description is broadly commonplace in Kashmir where funerals are often fired upon
with bullets, pellets, tear gas, and pepper gas shells. The poem, therefore, at one level stays true
to its promise to Rizwan and catalogues the sufferings of the Valley in a moving, elegiac lyricism
indicting the state for the mayhem unleashed on Kashmir. This is in keeping with the first move-
ment in Shahid where he seeks to use poetry as a catalogue of the turmoil and trauma of Kashmir.
Yet in a contrarian movement it is important to note that Shahid chooses to anoint Rizwan
as a symbol of the brutalities of war, and the funeral of Maulvi Farooq as an archetypal symbol
of the bloody war to represent the massacres. In the poem “Dear Shahid,” Rizwan is mourned
again: “You must have heard Rizwan was killed. Rizwan: Guardian of the Gates of Paradise.
Only eighteen years old” (Ali 2009: 194). At one level, the choice of Rizwan makes sense, as he
is the namesake of one of the gates of Paradise, according to Islamic theology. His anointment,
therefore, fits well with the discourse of martyrdom discussed earlier, and therefore an accurate
reflection of popular memory. Yet, his anointment and the dedication along with the choice of
Mirwaiz’s funeral also reflects Shahid’s discomfiture with the movement. One, Rizwan’s death
represents a blow to the traditional hierarchies from which elite Muslims benefited. Rizwan’s
choice to adopt a militant path, rather than the traditional role of preaching effectively ensures
that the family bastion is lost, especially considering the son of Mirwaiz Mohamad Farooq –
Umar, chose to succeed his father ensuring the position is not lost to the family. No wonder
the ghost wishes to spare the father the news of his death pleading “Don’t tell my father I have
died” (ibid.: 152). It is the college in his name that rescues him from being just a statistic in the
footnotes of history as just another militant among thousands and ensures his “martyrdom” is
commemorated. The setting up of a college involves applying for and seeking recognition by
state as conforming to regulatory standards set by the very state against which Rizwan fought.
Rizwan, therefore, explains the paradox of life under occupation where the occupied seeks
release from the occupier, yet also depend on subservience to it for their survival. However,
188
the college is also a site of transferring cultural capital, and is therefore a function of both the
cultural and material wealth of the Hai family much like Shahid’s family. Shahid’s commemora-
tion of Rizwan through the poem exemplifies this cultural capital that determines who is worth
commemorating in art and who is to be forgotten. Rizwan then emerges as an alter-ego of Sha-
hid, and the lament for him is equally a lament for the old world-order in which the supremacy
of the traditional elite is under severe threat. It is not entirely irrelevant to note that the stanza
compares the falling snow to ash:
From windows we hear

grieving mothers, and snow begins to fall
on us, like ash. (ibid.: 152)
Snow is indicative of winter, which has forever been associated with death and decay. Besides
snow is compared to ash, which indicates a charring, and is again associated with complete
destruction. Both images suggest a dismantling and death of old structures and hierarchies,
which are grieved over as much by Shahid as by the mothers in the poem. Consider, the poem
uses the first-person plural “us” to indicate him and Maulvi Hai to whom the poem is dedi-
cated. The specter of both persona looms over the poem as Shahid frequently invokes “we” –
first person plural, to frame the action of the poem. Both of them represent the old elite whose
authority and legacy are gradually eroding in the fires kindled by turmoil.
The assassination of Mirwaiz at the hands of militants (generally acknowledged, never con-
firmed) presents a striking example of this threat. The Mirwaiz family has historically enjoyed
great prestige in the Valley, and have influenced the course of the politics in the Valley. Mirwaiz
Muhamad Yusuf Shah, the predecessor and uncle of Mirwaiz Faruq was in fact the joint founder
of Muslim Conference that emerged as the first platform for the anti-Dogra sentiment. His
shocking assassination implied that old bonds of respect and authority meant little in the new
scheme of things, and so with the death of Rizwan indicates Shahid’s anxiety at the unravelling
of Kashmir frozen in his nostalgia, for which he seeks consolation:
The shadow slips out, beckons Console Me,

and somehow there, across five hundred miles,
I’m sheened in moonlight, in emptied Srinagar,
but without any assurance for him.
On a note not dissimilar, the poem also contains a brief digression as it briefly mourns the exil-
ing of Pandits:
By that dazzling light

we see men removing statues from temples.
We beg them, “Who will protect us if you leave?”
They don’t answer, they just disappear
on the road to the plains, clutching the gods. (Ali 2009: 180)
Shahid subverts the Islamic contours of the armed movement by referring to the Hindu gods
as protectors, acknowledging their divinity, contrary to the monotheistic premises of Islam.
Furthermore, at the end he ties the threads at Shah-e-Hamdan shrine presumably at Khanqah.
Taken together, the two phenomena reflect Shahid’s belief in pluralism and a more syncretic
culture, which was part of his upbringing. Ghosh recalls that Shahid spoke often of a time in his
189
Huzaifa Pandit
childhood when he had been seized by the desire to create a small Hindu temple in his room in
Srinagar. He was initially hesitant to tell his parents but when he did, they responded with an
enthusiasm equal to his own. His mother bought him statues (murtis) and other accoutrements
and for a while he was assiduous in conducting pujas at this shrine. “Whenever people talk to
me about Muslim fanaticism,” he said to me once, “I tell them how my mother helped me make
a temple in my room. What do you make of that? I ask them” (Ghosh 2017: 209). Such “secu-
lar” and “pluralistic” upbringing is not surprising as it is largely in keeping with the atheistic
tenor of the Fabian-socialist culture that the Nehruvian elite prided upon in professing. Nehru,
the progenitor of socialism in India explained in his biography that he was essentially a “typical
bourgeois, brought up in bourgeois surroundings with all the early prejudices that this training
has given me” (quoted in Mohan 1975: 184). Notably, he argued that he explained this dou-
bling thus: “Is there a necessary contradiction in the two terms? I suppose I am temperamentally
and by training an individualist and intellectually a socialist I hope that socialism does not kill or
suppress individuality” (quoted in Mohan 1975: 189). It limited religion to a cultural expression
than a deterministic belief system. Nehru who greatly shaped the tenor of Congress’ socialism
“rejected the idea of a personal God. According to Nehru, too much dependence on super-
natural factors could lead, and had often led, to a loss of self-reliance in man and to a blunting of
his capacity on creative ability” (Kapoor and Singh 2005: 508). Since Agha Ashraf Ali, the father
of Shahid, was greatly influenced by this tilt of socialism, it was inevitable that the same may be
transferred to Shahid too. In an interview, Shahid bluntly put out that his religion was “Screw
and let’s screw,” and that his wish was “to live in Manhattan, in San Francisco, in Copenhagen,
in Amsterdam, in Paris, in Rome, in New Delhi, in Bombay.” Cosmopolitanism was a natural
by-product of this culture, and the Fabian-socialist tenor of the mid-twentieth-century Britain
further ensured a cultivation of this worldview in the elite natives who looked up to the colo-
nial master as a model of civilization and progressiveness. Shahid himself belonged to this elite.1
Equipped thus with a cosmopolitan, secular worldview, they transferred the cultural capital to
Shahid who is completely at ease with a worldview that can fuse the ghazal singer Begum Akhter
with the mystic poet Lal Ded, Hindu temples with Muslim shrines. In an interview, Shahid explained:
Religion was never a big issue in our house. . . . But if somebody asked me what I was,
I would just say, ‘I’m a Muslim’ because that was in my name and it was just natural to
say it. It implied no more than that.
(Ali 1990)
The attachment to shrines and temples is therefore not just an individual choice, but one deeply
determined by class and culture of that class which cultivated such an outlook to consolidate
their difference from the plebeian population. This does not suggest that only the elite class
was attached to shrines, but rather that the class derives significant cultural wealth and political
power by consolidating and utilizing their power over the shrines. Shahid’s poetry, therefore,
abounds with this allusion to cultural capital accumulation. The lament on the destruction of
the shrine of Sheikh Noor-ud-din at Chaar e Shareef is particularly evocative in his poem “I
Dream I am the Only Passenger on Flight 423 to Srinagar”:
It’s 1994: ARMY LAYS SIEGE TO SHRINE,

. . .
Was it thus
that Lal Ded – robed in the brilliant green
of Paradise – rose from her ashes, fabulous
190
. . .
She blessed her true heir: Sheikh Noor-ud-Din.
He still speaks through five centuries of poets.
I hear his voice: “Fire moves on its quick knees –
through Chrar-e-Sharif – toward my shrine. Know it’s
. . .
We begin
our descent. “All threads must be untied
before springtime. Ask all – Muslim and Brahmin –
if their wish came true?” He appears beside
me, cloaked in black: “Alas! Death has bent my back.
It is too late for threads at Chrar-e-Sharif.” (Ali 2009: 186)
This poem has been read as proof of Shahid’s syncretic outlook that combines Lala Ded, the
mystic Shaivite poet renowned for her vyakhs, greatly revered by Kashmiri Hindus; Sheikh
Noor-ud-din, saint and poet renowned for his Shrukhs; and the missionary scholar Syed
Mir Ali Hamdani, greatly revered by all. This syncretism loosely defined as “Kashmiriyat”
or “Kashmiri sufism,” both used interchangeably, is often used as a binary to contrast the
fundamentalist and rigid “wahhabism” supposed to have enveloped Kashmir post-1990s.
Shahid is, therefore, considered to be the torchbearer of the inclusive and pluralistic variety
of religion. In the poem, Shahid is read as evoking an alternate and more fluid node of
religion that is more inclusive and multicultural in its essence. Therefore, Ananya Jahanara
Kabir (2009: 141) argues “Shahid turns away from mosques and their associations of a pub-
lic, regulated Islam of congregations and prayers in favor of shrines of Kashmiri Sufi saints
associated with more vernacular and individual forms of devotion.” While Shahid’s belief in
a syncretic and pluralistic culture is in terms of his personal practice, and his poetry is well
documented, that this belief in such syncretism is a function of Shahid’s class consciousness
is often overlooked.
Shahid’s lament for the demise of this multicultural and syncretic Islam only underscores the
immense political role these shrines played in the history of Kashmir from the time of sultans.
It demands an investigation into the historical role of these shrines as centers from which power
and legitimacy accrue to parties competing for it. The significance attached by Shahid to the
shrines must be examined in this historical context, as deeply embedded in his class memory,
not just as a common feature of pluralistic south Asian religious imageries. Zutshi (2017: 52)
writes:
Urban shrines, particularly those of Srinagar have played an important role in Kashmiri
society and political culture as arbiters of Kashmiri Muslim community identities. . . .
Along with other major shrines, the Khanqah came to exercise a symbolic power over
the city, its inhabitant and its sacred past, and as a result became the centre of rival
Kashmiri noble groups and their sufi supporters and detractors. Since the shrine was a
means to assert both political and religious legitimacy, these groups attempted to gain
control over its management, and through it the whole Muslim community itself.
This religo-political nexus unsurprisingly achieved greater significance in the late nineteenth
century, when the anti-colonial sentiment pervaded the subcontinent. Sheikh Abdullah was
among the first to employ the shrines to gain political advantage. Mridu Rai (2004: 267) notes
Sheikh Abdullah rose to prominence only after allying himself with the shrines and approval of
191
Huzaifa Pandit
the other Mirwaiz – the Mirwaiz of the Sheikh Hamdan shrine at Khanqah as the shrine had a
massive following in Kashmir.
Similarly, his canvassing for the construction of shrine of Hazratbal greatly cemented his
position as the tallest leader of the state. After 1947, the shrines starting from the relic movement
have evolved as pro-state spaces controlled and employed by the state as true inheritors of the
often overstated syncretic, and non-political Islam as counter to the political secessionist Muslim
identity often associated generically with Wahhabism. These shrines are directly administered
by the state under the Jammu and Kashmir, Muslim Wakf Act, 1959, and the immense revenue
generated by these shrines is directly split between the government and the shrine caretakers
who claim succession from the saint interned/revered in the shrine. The political symbolism
of the shrines is not lost upon the state or political leadership on both sides of the spectrum –
the mainstream and separatist. Both are often seen publicly offering ceremonial namaz like
Eid Namaz at the shrines like Hazratbal or Syed Sahab Sonwar. Shahid’s foregrounding of the
shrines, therefore, only points out that the notion of syncretism is rooted deeply in the politics
of legitimacy of the state, and contestation of that power. His preference toward the syncretic
variety is a rearticulating of this symbolic power and immense cultural capital that flows directly
from it. It is the articulation of a historical memory, of a childhood ingratiation into this hier-
archy wherein the shrine offers a “secular” and “fluid” belief system that itself is the function
of a particular class consciousness. The evoking of shrines is a direct reference to that old world
frozen in Shahid’s immigrant memory where his class prided itself in its syncretism and inter-
mingling – a privilege unavailable to the plebeian class. This does not imply that syncretic belief
systems are only the prerogative of elite, but simply that the Nehruvian atheistic tenor neces-
sitated effacing of religion in public life in keeping with the Western binary of faith as private
and state as secular. However, this obsessive urge to embrace an expression of atheism was not
well embedded, and found expression in the following of shrines, and the subsequent pride in
a shared culture between Pandits and Muslims. On the ground level there were distinct cracks
between the Pandits and Muslims, where Pandits were always seen as pro-India and pro-state
and thus antagonist to the plebiscite-supporting majority. Besides, significant differences existed
where some Hindu spaces like the kitchen were off limits for Muslims. This co-existence was
accessible only to a certain class of Muslims, and by and large it was not a common factor
of lived experiences of non-elite classes. In other words, Shahid is articulating the privileged
milieu (a habitus) that determines him, and the anxiety at the loss of such syncretism also
betrays among other things an anxiety at the loss of this immense symbolic power that had been
the unchallenged possession of the Muslim elite. Shahid’s location in the diaspora implies his
account of Kashmir is marked not only by a factual representation of the crisis unfolding there,
but also undermined by an anxiety of losing the nation frozen in his immigrant imagination. In
“Tonight,” Ali (2009: 374) in an unguarded moment provides a clear glimpse of this longing:
Mughul ceilings, let your mirrored convexities

Multiply me at once under your spell tonight.
The exasperated cry for being enchanted by Mughal ceilings, at once a signature of old villas,
and a metaphor for refined taste is a sure marker of the nostalgia for the cultural capital. Seeking
them as a panacea against the harsh grating memory of the mirrors which reflect excesses and
disintegration, he seeks a multiplication, a strengthening rather than fragmentation to counter
the expelling from rupture’s road. The cry for a nostalgic restoration is undiluted here, and
provides a clear inkling of this trajectory in Shahid’s work.
192
Shahid’s poetry, especially The Country Without a Post Office, must be examined not only as
a linear and unambiguous representation of Indian atrocities on Kashmir. It must also be read
as resisting simplistic narratives of the relationship between contemporary history and the nos-
talgic melancholy for the erstwhile empire, the nodes of remembrances, and the specificities of
this memory, and finally the relationship between memory and the subject. The contradictions,
re-articulations, and modernist bricolage must all be seen as a way of unholding, a mirroring of
community trauma, witness and meanings of living in a contested history. The poems in their
multitude of forms, fractures, allusions, and contexts foreground the failure to mean, rather than
meanings and therefore the limits of meaning. A significant hazard of occupation is its endeavor to
produce meanings from striated space that is “a gridded, linear, metric, optic, state space” carved
from “government institutions, fixed concepts and essentialised spaces” (Ashcroft 2005: 12).
Shahid’s poetry challenges these conventions by resisting the chronologies, and oppressive dis-
cursive spaces by making poetry the vehicle of potentiality and possibility rather than a static space
of mourning. Although this mourning is determined by a deep desire for decolonization, yet
paradoxically it also yearns for some continuum of the cultural capital amassed from original colo-
nization, which manifests itself in new-old forms and spaces that articulate the different (sometimes
contradictory) longings at different times. Both these contradictory strands exist in a simultaneity in
his poetry, erasing and foregrounding each other, arguing that public memory and poetic testimony
must necessarily be guarded against generic, binarizing, and hegemonic epochs. Rather, the con-
tradictions and fractures of Shahid’s poetry are a reminder that narratives of nationhood – Kashmir
or India are not fixed, and natural facts that unfold in history due to some immanent eternal force.
The contestations and cleavages in Shahid’s poetry are a reminder both of his poetic genius
and the limitations of such genius. While Shahid has been read uncritically and in a celebratory
tone, it only reifies the potential of ideology to go for the simplest solutions. In such a solution,
the slightest criticism is seen as greatest sacrilege as the oppressed are sanctified and every aspect
of their actions are cherished as admirable. Reading his poet uncritically is akin to erasing the
nostalgic strain in his poetry that longs for restoration of colonial privilege. This strain contra-
dicts the testifying impulse in his poetry that can be read as a codified narrative of the trauma
of survivor as an instrument of reclaiming agency and power. In seeking to understand this
cleavage in Shahid, his poetry can be read as resisting the binarizing and totalizing approach to
imagining the nation of Kashmir and draws forth the necessity of remapping Kashmiri identity
in historical space and time. The articulation of contradictory identities, as evoked by Shahid,
only disturb the narrative of national(ist) identities, and (post/colonial) utopias by foreground-
ing local pasts and scrambled futures. The Country Without a Post Office, specifically, must be seen
as resistance to this teleological discourse of a singular national identity – Kashmiri or Indian.
Rather it must necessarily be seen as fragmented, plural, and riven by contradictions, in order
for it to be truly illustrative of the ground realities.
Note
1 Shahid’s ancestor, Agha Syed Hussein, was the first matriculate from Kashmir in 1894 and was educated
at top colleges, Aitchison and Mayo colleges, both colonial educational institutions. His daughter,
Begum Zaffar Ali, was the grandmother of Shahid and the first Kashmiri matriculate of the Valley in
1930. With the Maharaja’s encouragement, she enrolled in Lady Mclegon College, Lahore where she
graduated in Domestic Science and liberal arts. Later she joined the state government as a teacher and
eventually became the Inspector of Schools in Kashmiri. Shahid’s father, Agha Ashraf Ali, went on a
Fulbright Scholarship to the United States in 1960 where he received the first PhD at the Ball State
University in Muncie, Indiana, in 1964 (Rizvi and Qizilbash 2017).
193
Huzaifa Pandit
Works Cited
Ali, Agha Shahid. 2009. The Veiled Suite. Gurgaon: Penguin India.
Ali, Agha Shahid Interview by Stacy Chase. 1990. “Agha Shahid Ali: The Lost Interview.” The Cafe Review,
March 3–4. www.thecafereview.com/spring-2011-interview-agha-shahid-ali-the-lost-interview/.
Arsilan. 2018. “The Case against Caste Discrimination among Kashmiri Muslims.” Wande, March 17.
Retrieved April 1, 2022, from https://www.wandemag.com/case-discrimination-kashmiri-muslims/.
Ashcroft, Bill. 2005. “Globalisation, The Transnation and Utopia.” In Narrating the (Trans)nation: The Dia-
lectics of Culture and Identity, edited by Krishna Sen and Sudeshna Chakravarti, 1–24. Kolkata: Das-
Gupta & Co.
Associated Press. 1990. “Cleric Killed; 30 Mourners Slain in India: Kashmir: Troops Open Fire on 100,000
Muslims Carrying Assassinated Religious Leader’s Body.” Los Angeles Times, May 21.
Césaire, Aimé. 1990. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 1946–82. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette
Smith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2017. “The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn.” In Mad Heart Be
Brave- Essays on Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, edited by Kazim Ali, 199–214. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Jaleel, Muzamil. 2016. “A Prisoner’s Letter to a Lover Begins: ‘These Words May Never Reach You.’ ”
Indian Express, March 6.
Kabir, Ananya Jahaan. 2009. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Kapoor, Suneera and Shrawan Singh. 2005. “Gandhi and Nehru on Religion.” The Indian Journal of Political
Science 66(3): 503–514.
Kaul, Suvir. 2016. “The Witness of Poetry.” In Of Gardens and Graves, Second edition, 135–161. Gurgaon:
Three Essays Collective.
Lepeska, David. 2020. “The Life and Times of Agha Ashraf Ali.” August 8, originally published in
2006. Retrieved April 1, 2022, from Kashmir Observer: https://kashmirobserver.net/2020/08/08/
the-life-and-times-of-agha-ashraf-ali/.
Mahmood, A. and M. M. Mehta. 2017. “Literary Language in the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali.” International
Journal on Arts, Management and Humanities 6(2): 189–192.
Mohan, Jag. 1975. “Jawaharlal Nehru and his Socialism.” India International Centre Quarterly 2(3): 183–192.
Moscaliuc, Mihaela. 2017. “Palimpestic Interextualities in ‘A Lost Memory of Delhi’ and ‘The Last Saf-
fron.’ ” In Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, edited by Kazim Ali, 156–163.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Nehru, Jawahar Lal. 2007. Nehru’s India: Select Speeches. Edited by Mushirul Hassan. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Niranjana, Tejaswani. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley:
Pandit, Huzaifa. 2015. “Of Gardens and Graves by Suvir Kaul – A Review.” The Luxembourg Review,
August 17.
PTI. 2020. “IIT-Kanpur Constitutes Panel to Decide if Ahmed Faiz’s poem ‘Hum Dekhenge’ Hurts
Hindu Sentiment.” New Indian Express, January 2.
Rai, Mridu. 2004. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir. Ranikhet: Per-
manent Black.
Rizvi, Syed Iliyas Ali and Agha Faisal Ali Qizilbash. 2017. “Kandhar’s Qizilbash.” Kashmir Life 35(9):
(November 30). https://kashmirlife.net/kandahars-qizilbash-issue-35-vol-09–157293/.
Shabir, Syed Humayoun. 2013. Published in Cultural Plurality and Revival: A Study of the Poetry of Agha
Shahid Ali Ph.D. Dissertation, Aligarh Muslim University.
Zutshi, C. 2012. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. New Delhi:
Orient Blackswan.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2017. “Contesting Urban Space: Shrine Culture and the Discourse on Kashmiri
Muslim Identities and Protest in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century.” In Kashmir: His-
tory, Politics, Representation, edited by Chitralekha Zutshi, 51–69. London: Cambridge University Press.
194
14
MIXING GENRE, MAKING
TRUTH CLAIMS
Human Rights Storytelling in Arundhati Roy’s
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Rakhshan Rizwan
Introduction
Published nearly two decades after the Booker award–winning The God of Small Things (1997),
Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) has been lauded as the “most awaited
fiction of the past two decades” (“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Released” 2017). This
novel carries generous traces of Roy’s political activism; it tackles the fraught and contentious
issue of Kashmir and to this end, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (abbreviated as “The Minis-
try” in this chapter) is thematically connected to her nonfictional writings.
The discourse on Kashmir has mostly been dominated by Indian and Pakistani binaristic national
narratives. According to the Indian national narrative, Kashmir is ‘atoot ang’ which means a
fundamental, unassailable, indivisible, and unbreakable part of the Indian geo-body (Kaul 2011:
191). The atoot ang narrative privileges the signing of the Instrument of Accession by Maharaja
Hari Singh, the Dogra ruler of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and considers
this as the legal precept for laying forceful claim to Kashmir (Dasgupta 2018). As per the Pakistani
narrative, Kashmir is Pakistan’s “shah rag,” or jugular vein, which means that it is the ideological
lifeline that sustains the republic and lends credence to the Two-Nation Theory, the principal by
which Pakistan was formed. Kashmir as Pakistan’s “shah rag” or its jugular vein, is a metaphor
that implies a similar physical closeness and codependence as that of the unbreakable cartographic
body of the Indian nation. A third narrative presents a liberal-benevolent portrait of Kashmiris as
victims of human rights violations. While this narrative commendably takes to task the other two
narratives and exposes the Indian state’s human rights excesses in the Valley of Kashmir, it at times
falls into the trap of perpetuating a limited repertoire of representations of Kashmir.
Arundhati Roy has historically been a powerful proponent of the Kashmiri cause. In 2010, her
remark that Kashmir was not an integral part of India (atoot ang), a political position in direct con-
tradiction to India’s long-standing posturing on the region, resulted in her being threatened with
sedition charges by India’s home ministry (Chamberlain 2010). The chapter focuses on the use of
multiple genres within Roy’s postmodern text, particularly the human rights report, the testimony
and the magical realistic novel, to forward a critique of the limitations of the conventional human
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-18 195

Rakhshan Rizwan
rights narrative and to contrast it with fictional modes of narration that function differently. While
she is cautious to not disavow these forms, highlighting their political import and their efficacy in
bringing about justice, she demonstrates how literary forms can be used to fill in critical gaps in
both narrative-making and representation that are found in human rights genres.
This chapter first examines the significance of genre within the field of “Human Rights
and Literature.” Following this, it delves into the specific ways in which Roy’s novel critiques
traditional human rights genres such as the human rights report, and testimony, exposing their
malleability, and highlighting how the literary novel can be instrumental in filling in and com-
pensating for many of the semantic absences that can be found in these generic forms. Lastly, it
analyzes the deployment of a magical realistic aesthetic in her novel, to draw attention to a form
of human rights advocacy through literature, which is not reliant on a stable victim/perpetrator
binary but still manages to offer a rich exposition of the Indian occupation in Kashmir.
Human Rights and Literary Genre

Michael Ignatieff (2002) states that human rights are the “dominant moral vocabulary in foreign
affairs” in the post–Cold War world. According to Pramod K. Nayar (2016), narratives in the field
of rights can be defined as “literary texts where the human subject’s social ontology is eroded,
and which therefore implicitly demonstrate how the subject can only develop and grow in condi-
tions that sustain life” (xiii). John Beverley (1989: 13–14) famously identified the testimonio as
the generic vehicle through which marginalized people tell their stories, labelling it a “novel or
novella-length narrative” in which the narrator is the “real witness or protagonist of the events.”
Joseph Slaughter (2009: 25) argued that, among the different genres of literature, the novel,
particularly, the Bildungsroman, has been useful in articulating and advocating for the rights of
human beings. For this reason, he referred to the Bildungsroman as the “novelistic wing of human
rights . . . that disseminates its norms.” This genre is particularly effective in the way it “inverts the
affirmative rights claim of the idealist genre by publicizing the discrepancy between the rhetoric
of liberty, equality and fraternity and the inegalitarian social formations and relations in which
that rhetoric is put into practice” (ibid.: 182). In my own work elsewhere, I posit that Kashmiri
novels use human rights discourses for the purposes of advocacy but deploy a distinctive language
of pleasure rather than of physical pain to represent the state of having and losing rights (Rizwan
2020: 91). I identify the bildungsroman as a dominant generic form, which is used to emplot the
coming of age of the protagonist, within the canon of Anglophone Kashmiri writing (53).
Crystal Parikh (2018: 2) in Writing Human Rights focuses on human rights through the “ethi-
cal deliberations staged in narratives authored by contemporary American writers of color,”
probing the forms of subjectivities and communities imagined in this strain of minor literature.
In line with Slaughter, she too elevates the bildungsroman as a transnationally mobile human
rights form that is “endlessly transposable across the globe” and of special relevance to American
writers of color insofar as it is deployed by them to produce the figure of the subject of human
rights (ibid.: 21–22). In recent scholarship, James Dawes (2018: 22) identifies the US novel of
human rights as a genre category that “tells myriad stories” but typically follows “two different
kinds of plots: the justice plot or the escape plot.” The justice plot, he posits, is related to the
detective novel and involves “a narrative of return” in which a human rights atrocity occurs
and is subsequently investigated (ibid.: 22–23). On the other hand, the escape plot looks to the
picaresque and features a “narrative of departure” in which incremental human rights violations
ultimately lead to flight from the damning situation (ibid.: 22–23). The Ministry conforms to
the justice plot insofar as its protagonist, Tilo, mounts an investigation and gathers evidence
196
Mixing Genre, Making Truth Claims
following the committing of a human rights atrocity, and the exoneration of the perpetrator
shortly afterwards. Roy’s novel is divided into two parts, with each part revolving around a dif-
ferent marginalized protagonist. The first part chronicles the story of Tilo, a seemingly casteless
architect and human rights fact-finder, and the other of Anjum, a Muslim transgender charac-
ter who lives in a Delhi graveyard where she founds Jannat Guest House, a lodging for social
pariahs, untouchables, vagrants, and outcasts. The two parts of the novel are not insular and
self-contained, as both Anjum and Tilo meet each other at specific points of the plot. However,
I will take the second part of the novel as my primary focus; it traces Tilo’s self-development
and bildung as a South Indian, Syrian Christian woman who is born out of wedlock in Kerala
and the product of her mother’s illicit love affair with an untouchable subject.
The Human Rights Report

Tilo, because of her peculiar and disadvantaged circumstances, is perceived by her university
friends as a person without a “past, a family, a community, a people, or even a home” (Roy
2017: 155). Nevertheless, she learns to navigate the precarity of her situation with a combi-
nation of self-reliance, eccentricity, and an endearing charm. During her third year at Delhi
university, Tilo participates in a theatrical production of Norman, Is That You?, a play written by
the American playwrights Ron Clark and Sam Bobrick in 1970. Here, she meets her co-actors,
Naga, Musa, and Biplab and the four of them become inseparable. After graduating, their fates
once again intersect in Kashmir. Naga, a vocal social justice activist, voraciously supports the
politics of the Radical Left and pursues journalism. He is eventually posted to Srinagar, the
summer capital of Kashmir, where he works as the Kashmir correspondent for a prominent
Indian newspaper. Meanwhile, Biplab Dasgupta is appointed the deputy station head of the
Intelligence Bureau and transferred to Srinagar during the same time Naga is stationed there as
a local correspondent. Musa Yeswi, a Kashmiri member of their group who is closest to Tilo out
of the three of them, also returns to Kashmir following the culmination of his university educa-
tion, marries a Kashmiri woman named Arifa and eventually fathers a baby girl. Their marital
bliss is short-lived; both Arifa Yeswi and her infant child Miss Jebeen are shot by Indian soldiers
while watching a funeral procession from the verandah of their home. Following this, Musa
reinvents himself as Commander Gulrez, a feared Kashmiri guerrilla fighter and leader of the
Hizb-ul-Mujahidden, a well-known militant outfit operating in the Valley. He also reconnects
with Tilo, his former romantic partner, and they begin amassing evidentiary materials related to
human rights atrocities committed by the Indian armed forces in the Valley of Kashmir.
I posit that Tilo’s human rights fact-finding is the thematic core of Roy’s novel. Evidence for
the significance of human rights as an analytical framework for the text is present in The Ministry
itself which uses human rights vocabulary liberally, highlighting its usefulness as an ethical tool
in bringing atrocities to light, and advocating for the rights of the marginalized while simultane-
ously flagging its weaknesses. Tilo moves to Delhi where she contacts Biplab and requests to use
the room he is subletting for her activities as a “freelance illustrator and graphic designer,” a foil
for her actual work as a human rights worker (187). During her tenancy, Biplab wanders into
her room and discovers her disorderly and self-managed archive of “photographs (numbered,
captioned) pinned on noticeboards . . . towers of documents stacked neatly on the floor, and
in labelled Post-its stuck on bookshelves” (189). Despite, the apparent messiness of evidentiary
files and documents, there is a method to the madness: the photographs are titled and numbered
and Post-it notes are strategically placed to label and organize the data. Vivid representations of
Tilo’s occupation suggest that she works as a lay human rights fact-finder attempting to com-
pile, caption and report the evidence that she had either discovered and collected herself or that
197
Rakhshan Rizwan
which has come into her possession through her former lover, the architect-turned-militant,
Musa. In collecting and protecting this personal debris, she begins to “unravel” the mysteries
not only of her relationship with Musa but also of the conflict and military occupation present
in Kashmir (270). The novel affirms and recognizes the political import of her work, depicting
the process of fact-finding in the following words:
Tilo had been a weird, part-time stenographer to a full-time military occupation . . .

she took odd pictures. She wrote strange things down. She collected scraps of stories
and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. . . . She was not writ-
ing for a newspaper or magazine, she was not writing a book or making a film. She
paid no attention to things that most people would have considered important. Over
the years, her peculiar, ragged archive grew peculiarly dangerous. It was an archive
of recoveries, not from a flood, but from another kind of disaster. . . [she] ordered it
according to some elaborate logic of her own that she intuited but did not understand.
(270)
Dudai (2006: 783) writes that “the human rights movement has given us a new vocabulary,
new standards, new mechanisms and a new literary form: the human rights report.” The generic
format of the human rights report involves “fact-finding,” where the organization documents
various factual aspects of a practice which it considers to be a “human rights violation” (ibid.:
783–784). Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey (2016: 3) argue that fact-finding “is at the heart of
human rights advocacy. . . . In recent years, there has been a huge increase in the number and
variety of fact-finding mechanisms established.” Human rights fact-finding is typically defined
as an “in situ or on-the-ground type activity that involves documenting or investigating abuses
by speaking with witnesses . . . inspecting or monitoring the scene of any violations, [and] col-
lecting physical and documentary evidence” (ibid.: 9). In other words, fact-finders may use both
“quantitative and qualitative methods . . . to ‘triangulate’ accurate findings” (Satterthwaite and
Simeone 2016: 345). Qualitative data is defined as testimonies of victims, witnesses, survivors,
and government officials and is collected in the context of personal interviews or focus groups
(ibid.: 338–339). In The Ministry, qualitative data, including interviews and testimonies, consti-
tutes the primary form of evidentiary material and these testimonies are collected and reported
by Tilo in the course of her investigative work in Kashmir or are part of ongoing and completed
official investigations contained in case files that Musa entrusts to her care.
Fact-finders compile their human rights findings into reports. According to the United Nations
Manual on Human Rights Reporting, a human rights report should have a factual and an analytical
component with the factual component providing “an accurate account of the facts based on
the information gathered during the monitoring activity” (United Nations Office of the High
Commissioner on Human Rights 2011: 7). The argumentative thrust of a human rights report
therefore appears to derive from its unrestricted access to the uncontested and incontrovertible
“truth,” which is represented using forms of literary realism in an idiom that is free of embellish-
ment, symbolism, and metaphor. The language that human rights practitioners are required to
use is meant to be “simple and neutral language, without subjective elements, jargon or unneces-
sary adjectives” (ibid.: 5). Facts surrounding the human rights atrocity, as per the UN manual, are
required to be presented in the form of a singular “narrative of facts” and the questions “Who
did what to whom? When? Where? How? Why?” are to be answered by the human rights
officer. This narrative of facts is typically accompanied by “an analysis of the responsibilities of
the alleged perpetrators, whether institutions or individuals” (ibid.: 7).
198
Roy includes a series of short and evocative vignettes, which extend to a few paragraphs,
but which are powerful narrative fragments that testify to the heterogeneity and multiplicity of
experiences of oppression and atrocity as experienced by different Kashmiri subjects. The stories
and testimonies are presented as having been collected and compiled by the lay human rights
fact-finder, Tilo. The vignettes are contained in Tilo’s diary which bears the title, The Reader’s
Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children; the title functions as a
decoy to not attract the suspicion of anyone who happens to discover this incriminating docu-
ment. One of the vignettes titled, The Old Man and His Sons, relates the unlawful abduction and
detention of the father of a militant, Aziz Ganai, and mimics the form and structure of a human
rights report as described by the United Nations Manual:
When Manzoor Ahmed Ganai became a militant, soldiers went to his home and
picked up his father, the handsome always dapper Aziz Ganai. . . . On the day Man-
zoor Ahmed Ganai was killed, smiling soldiers opened the door of his father’s cell.
“Jenaab, you wanted Azadi? Mubarak ho aapko. Congratulations! Today your wish
had come true. Your freedom has come.” . . . The people of the village cried more
for the shambling wreck who came running through the orchard in rags with wild
eyes . . . than they did for the boy who had been murdered.
Q1: Why did the villagers cry more for the shambling wreck?
Q2: Why did the wreck shamble? (Roy 2017: 271)
The first part of the vignette is a testimony collected within the course of Tilo’s fact-finding
mission in Kashmir, which enables the designation of victims and perpetrators. Culpability
is clearly attributed to the Indian soldiers who extrajudicially murder Manzoor Ganai, and
the former militant and his father are identified as the victims. The metafictional questions
that follow, both beginning with the “Why” refrain, intertextually reference a traditional
human rights report, by echoing the requirements of the UN Manual to form a narrative
of facts. Moreover, the questions posed expand the ambit of a narrative of facts beyond
the assignment of victim and perpetrator by excavating the heightened emotional pain of
the subjects involved – Aziz Ganai and the mourning villagers. The novel uses evocative
images of Aziz’s “wild eyes” and his transformation into a “shambling wreck” to power-
fully capture his physical and psychic devastation at the loss of his son. Roy includes finely
observed details surrounding the human rights atrocity, which while not directly relating to
the incident itself, are responsible for the victim’s heightened agony. She considers these an
essential component of the truth-claim being articulated by the vignette. The soldiers do
not merely murder Ganai’s son, but they also carry his corporeal remains as war booty to
his house, while jeering at the Kashmiri demand for azaadi. Many of the vignettes in Roy’s
novel transcend representations of victims, bystanders and perpetrators, containing potent
but seemingly absurd, or unanswerable questions at the end whose function, it would appear,
is to probe the visceral, affective, often unrepresentable core of a human rights crime and
to add layers of emotional noise to the cut and dry findings that characterize a traditional
human rights report. The opening out of Roy’s literary narrative through vignettes and
metafictional questions in Roy’s novel is meant to involve the implied reader in generating
the under-emphasized affective core of the human rights atrocity and to draw attention to
the uniqueness of each victim of the occupation and to probe the fact of emotional pain
which underlies each situation.
199
Rakhshan Rizwan
Testimony
While adumbrating on the ethical work that human rights workers perform within Kashmir,
the novel remains cognizant of the possibility of the hijacking of human rights discourse by
perpetrators. The Ministry explicates on the ability of human rights activists, such as Tilo
to speak truth to power and to take a repressive state to task for its atrocities but simultane-
ously depicts the limitations of human rights discourse to do the same. Nowhere does this
dichotomy come to the fore as effectively as in Roy’s fictionalized representation of a real
incident: the murder of a prominent Kashmiri human rights lawyer, Jalil Andrabi, by Major
Avtar Singh. In March 1996, Singh kidnapped and brutally tortured Andrabi, and a few days
afterwards his body was discovered in the Jhelum River (Ganai 2012). Despite the issuance of
arrest warrants and requests to impound his passport, Amrik Singh fled to the United States
with the assistance of the Indian state (ibid.). In 2012, Singh was charged for the murder
of his wife and children and taken into custody by the police (ibid.). In Roy’s novel, Major
Amrik Singh is described as a notorious member of the Indian army who is implicated in
the abduction and extrajudicial murder of a “well-known lawyer and human rights activist,”
Jalib Qadiri (Roy 2017: 175). The narrator, Biplab, describes Qadri as a “nuisance, a brash,
abrasive man who died not knowing the meaning of nuance” and who, on the night he is
apprehended by Amrik Singh, is scheduled to testify at an “international human rights con-
ference” (ibid.: 175).
After being involved in his extrajudicial murder, Amrik Singh files for asylum in the United
States on the grounds that his life is endangered in India and he is a victim of police corrup-
tion and extortion and a target of Islamic militants. In addition to testimonies contained within
vignettes, The Ministry also contains standalone testimonies that are generated as part of Amrik
and his wife’s psychological evaluations. A testimony is a human rights form that can be defined
as a “declaration of personal experience in the absence of that experience” which may serve as a
“tool for uncovering hidden truths” (Park-Fuller 2000: 21). Testimonies are one of the “trade-
marks” and crucial defining features of the human rights report (Dudai 2006: 790). They are
frequently used by NGOs and human rights workers to provide the reader with subjective and
highly personalized language to strike an emotional chord with them and let them hear the
unmediated and unfiltered “voice” of the victim (ibid.: 790). Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
(1991: 5) define a testimony as a “performative speech act” and to testify as a “vow to tell, to
promise, and produce one’s own speech as material evidence of truth.” At the same time, they
warn that a testimony cannot be viewed as “a totalizable account of . . . events” because in a
testimony, language itself is “in trial” (ibid.: 5).
In the novelistic retelling of the story, his wife, Loveleen, falsely testifies to being tortured
by the local police in Kashmir, after her husband is implicated in the murder of a human rights
activist:
In 1995 a human rights lawyer by the name of Jalib Qadri was kidnapped and killed
and my husband was blamed by the local police and we felt that Muslims were fram-
ing him. . . . One policeman took my son. They stole all my jewelry. All the while
they kicked and beat me and said, “This is the family of Amrik Singh who killed
our leader.” In the police headquarters they tied me to a wood plank and kicked and
slapped and beat me. They beat me on my head with a rubber plank. They told me,
“We will make you a mad vegetable for the rest of your life.” A man with metal shoes
kicked and crushed my chest and stomach. Then they rolled wooden poles down my
200
legs. Then they attached sticky things on my body and thumbs and gave me electric
shocks again and again.
(Roy 20 17: 199)
While the instability of language as a communicative medium is an issue that must be contended
with when collecting testimony, there is the additional possibility of recording and valorizing
false testimony, a potential pitfall of first-person witnessing that Roy’s novel highlights, by using
Amrik Singh and his wife’s testimony, as an example of a false witnessing of events that did
not take place. Amrik Singh and his wife hijack the language of human rights and Kashmiri
atrocity narratives to position themselves as victims rather than perpetrators of state-sanctioned
violence. Roy uses an actual incident to illustrate this point to place additional emphasis on and
foreground the real-life implications of the misuse of human rights language to exonerate per-
petrators of blame and further their cause. Loveleen appropriates her husband’s intimate knowl-
edge of the torture to create a believable and reliable narrative of oppression. “Verisimilitude
is everything,” Tilo comments laconically, “As for her detailed and knowledgeable account of
use torture, I hope her husband only tutored her in his techniques and didn’t actually use them
on her” (202). Employing realism to imitate accounts of torture in Kashmir, Loveleen is able to
convince the Dr. Ralph Bauer of the truthfulness of her testimony, leading him to identify them
as victims of torture and “indefinite periods of incarceration and separation” and recommend-
ing them for asylum (203). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2016) bring to light the problem
with the genre of the testimony, arguing that the “scandals and controversies that ensue from
allegations of false witnessing unsettle relations among witnesses, publishers, activists, and read-
ers, forcing us to confront the vulnerability of life writing and our attachments to its premise
of truth-telling” (591).
This vulnerability, expertly imagined in Roy’s novel, contests the reliance of the human
rights process on the genre of testimony, evincing the possibility of falsification and fabrication
of facts within first-person testimonial narratives. Commending Amrik and Loveleen on their
ability to exploit the testimony as a generic form which intrinsically mobilizes sympathy for the
witnessing subject, The Ministry summarizes the episode as follows:
They certainly knew how to go about their business, those two. How was poor old
Ralph Bauer, LCSW, to know that their story rang so true because it was true, except
that the victims and the perpetrators had swapped roles?
(Roy 2017: 203)
As mentioned earlier, the assignment of blame is an essential component of a narrative of facts

as described in a human rights report. Here, that narrative is reversed such that the perpetrator
disguises himself as a victim and exploits knowledge of human rights crimes he had committed
to achieve legal residence in the United States.
The casting of differently motivated political actors into the victim/oppressor binary format
is a standard practice in human rights advocacy which is reliant on the creation of “a poor, suf-
fering and ennobled saint” and an “evil monolithic powerful oppressor” to be persuasive and
effective (Hogan 2010: 241). The testimonial narratives of witnesses contain rights claims using
the “discourse of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ to enlist reader sympathy and call for international
intervention [and as such] they are situated within the contemporary politics of naming, sham-
ing, redress, and reconciliation” (Smith and Watson 2016: 599). Makau Mutua (2001: 201)
famously coined the metaphor of “savages-victims-saviors (SVS)” to describe the human rights
201
Rakhshan Rizwan
movement. According to him, “the grand narrative of human rights contains a subtext that
depicts an epochal contest pitting savages, on the one hand, against victims on the other” (ibid.:
201). Within the “human rights story . . . the state [is presented] as the classic savage, an ogre
forever bent on the consumption of humans,” whereas the victim is depicted as a “powerless,
helpless innocent” (ibid.: 202–203).
In The Ministry, the state is implicated through its agents. Amrik Singh wields the instru-
mentality of the state through the torture of deviant Kashmiri bodies. By positioning himself as
the victim of crimes he perpetrated, he removes the “aura of authenticity” that characterizes the
testimonial narrative (Smith and Watson 2016: 600). The narrative focalization in a testimony,
as we have observed, is usually on the victim experience and any unsavory representation of the
victim, or the emergence of doubts regarding their reliability, is bound to undermine the truth
claims articulated by them. The representation of this incident also exposes the sophisticated
machinations of the Indian state, which does not just function as the “classic savage” but turns its
military agents into victims and beneficiaries of asylum on humanitarian grounds in other coun-
tries. This is primarily done through legislation such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act
(AFSPA), which grants immunity to all “members of the security forces from prosecution from
alleged human rights violations” and as such, violates international human rights conventions
(Amnesty International). Roy’s novel question the effectiveness of human rights language and
processes in a space where the human rights of Kashmiris have been legislated out of existence.
The Ministry takes the critique a step further and pinpoints the irony of the Amrik Singh case
and the discrepant position of the state with respect to human rights norms. Despite the Indian
state’s sustained violation of human rights law through the retention of the draconian AFSPA,
state functionaries aided a perpetrator’s safe passage to the United States, through a reliance on
humanitarian clauses.
Magical Realism
Roy problematizes the pliability of human rights norms and criticizes the capacities of genres as
diverse as the human rights report and the testimony to describe the full breadth and complexity
of the occupation in Kashmir. This section explores her deployment of the conventions of the
magic realistic novel to portray the flood that ravaged the Valley of Kashmir in September 2014.
According to The Guardian, the flood came about in the aftermath of monsoon rains that caused
the levels of the Jhelum River to rise dramatically, and resulted in the deaths of 460 people and
the displacement of nearly a million (Burke and Boone 2014). In Srinagar alone, 200 people
were killed, and several residents were stranded in the upper portions of their houses, unable
to escape (Burke and Boone 2014). Roy uses magical realism to describe the flood that inun-
dated Kashmir in 2014. In a recent interview published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, she
vehemently dismisses the classification of her novel as magical realism, stating that turning the
realism of her lived experiences into “a genre of literature is to deny our reality in some ways”
(Nguyen 2018). However, while her novel on the whole cannot be classified as a magical real-
ist text, it has recurring magical realistic elements. At its heart, magical realism is defined as a
combination of “realism and the fantastic in such a way that magical elements grow organically
out of the reality portrayed” (Faris 1995: 163). The genre is considered synonymous with the
works of the writers, Marquez, Borges, and Allende and comes across in their depiction of rural
South America (Bruso 2012: 54). Oftentimes, South American magical realist texts were used
to mount a critique of brutal military regimes. For instance, Allende in The House of the Spirits
heavily criticizes Pinochet’s inhumane military dictatorship, and through the magical realistic
202
aesthetic, resuscitates the dead, and brings them back as ghosts such that they may be able to
testify to atrocity and memorialize countless others who fell victims to the regime (Hart 2003:
119).
In a similar vein, I posit that Roy deploys certain conventions of the magical realistic novel
toward on a limited scale to push the limits of human rights discourse, and to expose the con-
tradictions of the Indian neo-colonial military occupation of the Valley of Kashmir, as demon-
strated in this passage:
A drowned city was a spectacle. A drowned civil war was a phenomenon. The army
performed stunning helicopter rescues for TV crews. In live round-the-clock bul-
letins news anchors marveled at how much brave Indian soldiers were doing for
ungrateful, surly Kashmiris who did not really deserve to be rescued. When the flood
receded, it left behind and uninhabitable city, encased in mud. Shops full of mud,
houses full of mud, banks full of mud, refrigerators, cupboards and bookshelves full
of mud. . . . During the weeks the flood lasted, Tilo had no news of Musa. She did
not even know whether he was in Kashmir or not . . . On those nights, while she
waited for news of him, she put herself to sleep with heavy doses of sleeping pills,
but during the day while she was wide awake, she dreamed of the flood. Of rain and
rushing water, dense with coils of razor wire masquerading as weeds. The fish were
machine guns with fins and barrels that ruddered through the swift current like mer-
maids’ tails, so you could not tell who they were really pointed at, and who would die
when they were fired. Soldiers and militants grappled with each other underwater,
in slow motion, like in the old James Bonds films. . . . Cats, dogs, yaks, and chickens
swam around in circles. Affidavits, interrogation transcripts and army press releases
folded themselves into paper boats and rowed themselves to safety. Politicians and TV
anchors, both men and women, from the Valley as well as mainland, went prancing
past in sequined bathing suits, like a chorus line of seahorses, executing beautifully
choreographed aqua-ballet routines, diving, surfacing, twirling, pointing their toes,
happy in the debris-filled water, smiling broadly, their teeth glimmering like barbed
wire in the sun.
(Roy 2017: 265)
Here, the representations of the destruction caused by the flooding are juxtaposed against
dream-like elements in the form of fantastical re-imaginings of politicians, militants and soldiers,
the chief players in the political tableau of Kashmir. Roy uses magical realism to satirize the per-
formative and rehearsed quality with which agents on the ground conduct themselves; soldiers
display faux bravado, performing “stunning helicopter rescues” for the television crews, while
media personnel and political personalities, disingenuous and disconnected from the misery on
the ground, swim in floodwaters wearing sequined and ornate costumes, enabling the morbid
commodification of crisis. There is a sense of harmony and constructed unity in the depiction
of different political actors in the Valley “grappling” with each other in the floodwaters. The
image of the flood also works to unglue the different components that constitute Kashmir as a
pastoral but heavily militarized and violent space: militants and soldiers are no longer perpetra-
tors of state and anti-state violence, positioned at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but
are in fact performers playing their part in the tableau and swimming underwater like villains
from a Bond movie in which ordinary Kashmiris are collateral. The waters of the flood function
metaphorically insofar as they are instrumental in unmooring and disarticulating the different
203
Rakhshan Rizwan
components and actors in Kashmir – the soldiers, militants, media personnel, and politicians –
from their dominant contexts. These subjects are integral to any representation of atrocity in
Kashmir and in The Ministry are re-mapped using the genre of the magical realistic novel, such
that the that the relationships between different political agents and their relationship to the
territory of Kashmir are left purposefully tenuous and vague, open to subversive interpretation
and renegotiation. As such, the magical realistic aesthetic deployed here scrambles the narrative
codes of the standard human rights story, which has an identifiable victim and a perpetrator, and
a clearly laid out narrative of facts. The scrambling of codes is meant to expose the farcical reality
of military occupation in Kashmir, where oppressors allegedly double as saviors of the people
of the Valley, and this covert discursive cover-up of their crimes is done through an expansive
propaganda machinery.
The coverage of the flood in 2014 was an especially illustrative example of this, with The
Times of India lauding the Indian army’s relief efforts and announcing its conversion from an
occupier to a “humanitarian agency” devoted to rescuing Kashmiris in a bid to “win the hearts
and minds of the local populace” (Pandit 2014). Supplemented with photographs of the Indian
military repairing bridges broken by the flash floods in Poonch and in Jammu, such represen-
tations are at the core of the media whitewashing of the role of the army in the region, and
central to Roy’s incisive critique in which television personnel are described as “a chorus line of
seahorses.” This dual positioning of Indian soldiers as both saviors and perpetrators of violence
against Kashmiris, in Roy’s text, also unmasks the Indian government’s claim to be functioning
as “protectors” of the people. The saving of people who have been deemed expendable threats
in the past only to have them be legitimate targets of state violence in the future exposes fun-
damental contradictions in the military occupation of Kashmir.
Roy, in effect, overcomes what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, refers to as the “danger of
a single story.” Adichie posits that the “single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with
stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story
become the only story” (Adichie 2009). In the preceding passage for instance, the “truth” being
represented relates to the absurdity and moral quandary of Indian soldiers who police and surveil
Kashmiri bodies, fatally shooting them at them at the slightest provocation, and yet rescue those
same Kashmiris from the ravages of the flood, only to have them dutifully return to their life of
servitude under the occupation. This rendition is, in effect, a larger commentary on the Indian
neo-colonial project in the Valley of Kashmir, in which Kashmir and Kashmiris are claimed as
part of the geo-body of the Indian nation, and labelled an indivisible part of the nation, but also
subjected to the worst human rights excesses to keep them within the ranks of loyal citizenry.
The satirical juxtaposition of realistic and fantastical elements in portrayals of the flood serves to
drive home the illogicality of the situation while simultaneously highlighting the wretchedness
of the everyday lived experience of Kashmiris.
Roy’s novel functions as a narrative super-container, enclosing different human rights forms
to show how easily they can be exploited by functionaries of the state to further its stranglehold
over a people and exonerate itself of blame. The Ministry cuts across multiple genres to expose its
own materiality and to closely attend to questions of authenticity, form, and narrativity within
both fictional and nonfictional human rights forms. Traditionally closed and specialized human
rights forms, such as the human rights report and the testimony, are shown as effective but, to
an extent, are limited by genre conventions to retell and repurpose the same stories. On the
contrary, literary fiction is shown as well-equipped to expose the gaps in the traditional human
rights narrative while bringing the full breadth of the complexity and perversion of the Indian
occupation of Kashmir to the fore.
204
Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED. www.ted.com/talks/
chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.
Alston, Philip and Sarah Knuckey. 2016. The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Amon, Joseph J., et al. 2015. “Evaluating Human Rights Advocacy on Criminal Justice and Sex Work.”
Health and Human Rights Journal 17(1): 91–101.
Beverley, John. 1989. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 35(1):
11–28.
Bruso, Andrew. 2012. “In the Altered Light of the Sundarbans’: Understanding Magical Realism in Rush-
die’s Midnight’s Children.” Shawangunk Review XXIII: 53–58.
Burke, Jason and Jon Boone. 2014. “Kashmir Monsoon Floods Leave 460 Dead and Displace Almost a Mil-
lion.” The Guardian, September 11. www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/11/kashmir-monsoon-
floods-million-displace-pakistan-india-aid.
Chamberlain, Gethin. 2010. “Arundhati Roy Faces Arrest over Kashmir Remark.” The Guardian, Octo-
ber 26. www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/26/arundhati-roy-kashmir-india.
Dasgupta, Anchita. 2018. “Azaadi and Atoot Ang: How Kashmiri Resistance Shapes Indian Nationalism.”
Brown Political Review, October 19. https://brownpoliticalreview.org/2018/10/azaadi-atoot-ang-kashmiri-
resistance-shapes-indian-nationalism/.
Dawes, James. 2018. The Novel of Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Dudai, Ron. 2006. “Advocacy with Footnotes: The Human Rights Report as a Literary Genre.” Human
Rights Quarterly 28(3): 783–795.
Faris, Wendy B. 1995. “Scheherazade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern Fiction.” In Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community, edited by Lois Parkinson. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. 1991. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and His-
tory. New York: Routledge.
Ganai, Naseer. 2012. “Kashmir Murder Accused Ex-Army Officer Kills Family, Self in US.” India
Today, June 11. www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/kashmir-murder-accused-army-major-kills-family-
self-in-us-105208-2012-06-10.
Hart, Stephen M. 2003. “Magical Realism in the Americas: Politicised Ghosts in One Hundred Years
of Solitude, the House of the Spirits, and Beloved.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 9(2):
115–123. https://doi.org/10.1080/1470184032000171759.
Hogan, Nanci. 2010. “The Implications of a Politics of Natality for Transnational Feminist Advocacy:
Transforming the Human Rights Moral Imaginary.” In Grace Jantzen: Redeeming the Present, edited by
Elaine L. Graham, 227–247. Burlington: Ashgate.
Ignatieff, Michael. 2002. “Is the Human Rights Era Ending?” The New York Times, February 5. Accessed 5
February 2019. www.nytimes.com/2002/02/05/opinion/is-the-human-rights-era-ending.html.
Kaul, Nitasha. 2011. “Kashmir A Place of Blood and Memory.” In Until My Freedom Has Come: The New
Intifada in Kashmir, edited by Sanjay Kak, 189–212. New Delhi: Penguin.
“The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Released.” 2017. The Hindu, June 6. www.thehindu.com/news/
national/kerala/the-ministry-of-utmost-happiness-released/article18732000.ece.
Mutua, Makau. 2001. “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights.” Harvard Interna-
tional Law Journal 42(1): 201–245.
Nayar, Pramod K. 2016. Human Rights and Literature: Writing Rights. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh. 2018. “Delightful Listening: A Conversation Between Viet Thanh Nguyen
with Arundhati Roy.” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 31. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/
delightful-listening-a-conversation-between-viet-thanh-nguyen-with-arundhati-roy/.
Pandit, Rajat. 2014. “In Flood-Hit J&K, ‘Occupation Force’ Hailed as Saviour.” The Times of India, Sep-
tember 10. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/In-flood-hit-JK-occupation-force-hailed-as-
saviour/articleshow/42126647.cms.
Parikh, Crystal. 2018. Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
Park-Fuller, Linda M. 2000. “Performing Absence: The Staged Personal Narrative as Testimony.” Text and
Performance Quarterly 20(1): 20–42.
205
Rakhshan Rizwan
Rizwan, Rakhshan. 2020. Kashmir Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure, and the Local Cosmopolitan. New
York: Routledge.
Roy, Arundhati. 1997. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: India Ink.
Roy, Arundhati. 2017. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. New York: Penguin Randomhouse.
Satterthwaite, Margaret L. and Justin C Simeone. 2016. “A Conceptual Roadmap for Social Science
Methods in Human Rights Fact-Finding.” In The Transformation of Human Rights Fact-Finding, edited by
Philip Alston and Sarah Knuckey, 322–345. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Slaughter, Joseph. 2009. Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. Ford-
ham University Press.
Smith, Sidonie and Watson Julia. 2016. Life Writing in the Long Run. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2011. Manual on Human Rights
Monitoring. New York and Geneva: United Nations. www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/Chap
ter13-MHRM.pdf.
“What Is AFSPA? AFSPA in Jammu Kashmir.” Amnesty International India, June 19, 2020. https://amnesty.
org.in/campaign/broken-families/.
206
15
CACHED RESISTANCE
The “Unheard” Narratives of Militancy
in Kashmir
Haris Zargar
Introduction
Militancy first erupted in the erstwhile state1 of Jammu and Kashmir over three decades back
in the late 1980s with the Valley’s first militant organization Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
Front ( JKLF) initiating an armed offensive against the Indian rule (Evans 2007). This territorial
dispute between rivals India and Pakistan, since the partition of Indian sub-continent in 1947,
transformed into a full-fledged guerrilla crusade, in which Kashmiris became central actors of
the conflict. With hundreds of Kashmiri men crossing over to neighboring Pakistan to receive
arms training, new militant groups such as Hizbul Mujahideen (Hizb), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen,
Al-Badr, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Jaish-e-Mohammed ( JeM) emerged on the Valley’s polit-
ical landscape by the end of the last millennia (Schofield 2000). This militancy, consequently,
was largely led by Pakistan-based groups like LeT and JeM by the beginning of the new cen-
tury, although Kashmiris continued to constitute a significant number in the insurgent ranks
(Mir 2019).
With the 9/11 twin tower attacks notably altering the geopolitics of South Asia, Islamabad
effectively put the Kashmir dispute on the backburner (Hussain 2007). Kashmiris also restruc-
tured their political activism for the right to self-determination from an active armed campaign
to non-armed political activities (Bukhari 2010). These new dynamics were evident during
three consecutive summers of 2008, 2009, and 2010 – often referred as Kashmir’s intifada, when
a 100,000 youth led months-long public agitations calling for the end of Delhi’s rule in the
region ( Jha 2016). These nonviolent demonstrations were clamped down heavily by the Indian
state that led to the killing and arrests of several hundred young men (Rashid 2016). Upon this
violent state repression and striking down of public dissent, a new phase of armed insurrection
emerged in the Valley around 2012, wherein educated tech-savvy youth began joining militant
ranks. Popular militant commanders such as Burhan Wani, Riyaz Naikoo, Sameer Tiger, and
so on, associated with the Hizb, became household names and were eulogized by the Valley’s
population for leasing new life to Kashmir’s tehreek (political movement). The number of local
youth joining the rebel groups started to rise significantly, which spiked further following the
killing of young charismatic commander Burhan Wani in July 2016. Many of these men were
government employers, research scholars, engineers, college students, police officials, and so on
(Mir 2019).
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-19 207

Haris Zargar
Varying explanations were offered for the spurt in youth joining the militancy in Kashmir,
which include a rise in pan-Islamization, radicalization2 and lack of employment opportunities
(Um-Roommana and Bhat 2018; Hussain 2007; Shah 2019). Some also asserted that the use of
strongarm tactics by the state forces, as well as the glorification of militants by pro-independence
groups like All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC or Hurriyat), were also behind this phe-
nomenon (Kakar 2018). These portrayals were arguably focused on constructing a distorted
identity of militants in sync with the normative perspective of violent global insurgencies.
There was little effort to know or reveal these individuals from a local standpoint. The narrative
around Kashmir’s insurgency fundamentally ignored the histories of individuals who were either
directly involved in the armed campaign or their immediate family and friends. It arguably
amplified the practice of “silencing” the dissenting perspectives in this highly restive and con-
tested territory. Although local media reportage of the armed conflict provided some glimpses
into the lives of those who make up today’s militancy, the “dehumanizing” and “depersonal-
izing” of these young Kashmiris remain profound within the larger discourse on militancy in
Kashmir.
The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to gain a viewpoint of the families of militants,
who share lived experiences of the militancy for a major part of their lives. It seeks to under-
stand how these men are remembered by their immediate relatives and immortalized in the
collective memory of the people. Through personal memories of kin, I look at the narratives of
remembrance as recounted by the families of rebels. The objective is not to evaluate the broad
existing literature on the contours of Kashmir conflict, but to echo the narratives that may pro-
vide a deeper understanding of mentalities and beliefs shared by Kashmiris that prompts them
to challenge India’s rule in the contentious region. This historicization through oral testimonies
further aims to “personalize” the debate around the Valley’s three-decade-long insurgency by
bringing back at center of discourse the human characters, and not just the phenomenon that
otherwise silences the raw human emotions, sufferings, and aspirations.
Memory and History

Over the years, scholars have used official documentary materials such as newspaper reports,
court transcripts, state archives, police interrogation testimonies, and so on as sources to under-
stand the underlying causes of militances or terrorism. This examination, although it dwells
into the questions of “how” and “when,” most often fails to provide any relevant response to
the “why” questions of these phenomena (Olsen 2009). The analysis of Kashmir’s ongoing
militancy has arguably also followed a similar outline, which often eludes relevant inquisitions
into understanding the Valley’s protracted armed insurrection and role of the local populace.
Militancy as a phenomenon has often been examined through social psychology, in which
human behavior is understood as “a manifestation of social interaction” and constructs identity
in the context of social interactions, prevailing ideologies, social roles, or situated politics (Arena
and Arrigo 2005). Such analytical standpoints are often designed to formulate policies and tools
for state authorities to respond to militancy in which the militant actors are effectively stripped
of their “humanity,” for instance as “victims” of an ideology or a socio-political schema, or “vili-
fied” as antisocial elements. It follows a similar literary discourse that is identified by Edward
Said in his seminal work Orientalism (1977), in which scholars fabricate the “identity” of the
subject under examination rather than revealing the subject. This literary discourse effectively
serves to “historicize” oppressed societies and their political actions through racial, ethnic, gen-
der, or cultural tropes that only further the perspective of the occupying colonial state.
208
Cached Resistance
Sengupta (2009) underlines that Said especially emphasized a spatial concept of colonialism,
as he wrote about an “imaginative geography” that was imbricated with structures of power and
hegemony in the imperial representations of the Orient. Contemporary approaches to colonial
history aim to break down the barrier between the mutually exclusive strands of metropolitan
history and colonial studies, thus emphasizing the entangled nature of the history of “metro-
pole” and “colony” (read India and Kashmir respectively, in the context of this chapter).
Building on Said’s work, postcolonial theory emerged as a school of thought in which ques-
tions of language and power, of the subjectivity of the subaltern, nature of cultural identity,
nationalism, historiography, and so on are critically analyzed to deconstruct the underlying
layers, structures, and forms that are embedded in the colonial past and postcolonial present.
Within this perspective, postcolonial theory is concerned with the aftermath of colonialism,
not just as a political or historical reality but also as a felt and lived experience that has adversely
affected the subaltern subject, silenced through the dynamics of imperialism, oppression, and
power, but that remains as a sedimented form of collective memory (Burney 2012).
Collective (or public) memory, therefore often appears fundamentally in opposition to offi-
cial history as noted by French historian Pierre Nora in his seven-volume work, Les Lieux de
Mémoire. Nora underlines that history essentially operates in the “conquest and eradication of
memory” (Rose 2017). For Nora (1989),
memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent
evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its
successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible
to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the
reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.
Nora concluded that memory is absolute and spatial, while history is relative and temporal,
because memory is an actual phenomenon of the present, while history is a reconstruction of
the past (Rose 2017).
With the emergence of the remembrance discourse on the Holocaust and the rise of postco-
lonial studies, suffering became the focal highlight of memorial sites. Assmann (2009) adds that
in this postcolonial narrative there is a question not only of perpetrators and victims but also
of colonizers and colonized – the latter also qualifying as victims. Therefore, the postcolonial
queries involve entangled histories of the oppressor and the victim.
History, while written about humans, has mostly ignored the personal lives of individuals
as argued by Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, who called the “ingenuous belief in
history as past and something outside oneself ” (De Martino 1941, quoted in Passerini 1987: 3).
Nora (1989) further notes that what we call memory today is therefore not just memory but
already history, and what are taken to be flare-ups of memory are actually its final consumption
of history. He concludes that the quest for memory is the search for one’s history (Nora 1989:
13). The concept of memory becomes a critical tool to understand human history especially in
relations to identities, beliefs, and mentalities.
In her book Fascism in Popular Memory, Luisa Passerini (1987) – who recorded about sev-
enty stories with the idea of understanding the fascist phenomenon in Italy – accentuates that
the subjective dimension of phenomena does not allow a direct reconstruction of the past,
but rather links past and present in a combination which is laden with symbolic significance.
While these oral sources have to be placed in a proper framework, they are highly relevant
to historical analysis. These testimonies are, first and foremost, statements of cultural identity
209
Haris Zargar
in which memory continuously adapts received traditions to present circumstances (Passerini

1987: 17).
Oral testimonies, most importantly, in the context where there is an oppressive power struc-
ture, do not only reconstruct the past but also preserve the narratives of silences and allow
redefining the hegemonic discourses. Writing in the context of Chilean dictatorship, Raposo-
Quintana (2009) highlights that the state’s military version had dominated social space, and their
official narrative was the only possible version to be mentioned in public. However, it was not
only one. Memory works were constantly produced in different levels of the social networks,
preserving what the army sought to conceal. Eventually, when historical situations changed,
these oral works allowed elaboration, re-elaboration and production of memories and knowl-
edge of this hard period in Chilean history.
From these perspectives, it is important to record the narratives of people who articulate
the militancy in Kashmir from the standpoint of the victim or oppressed. Without registering
these local narratives, it may be difficult to analyze and understand the meaning of Kashmir’s
recent political history and articulate sincerely as to what transpired on the ground for the past
few decades. More importantly, without recognizing these perspectives, the ongoing political
conflict and militancy in Kashmir shall remain oblivious of people’s suffering and continue
repressing the stories of the disenfranchised masses. The stories of militants through the memo-
ries of their family members not only reconstruct the past, but also demonstrate how the people
describe and realize their own present.
Methodology
I have used qualitative interviews as a primary method to collate memoirs or oral testimonies
for this chapter. I chose to conduct in-depth interviews with the families of three prominent
militant commanders – Riyaz Naikoo, Majid Zargar, and Sabzar Ahmad Bhat, who had joined
rebels ranks after 2012. These oral testimonies were recorded between the period of Janu-
ary 2019 and July 2019 at their respective homes with multiple respondents, who were mostly
close family members. The families belong to different socio-economic backgrounds and reside
in three different villages of South Kashmir – an area at the heart of the new wave of militancy
in the Valley.
The interviews were conducted in a conversational manner keeping in view the sensitive
nature of the subject for the respondents. Each interview lasted for about 30–35 minutes.
Only one of the three militants was active at the time of the interview while two others had
been killed in the years 2016 and 2017. The interviews were first recorded in the native Kash-
miri language and then transcribed into English. Given the sensitivity of interviewing militant
families, a local journalist first established contact with the families to receive consent for the
conversation.
I first interacted with the four family members of Majid Zargar, a 23-year-old militant
commander of LeT, at their residence in Quimoh area in South Kashmir’s Kulgam district.
The second interview was done with the three family members of Riyaz Naikoo, the 35-year-
old commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen, who was killed in May 2020 and was active at the
time of the interview. It was conducted at Naikoo residence in Beighpora village of Awanti-
pora in South Kashmir’s Pulwama district. The third interview was done with the mother
and brother of 28-year-old Sabzar Ahmad Bhat – a close associate of Burhan Wani and at the
time of his death Hizb’s operational chief in the Valley. It was held at their residence in South
Kashmir’s Tral.
210
Cached Resistance
The oral testimonies were then evaluated applying the Straussian approach to Grounded
Theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990) that analyzes the data through an inductive process. In this
process, a code was attributed to a particular discourse. For instance, if a participant talked about
anything specific to religion, I ascribed a code – “religiosity” for that statement. Overlapping
codes were then merged in the second round of evaluation. Thus, coding was done through a
two-phase coding process that included open and selective coding.
During the preliminary analysis, the discourse revealed about 15 themes that were loosely
developed through open coding. In the new cycle of analysis, I looked for patterns, recurring
narratives, and contradictions, following which eight codes were registered (see Table 15.1).
Two main themes appeared following another round of assessment and these codes were then
categorized in two groups – inspiration and persona – which broadly provided insights into the
two parallel portrayals. The narratives that detailed motivations/mentalities were labelled under
inspiration while those that illustrated the individual were grouped under the persona.
The first thematic group – inspiration – was sub-classified into four topics: oppression, peer
influence, religiosity, and political activism, which reflect the narratives about the impetus behind
their members joining a rebel group. The second thematic group – persona – was catalogued
under four elements: compassionate, astuteness, public consciousness, and personal beliefs that illustrate
the discourses about how the families perceived their rebel member.
While analyzing the interviews, I was conscious of my prior knowledge and lived experi-
ence of the context of this study. As a Kashmiri, many of the responses from militants’ family
members felt quite personal, and there was a deep sense of familiarity with the narrative. It is
important to highlight that my analysis, especially codification, was done primarily in correla-
tion with the research question and the narrative of respondents, but perhaps may reflect an
element of my personal perceptions or understandings of Kashmir’s militancy.
Table 15.1 Microanalysis of the Anecdotal Narrative
Themes Codes Narrative ascribed
Inspiration Oppression Personally beaten or tortured; family harassed by police; public

killings by state forces; witness to police violence etc.
Peer influence Family or friends involved previously in militancy; established
contact with an active militant.
Religiosity Practicing Muslim; reading Islamic scriptures and texts; discussions
on Muslim histories; a strong sense of Muslim identity etc.
Political activism Involved in protests; supported Kashmir’s separation from India etc.
Persona Compassionate Helping family financially, providing support to neighbors or
involved in social work; never angered anyone or denied help;
emotionally very close to parents and siblings; caring toward
animals etc.
Astuteness Diligent in studies; earning well; keen observers; hardworking and
focused; no complaints; ambitious etc.
Social consciousness Debated state politics and followed news events; did charitable work;
assertion to work for the people etc.
Personal beliefs Beliefs other than religious; strong sense of self/identity; aspired
to participate in political-military activity; conviction to fight
injustices etc.
211
Haris Zargar
Memories and Insights: Riyaz Naikoo

Asadullah Naikoo, who runs a tailoring shop outside his house, remembered his son as a “dili-
gent,” “compassionate” person, who was “good at studies” right from the very young age, and
also someone with high “conviction” toward the resistance campaign in the Valley. A math-
ematics teacher by profession, Riyaz taught at a local school between 2010 and 2011, often
providing free tuitions to many children in his native village ( Javaid 2018).
He took charge of Hizb after the death of its commander Yasin Itoo in 2017, taking the nom
de guerre of “Muhammad Bin Qasim.” A tech-savvy militant commander, he was credited to
keep the Hizb intact when the group fell in disarray following the killing of Burhan Wani and
was the longest surviving militant commander in recent years (Masood 2020). Riyaz turned to
militancy in 2012.
We were expecting and hoping that he would pursue higher education outside the
state after completing his bachelors. We were planning to get him married. Riyaz also
insisted that he would marry after completing his degree. But, he left to join militant
ranks soon after.3
When I asked the family how they felt about Riyaz joining the militancy, considering it is a
difficult choice with death being a certainty, the family members said they were always con-
cerned about his well-being and would feel distressed whenever there was news of an encounter
between Indian forces and rebels in the Valley. They, however, noted that Riyaz’s choice to
become a militant made them feel “proud” and for taking up the “right cause” against what they
termed the “tyranny and oppression” of the Indian state.
This is something to feel proud about. We don’t say he took a wrong path. Had he
gotten himself involved in criminal activities like drugs or other such illicit trade, our
family name would have been tarnished. We are relieved that he took the right path.4
Explaining Riyaz’s rationale to join the insurgency, one of the family members highlighted the
regular state repression faced by Kashmiri Muslims, and attack on the religious faith of native
Muslims in the Valley.
For a certain time initially, we believed that the gun only leads to bloodshed. But the
kind of repression unleashed by India here, the face it showed. . . . We have a mosque
nearby. One day they asked us to lock it down. As a Muslim, how can we tolerate such
insults? I think it is better to pick up a gun than face such humiliation and desecration
of our religion.5
The family also noted that they faced severe harassment and ill-treatment from the Indian armed
forces after Riyaz joined militancy and that the family were pressured to ask him for surrender.
The family said that Riyaz refused to lay down his arms asserting he was not going to shun the
anti-India resistance movement.
He told us categorically, he would not surrender. So we informed the police official,

who kept nudging us to make Riyaz surrender, that he will never surrender and that
the police should not harass us anymore.6
212
Cached Resistance
Deemed as one of the most prominent Kashmiri commanders in recent years, Riyaz was killed
in his native village in May 2020 (Yasir, Schultz and Kirmani 2020).
Majid Zargar
Majid was once regarded as the “face of Lashkar-e-Taiba” in South Kashmir and was credited with
reviving Lashkar in the Valley (The Kashmiriyat 2018). A resident of Quimoh in Kulgam district,
he was killed in 42-hour-long combat with the Indian forces in December 2016. A secondary
school pass-out, he had joined Lashkar at the age of nineteen in 2012 and swiftly rose through the
ranks of the outfit. Initially functioning as the Hizb “over-ground” worker, he later joined LeT
after killing two policemen (The Kashmiriyat 2018). For the Indian security agencies, Majid was
a “dreaded” militant credited with high profile attacks on Indian forces in the Valley (Ali 2017).
Ghulam Mohammad Zargar, Majid’s father and a timber businessman, recalls his son as a
“bright child” with a keen interest in “religion and politics.”7 Majid’s family had a history of
men joining militant ranks before him as well. His elder brother had briefly joined the HM, but
was arrested within a month. He was let off after serving a prison term. His two uncles were
also militants and had been killed in the mid-1990s (The Kashmiriyat 2018).
Majid’s mother, Dilshada, mentioned that Majid had a great deal of conviction for the tehreek
and was highly motivated because of his religious belief. His father also asserted that this was
perhaps the reason why Majid contributed “immensely” toward the anti-India insurgency.
The family remembered Majid as a highly disciplined and obedient child with a gentle
demeanor, who was respectful toward everyone because and therefore was liked by his compan-
ions as well. Majid was known to be a close associate of top militant commanders, including
Burhan Wani, Abu Dujana, Abu Qasim, and so on (Ali 2017).
He would greet even a person younger than his age. If he would come across hun-
dreds of people on his way, he would greet each one of them. When he would leave
for school, he would carry a “miswaq” (teeth cleaning twig) in his mouth. He would
eat food with three fingers.8 . . . The few men (rebels) that would accompany Majid
would insist only moving or staying with him.9
Dilshada fondly recalled the day when Majid left home to join the militancy. Her narration
of the days provides a glimpse of how close she was to Majid, whom she believed was born to
become a fighter for Kashmir’s political cause.
I was feeling unwell. I suffer from a heart ailment for which doctors have advised
me not to work too much. So I usually end up resting in my room. That day he left,
he had gone to drop his younger sister off at the ‘darsgah’ (an Islamic seminary). He
returned and sat near me. I remember telling him that if he would sit around me
regularly and talk, it would put me at peace. In the evening he left for prayers with his
brother. While he was leaving for prayers I told him that our talking had already made
me feel better. At that time I had no idea that he had already bid farewell to his sister
when he had dropped her off.10
When Majid was engaged in the battle with Indian forces, hundreds gathered near the
encounter site in an attempt to rescue him and his associate in which one civilian was killed. It
was reported that the bodily remains of Majid were beyond recognition. Majid’s family believed
213
Haris Zargar
that the police and Indian forces were furious with him for reviving militancy in the area and
for launching several attacks on the state agencies, because of which they were also targeted
regularly even after his killing.
I don’t think anyone in Kashmir would have been harassed like we are being. The
forces are very angry at us. They break our windows, panes and doors. They also come
inside and beat us all, even the womenfolk in the family. They are taking out their
anger on us. They can’t stand us, they even hate to look at our faces.11
Sabzar Ahmed Bhat

A childhood friend of Burhan Wani, he joined the militancy after Wani’s elder brother, Khalid,
was killed by Indian forces. Sabzar was the chief operational commander of the Hizb in South
Kashmir for a brief period and was one of the popular rebels who enjoyed widespread adoration
of the locals in the Valley, especially in his home town Tral in South Kashmir. He was known as
a close associate of Wani, and was killed in May 2017 following a brief encounter at his native
town (Munshi 2017).
Sabzar was 20 years old when he joined the militant ranks, and worked small jobs to earn
a livelihood for the family. Eldest among three siblings, he was a school dropout owing to his
father’s ill health. Sabzar’s mother, Jana, also recounts his son as well-natured, soft-spoken,
and shy, who would never miss a prayer or speak in high tone with anyone. His brother also
described Sabzar as a benevolent easy going person, who despite living a tough life, never com-
plained, and was well-known among the locals.
He was a good-looking man, but I could only identify him as when he was a tod-
dler. You would argue he became a militant, but his demeanour was always mellow
natured. Despite my son becoming a militant both the police and army didn’t hurt
me, only because they also recognised my son left for a cause and didn’t hurt anyone
needlessly. Once a local spy was caught and bought before Sabzar, and instead of
hurting him, embraced him and told him that they were brothers, and ordered his
release.12
Just like in the case of Riyaz Naikoo and Majid Zargar, Sabzar’s family recounts him as a
popular person who was well versed in Islamic studies, socially conscious, and upon their death
drew a large number of people to their funerals. In the narrative of family, Sabzar is also an
obedient child who is very attached to his family especially to his mother.
He was very close to me and didn’t leave the house until I would permit him. He
would insist that he wouldn’t travel or leave without my consent. He wouldn’t tell me
where he was going. On the day he left, it was only after insisting for a while I allowed
him to go thinking he was travelling outside the valley with friends for leisure and
would return in a few days. It was only the next day that one of my relatives called and
informed us that Sabzar had joined militants.13
Sabzars’ family also insisted that it was primarily because of the constant harassment and
ill-treatment meted out by the state police and army that pushed him to join the Hizb. The
discourse of state repression against the common folk, especially killings of local youth during a
214
Cached Resistance
protest by forces remain the dominant narrative for the families. In the case of Sabzar, the con-
versation kept bringing the fact that he was regularly targeted by the police agencies.
He had never spoken to us about joining rebels. But whenever there were any protests
in the areas, the police would pick him up regularly without any reason. He would
be locked up days, and perhaps because of this, he was tired of being treated like with
such injustice. The police would accuse him of being associated with the militant.14
Learnings From the Sketches

The memoirs offer compelling personal anecdotes informed by the question of what attracted
these men to armed resistance. One of the predominant recurring discourses of participants
about why their family members joined the militancy was “oppression,” detailing how the state
security apparatus had unleashed a wave of atrocities on the family and society at large. All the
participants narrated in detail the different instances of how the state police forces would harass
and abuse the family members.
A lot of atrocities and harassment has been done to the family of Khumeni sahab
(another local militant) as well. They have suffered. His brother is under arrest too.15
The police and the army may come and beat or harass us, but what do we do. We
are helpless . . . they would often come and hurl abuses, what can we do about that.16
Both during the interaction and analysis processes, I strongly felt that the testimonies have a
major emphasis on how the state forces would arrest some family members regularly and hold
them for months without any charge and conviction. All the participants insisted that state
“oppression” had not only forced their members to join the insurgency, but also continued both
before their members had become rebels and after the death of their militant members.
Once the police arrived at our house and arrested both my husband and my
younger son. They asked me where Sabzar was, alleging that he had snatched a
gun from a cop.17
My son was arrested and he was booked under the Public Safety Act (anti-terror
law) . . . despite spending time in prison he would be asked to show his presence at
the police station. The police were not looking for him, but they would still insist on
his attendance.18
“Religiosity” was viewed by the participants as another “inspiring” factor in motivating their
members to join militancy. When I inquired about how much the militants practiced religion,
perceived their religious duties, or studied religious scriptures, it was revealed that all three had a
deep religious belief. The religiosity of the rebels, however, was highlighted as a primary moral
driver, an inspirational factor for seeking justice, and a source of validation for participating in
the anti-India armed campaign. The families exalted religiosity as a sign of the rebel kin’s right-
eousness and sense of justice, also often drawing similarities between their kin with “heroes” of
Islamic history.
Whenever I used to see him reading books, they would be about Islam. He would read
about past Islamic struggles. He would read about Salahuddin Ayubi, and so on. . . .
215
Haris Zargar
He used to be involved in a lot of aggressive attacks on (Indian) forces. He wanted to

be a “fidayeen”19 too and I think the main reason for him joining LeT instead of Hizb
is because Islam is at the core of its ideology. Another reason might be the fact that the
group attracted a lot of foreign fighters.20
He (Sabzar) lived a hard life but never complained and would often pray five times
a day.21
In my conversations with the families, I discovered that the militants often had someone in
their immediate family or known friends who was affiliated with rebel groups. “Peer influence”
was a significant factor drawing the men into the networks of militant groups.
My eldest son had joined the Hizb for a month. He came back and was arrested. After
serving some time in prison he was let off.22
Majid was close to some of them (Lashkar commanders), particularly with Abu
Qasim (Abdul Rehman).23
Our discussions also reaffirmed the fact that the existing political situation in the Valley had a
significant impact on the men before they joined the armed movement. The families insisted
that their rebel kin were well aware of the larger political conflict and repression in the state.
They stated that the suppression of dissent, denial of holding protests and killings by state forces,
meant that their family member joined the militancy both in reaction to state the state repres-
sion and because of their conviction toward the (nonviolent and violent) “political activism.”
The participants elaborated that the rebel member actively participated in public protests or
was vocal about their anti-India stance or visited sites of encounters for demonstrations and so
on. The process to join the political cause is illustrated as a willful action and not something
accidental or out of compulsion.
He (Majid) shot a CRPF gun in Lal chowk, Islamabad at point blank range with a
pistol and took away his gun to enter the militancy. . . . You know as a child he would
mostly walk in slippers even in the cold winters. I believe he is preparing himself for
becoming a militant. . . . He would often debate with his brother and father about
the happening in the valley. These would be fierce debates wherein he would insist on
playing an active role. He would read books on historic events.24
Sabzar joined the militancy days only after Khalid (Burhan Wani’s brother) was
killed, even though he barely knew either Burhan or Khalid. He was very upset and
cried a lot upon hearing about Khalid’s killing. . . . I think he would have left for
militancy much earlier. But perhaps he was waiting for us to shift to our newly made
house. He thought maybe it would become difficult for us to move in case he joined
rebels.25
In all the conversations, the families especially talked in great detail about the personality traits
of their rebel kin. Their narratives revealed in detail how families remembered their rebel family
members, which, in essence, offered a broad canvas to understand the behavior and personality
of these militants. These broadly provide an additional layer of information to examine if there
are patterns or convergence in the contexts of youth who become militants.
The families put a high degree of emphasis to the caring and “compassionate” nature of their
rebel members, with the narrative predominantly built on circumstantial factors that convinced
the Kashmiri youth to join the insurgency. This discourse emphasized that these individuals
216
Cached Resistance
took up violent activism against their personalities, which otherwise was mostly caring, intro-
verted, and well-mannered.
He (Sabzar) was a shy person and despite being well built, he was very soft spoken and
reserved. You would argue he became a militant, but his demeanour was always mel-
low natured. . . . Once a local spy was caught and bought before Sabzar, and instead
of hurting him, embraced him and told him that they were brothers, and ordered his
release.26
After finishing his bachelors, three of his friends went to study outside Kashmir. He
told me it would require some Rs 7000 for admission. I gave him the money that I had
kept aside for his further education, and told him to join that institute. But he never
went. And before he left to join the militant ranks, he gave that money to his mother.
He (Riyaz) came to visit us only when his grandmother was unwell. Despite the
surveillance, he tried visiting her often.27
Moreover, the families often illustrated their kin as “smart” and “intelligent” individuals,
with a significant emphasis on their educational attributes. The discourse demonstrates that the
family member believed that their rebel kin made the “rational” and thoughtful choice, also
asserting that they were conscious beings that could clearly distinguish right from wrong. This
perhaps was often stated to demonstrate that the decision to join the militancy was not a matter
of indoctrination but something that came as a matter of conscientious appeal.
He (Riyaz) always wanted to become a teacher, and studied mathematics. When he

was receiving his formal education, we never required to engage a private tutor for
him. Never did he ever fail in any exams.28
He was giving the final examination when he joined the militants. He had appeared
for four subjects and in the four papers he had appeared, he had scored 85% marks. He
was a very bright child.29
Sabzar ouss yaaro ka yaar (Sabzar was best friend of friends). When he was mar-
tyred, people from across the valley turned up for his funeral.30
The narrative of these personal memoirs show that the respondents strongly believed that their
rebel kin had a deep sense of “social consciousness,” which was beyond any personal ambitions.
This often involved being active in social works or aiming to take a profession that helped
others.
He would support local children from the underprivileged background with studies
and provided free tuitions to many. He was very actively imparting religious education
to some children as well.31
During our conversations, the rebels were highlighted as having high conviction toward the
resistance movement in the Valley. This narrative had a significant emphasis on the personal
tribulations and sufferings endured by the militants toward the political cause.
When he used to tell me that he would become a militant, I would insist upon him
to focus on studies. He would only respond saying that only he would pay for his sins
on the day of judgment. . . . He would be often hit with pellets, rubber bullets but
would never show us anything (injuries, scars). He wouldn’t tell us or accept that he
217
Haris Zargar
has been injured or anything. People would often tell us he may have been hit but he
would never acknowledge anything.32
Riyaz told us bluntly if he has taken any money, property or other such material
things from me or from the family? He told us categorically, he would not surrender.
He would not betray his oath.33
Key Findings and Conclusion

For the families of men who joined the militancy in Kashmir, the narrative of wrongdoing by
the state forces, personal conviction toward anti-India resistance, deep religious sanctimony
remains at the heart of their narratives. Constant victimization, harassment, and sacrilege of
Muslim religious sentiment at the hands of state security apparatus is assertively underscored in
the discourse, especially to the queries on why many young men take up arms against the Indian
state in the Valley. Driven by a deep sense of religiosity and socio-political consciousness – as
understood and perceived by their families – there is a clear reflection within the narrative that
the cause espoused by an individual is not only for justice but also something unavoidable given
the complexity and nature of conflict in the region. They see rebels as highly conscious indi-
viduals that have a deep sense of compassion, self-awareness, and empathy toward others. In this
discourse, the families perceive their rebel kin as a victim of the wrongdoing by the oppressive
state and compelled into reaction by the larger socio-political realities of the Valley. Interestingly,
there was no word on economic dimensions within this narrative. Although one of the families
is financially weak, they never spoke of facing financial constraints or their member taking up
arms for financial reasons.
These memoirs are imperative to know the local actors of the armed insurrection in Kash-
mir, whose personal histories are intertwined both with the lives of the common folk as well as
within the different contours of the political conflict. These “silenced” discourses are important
to record Kashmir political history and armed insurgency that may be critical to reconstruct the
Valley’s history away from the official accounts. These are certainly not the only silenced narra-
tives that prevail, and much more remains unheard. Although this study is small in its scope due
to a limited survey sample, it is vital to underscore the importance of the insights provided by
family members of actors that are central actors in the theatre of war in Kashmir.
Notes
1 The semi-autonomous state of Jammu and Kashmir was downsized into two Union Territories by the
Indian government on August 5, 2019, under the J&K Reorganisation Act of 2019 (Sharma 2019).
2 Radicalisation here should be understood in terms of socio-religious indoctrination.
3 Excerpt from the conversation with Riyaz Naikoo’s family, Beighpora village, Kashmir, March 2019.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Excerpts from conversation with Majid Zargar’s family, Quimoh, Kashmir, March 2019.
8 In Islam, it is considered a meritorious act if a Muslim eats with three fingers.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Excerpts from the interview with Sabzar’s brother and mother, Tral, Kashmir, January 2019.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
16 Excerpt from the conversation with Riyaz Naikoo’s family, Beighpora village, Kashmir, March 2019.
218
Cached Resistance
1 7 Excerpts from the interview with Sabzar’s brother and mother, Tral, Kashmir, January 2019.
19 Militants who are willing to “sacrifice themselves” while fighting.
22 Excerpt from the personal interview with Naikoo’s family, Beighpora village, Kashmir, March 2019.
24 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
Works Cited
Ali, Jehangir. 2017. “Why Dujana’s Killing Isn’t a Gamechanger against Kashmir Militancy.” The Quint.
August 2. www.thequint.com/voices/opinion/abu-dujana-encounter-jammu-and-kashmir.
Arena, Michael P. and Bruce A. Arrigo. 2005. “Social Psychology, Terrorism, and Identity: A Preliminary
Re-Examination of Theory, Culture, Self, and Society.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law 23(4): 485–506.
https://doi.org/10.1002/bsl.653.
Assmann, Aleida. 2009. Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolo-
nial Contexts. Edited by Indra Sengupta. London: German Historical Institute.
Bukhari, Parvaiz. 2010. “Kashmir 2010: The Year of Killing Youth.” www.thenation.com, September 22.
www.thenation.com/article/archive/kashmir-2010-year-killing-youth/.
Burney, Shehla. 2012. “Chapter Two: Edward Said and Postcolonial Theory: Disjunctured Identities and
the Subaltern Voice.” Counterpoints 417: 41–60. www.jstor.org/stable/42981699.
De Martino, Ernesto. 1941. Naturalismo e storicismo nell’etnologia. Bari: G. Laterza & figli.
Evans, Alexander. 2007. “The Kashmir Insurgency: As Bad as It Gets.” Small Wars & Insurgencies 11(1):
69–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592310008423261.
Hussain, Zahid. 2007. Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam. London: I.B. Tauris.
Javaid, Azaan. 2018. “How Riyaz Naikoo Went from Being a Math Teacher to Hizbul Muja-
hideen’s Chief.” HuffPost India. October 2, 2018. www.huffingtonpost.in/2018/10/02/
how-riyaz-naikoo-went-from-being-a-math-teacher-to-hizbul-mujahideens-chief_a_23548311/.
Jha, Prem Shankar. 2016. “The Rise of Kashmir’s Second ‘Intifada.’ ” The Wire, August. https://thewire.
in/politics/kashmir-uprising.
Kakar, Harsha. 2018. “Increase in Youth Joining Militancy in Kashmir is Worrying.” ORF, April 2018.
www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/increase-youth-joining-militancy-kashmir-worrying/.
The Kashmiriyat. 2018. “He Revived Lashkar in South Kashmir- Who Was Majid Zargar.” The Kashmiriyat,
December 9. https://thekashmiriyat.co.uk/he-revived-lashkar-in-south-kashmir-who-was-majid-
zargar/.
Masood, Bashaarat. 2020. “Who Was Riyaz Ahmad Naikoo, the Hizbul Mujahideen Commander?” The
Indian Express, May 6. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/who-was-riyaz-ahmad-naikoo-
hizbul-mujahideen-6396915/.
Masoodi, Nazir. 2016. “Funeral of Dead Terrorists Keep Drawing Huge Crowds in Kashmir.” NDTV.
com, December. www.ndtv.com/india-news/funeral-of-dead-terrorists-keep-drawing-huge-crowds-
in-kashmir-1637169.
Mir, Tahir-ul Gani. 2019. “From Scholars to Teenagers: What Makes Kashmiri Youth Join Militancy?”
Sociology and Criminology-Open Access 7(2). https://doi.org/10.35248/23754435.19.7.204.
Munshi, Suhas. 2017. “Sabzar Ahmad Bhat: 10 Things You Need to Know about the Lover-Turned-Sab
Don.” News18, May 27. www.news18.com/news/india/tral-encounter-sabzar-ahmad-bhat-sab-don-
burhan-wani-right-hand-man-hizbul-mujahideen-lover-turned-don-1414093.html.
219
Haris Zargar
Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations (2)6: 7–24.
https://doi.org/10.2307/2928520.
Olsen, Jon A. 2009. Roads to Militant Radicalization: Interviews with Five Former Perpetrators of Politically Moti-
vated Organized Violence. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies.
Passerini, Luisa. 2009. Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Press Trust of India. 2017. “223 People Killed in Kashmir Unrests in 2008, 2010, 2016: Govt Tells House.”
Hindustan Times, January 30. www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/223-people-killed-in-kashmir-
unrests-in-2008-2010-2016-govt-tells-house/story-f835qWXDdfOcqAI4DsF2HO.html.
Raposo-Quintana, Paula. 2009. “Militant Memories: Family, Gender and Politics under Pinochet’s Dicta-
torship.” PhD Thesis, Nottingham Trent University. http://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/129.
Rashid, Toufiq. 2016. “Why the Kashmir Protests in 2010 and 2016 Are Different.” Hindustan Times,
August 18. www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/kashmir-s-summers-of-discontent-why-the-pro
tests-in-2010-and-2016-are-different/story-xy9w5KiPO7VGSehQcwJ2bM.html.
Rose, Tom. 2017. “Pierre Nora, Memory, and the Myth of Elizabeth I.” The Midlands Historical Review 1:
November. www.midlandshistoricalreview.com/pierre-nora-memory-and-the-myth-of-elizabeth-i-2/.
Said, Edward W. 1977. Orientalism. London: Penguin.
Schofield, Victoria. 2000. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unfinished War. London: I B Tauris & Co.
Sengupta, Indra. 2009. Memory, History, and Colonialism: Engaging with Pierre Nora in Colonial and Postcolonial
Contexts. Edited by Indra Sengupta. London: German Historical Institute.
Shah, Fahad. 2019. “India’s Militant Pipeline.” Foreign Policy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/18/
jailed-stone-throwing-join-terrorist-militant-group-kashmir-radicalization/.
Sharma, Niharika. 2019. “As Jammu & Kashmir Loses Its Political Status, Here’s What the Past 80 Days
Have Meant for It.” Quartz India, October. https://qz.com/india/1737332/kashmir-loses-article-370-
turns-indian-union-territory-today/.
Strauss, A. and J. Corbin. 1990. Basics of Qualitative Research Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Um-Roommana and Suhail Bhat. 2018. “Kashmir’s Teenage Militants.” Thediplomat.com, December 27.
https://thediplomat.com/2018/12/kashmirs-teenage-militants/.
Yasir, Sameer, Kai Schultz, and Iqbal Kirmani. 2020. “Top Kashmiri Militant Is Killed, Sparking Protests
and Rage.” The New York Times, May 6, sec. World.
220
16
PLAYING CRICKET IN EIDGAH
Affective Labor in Kashmiri Childhood(s)
Sarbani Sharma
The Figure of the Kashmiri Child

On August 26, 2016, nearly a month and a half after the commander of Hizb-ul Mujahideen’s
south Kashmir division, Burhan Muzaffar Wani, was killed in an armed encounter with Indian
armed forces, the Chief Minister of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, Mehbooba
Mufti, held a press conference with the Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh in Srinagar.
During the press conference, Chief Minister Mufti infamously responded to a query from the
journalist in the audience about the death and mass blinding of several children since July 2016
by saying, “Had the kid gone to buy a toffee from an army camp? A 15-year-old boy who
attacked a police station, had he gone to buy milk?”
Though Mehbooba Mufti was a locally elected representative of the state, her comments
were not exceptionally unique regarding the condition of Kashmiri children, whose lives have
been marred by relentless violence and crisis for several decades now. The comments reiterated
the complex frames through which the afflicted childhood in Kashmir has to be understood.
In the view of the state and security establishments, children, especially young boys, in Kash-
mir, although affected by political violence, were now agents in perpetuating the violence that
disrupted public law and order. In everyday life in Kashmir, it was impossible to miss how the
trauma of the violence and disruption in regular schooling and educational activities had left
several generations of children exposed to prolonged psychological, physical, and social dis-
abilities. In 2016–2017, more than 60 percent of working hours in schools and colleges was lost
due to curfews and state-sanctioned disruptions in regular functioning of schools and colleges.1
Children disabled by the state without access basic right to education and child development
are frequently labelled as agents and conspirators in disturbing public order. The “problem” of
violence committed by children is purportedly resolved by state and security establishment by
arresting them, which in turn pushes children back into the abyss of violence, thereby initiating
a new cycle of violence, suffering and prosecution. Therefore, the figure of the Kashmiri child
oscillates between twin narratives: the innocent child killed in armed conflict whose future
needs to be secured through good governance and talent appreciation; and the unruly and
criminalized Kashmiri child who needs to be constantly disciplined.
Killing, maiming, and blinding of children by Indian armed forces have been a signifi-
cant part of the human rights violations committed by the armed forces over several decades.
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-20 221

Sarbani Sharma
Children are impacted not only by these direct armed hostilities, but also through the arma-
ments left behind after an armed encounter while they roam or play, “nonviolent” mob control
techniques or even the regular disruption of their schooling and learning routine. Violence
against children in conflict zones thereby serves twin purposes. The first is to humiliate and
subjugate the “enemy.” The second is to limit the agency of children by forcing them to
choose between survival in a context of resource scarcity in a conflict zone, rebelling against
their families to pick up arms, or running away in order to resist being a passive recipient of
violence and injustice (Korbin 2003). Based on an extensive study conducted by Jammu and
Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society ( JKCCS), the 15-year period from 2003 to 2017 witnessed
no fewer than 318 killings of children in the age group of 1 to 17. This constitutes 6.95 per-
cent of total civilian killings in various incidents of violence in Jammu and Kashmir during
that period ( JKCCS 2018). The JKCCS report on impact of violence on children in Kashmir
also notes how detention of children under repressive laws like Public Safety Act (PSA)2 has
seen substantial rise in numbers particularly in the past decade (Duschinski and Ghosh 2017).
The patterns of use of PSA to arrest children reveals the putative purpose of arresting children
was predominantly to punish and persecute them. In some cases, these arrests were beginning
a process of cultivating an “anti-state element,” wherein police will routinely harass and arrest
these young children whenever there is an anti-government protest in the area ( JKCCS 2018:
17). Indian media and judicial discourses circulate the image of the “unruly and criminalized”
Kashmiri child who participates in stone-pelting and attacks armed forces, as they call for disci-
pling and punishment, much like the way Mufti justifies violent armed assault on children.3 In
most cases, the criminal justice system operates in conjunction with the state’s political mecha-
nism that understands arrests of children as a technique of discipling the child through timely
punishment that ends up stripping children off their basic human and legal rights (Shalhoub-
Kevorkian and Odeh 2018). Either way, children in Kashmir are bereft of a childhood that is
considered safe and secure.
Contemporary literature on children, war and militarism has argued that essentialist notions
of childhood and militarism have been productively intertwined, to inform assumptions about
how children and childhood have worked as symbolic constructions and powerful rhetorical
tools (Frühstück 2017: 1). Sabine Frühstück’s work on children’s games in the context of mili-
tary empires argues that children’s games can be considered as manifestations and generators of
rhetoric about the nature of children and the roles they ought to play (ibid.: 22). By sanctifying
the child’s vulnerability, innocence, and moral authority, both the military and the political and
popular culture at large have successfully instrumentalized the child while also silencing it (ibid.:
212). In that sense, attributions of childhood as innocent or incapable of independent thought
and actions enable the metaphorical child to do a great deal of political work in the affective
imagination of children and adults.
There is little doubt that surrounding environmental factors influences children’s lives. Chil-
dren’s spatial lives are bound up in a web of personal emotional biographies and family practices,
as well as local and global factors (Leonard 2010: 330). Conflict zones marred by relentless
violence have even greater effect of spatiality and its role in meaning-making processes for
individuals and communities living in such geographies where contradictions of aspirations
and belonging to a repertoire of nationalism has held a much difficult history of violence and
repression (Akesson 2014, 2016). While young people often occupy shared spaces with adults,
they modify adult meanings of place through their interaction with their everyday environments
(Scheper-Hughes and Sargent 1998). This means that while there may be continuities between
adults’ and children’s perspectives on spaces and places, a more nuanced understanding of space
necessitates paying attention to the possible discontinuities as well. Children’s lives in the spaces
222
Playing Cricket in Eidgah
of their play and games with their peers and extension of the play within their homes offer us a
window to learn how trajectories of aspiration and affective labor of love and hate built through
a discursive process of meaning making of reality help them navigate through the environs
(Scheper-Hughes 1992).
In this chapter, I destabilize the figure of the Kashmiri Child by attending to the realm of play
in the life of Kashmiri boys, who regularly play cricket in the open ground of Eidgah, located
in the western end of central Srinagar city. Inspired by Roberte Hamayon (2017) who explores
the paradoxical nature of play and what anthropologists can gain by attending to the nuances
of play in a given society, I consider how the act of playing as if one were Pakistani cricketer
Shahid Afridi (one of the most reputed Pakistani cricketers) can inform us about the social and
political world that young boys in Kashmir inhabit. Can the aspirations for belonging to Paki-
stan, expressed by the young boys during play, be understood as affective labor of loving and
negotiating the complex terrains of nationalism? If so, can conceptualizing play as generative
apparatus of sociality inform us about childhood as it is lived in Kashmir, beyond the carica-
tured figure of the Kashmiri child? What do these vignettes from Kashmiri childhood tell us
about the complex play of nationalism in Kashmiri context? Inspired by Batesonian framework,
Hamayon (ibid.: 327) argues that playing is “a rhythmical movement in a limited space referring
to another realm of reality.” Further, play is a process that is constructed by players; the structure
of play is not a sufficient condition for there to be play. Foregrounding the agency of players, she
argues that only players can allow for there to be play (ibid.: 84–85). Humayon underlines that
play can indeed refer to nothing and at the same time play only partially negates the meaning
that the acts that constitute it as a modality of action. Hence, a “play frame” is implicitly a fic-
tion with the appearance of a reality. A fictional frame reflecting an empirical reality is therefore
a possibility that an act of play provides. In her work, she provides the example that a little girl
bathing her doll indeed intends to “bathe” and “wash” it; this bath, which would be called fic-
tional, and is “purposely created by her imagination and perceived as having a value of reality
in the field of imagination, resembles the one that her mother gives her, but only resembles it,
and the little girl knows this” (ibid.: 85). Every game, no matter how informal or rudimentary,
reflects some form of reality: “Each type of game shows a different facet of the identity and
alterity relation between players, which always define the self and the other, be he or she an
opponent or a partner” (ibid.: 169).
To me, the game of cricket played by Kashmiri boys as if they were a Pakistani team is an
ethnographic moment that allows fiction to gauge a specific form of reality in Kashmir. The
fictional moment of playing as if one was a Pakistani team that is purposefully created by imagi-
nation as – one that has a certain value of reality – is an opening into the view of life lived in that
geography. Though fictional, this “play frame of cricket” destabilizes the binaries of narratives
that caricature Kashmiri lives much like the way violence warps and weaves through everyday
life. In the following sections, I begin by presenting vignettes of a group of young boys playing
cricket in Eidgah ground in Srinagar who impersonate themselves as famous Pakistani cricket-
ers. In the sections thereafter, I consider how affective labor of loving Pakistan is performed by
these young boys and then reflect upon the complicated contours of belonging, and nationalism
in Kashmir.
Fictional Frames of Being Shahid Afridi

I was visiting the Martyr’s Graveyard in the Eidgah ground in Srinagar when a lime green
Cosco cricket ball hit my right leg while standing near the gate of the graveyard. When
I paid attention to the screams of “six” emerging across the graveyard, a boy in a blue t-shirt
223
Sarbani Sharma
standing on the other side of graveyard railing asked me to hand him over the ball. Perceiv-
ing from my demeanor that I was a non-local person and presumably a journalist, he asked
me, “Will you go and tell this to everyone in India how our brothers are killed every day?”
Before I could respond, his friends who were waiting for the ball called him back. After about
45 minutes dusk settled in, and the boys started winding up their sports gear and discussing
the timing for next day’s match. In a few minutes, the boy in the blue t-shirt came running
toward me toward the edge of the Eidgah field. While I was waiting for an auto rickshaw to
return back home. He was still catching up with his breath but continued asking me: Where
are you going? Will you come tomorrow also? Why did you come to the graveyard? Do you
play cricket? Before awaiting my answers to any of those questions, he slowed down his pace
and assertively said,
did you notice, we were playing as Pakistani cricket team, not Indian team? The guy
who was batting today is our Shahid Afridi. He plays very well, did you see how many
sixers he shot? I am a fast bowler, it’s very tough for the batsmen to score runs when
I am bowling. I will be bowling tomorrow.
I asked him, “What is your name?” He promptly replied, “Mudasir!”4 By then he got sum-
moned from his friends standing behind him, asking if he quickly wanted to grab some nadir-
mounje (lotus root fritters). As Mudasir sprinted back to go, on a departing note he said again,
“Didi, come again tomorrow at 4:30pm.”
As I aproached Eidgah in search of public transportation to north of Srinagar the next day, I
saw the children playing on the other side of the Eidgah field to avoid the wet soil and puddles
of water on the ground brought by the rain showers of the previous night. There were about
seven or eight boys in the age group of 8–12 years divided into two groups. There was only one
batsman, and the other player at the other end of the stumps was only a runner without a cricket
bat. Both the players used a single cricket bat to strike the ball. The wicket keeper was wearing
gloves only for one hand, and he was in a semi-ducked position at least three feet away from the
stumps. The stumps consisted of single wooden stick and two bricks on each side supporting
the stick, to perform the job of the stump for their game. The bowler ran at least two meters
before swinging the ball, and it was a total of five overs match. The boys soon noticed that I was
watching them play. Mudasir tried to sneak in gestures toward to me to pay attention toward
his bowling skills and often while fielding came running to ask me if I liked cricket. When the
batsmen kept hitting repeated sixers on all balls, those fielding kept cheering him “Go Afridi!”
I found it amusing that the fielders were also cheering for the batsmen. The bowler kept yell-
ing at the fielders after every ball for being mound-gopun (lazy cattle) while fielding. Each fielder
kept telling the other a better technique to be put in use for a catch or kept placing blame on
the lack of spin in the ball for the underperformance. Barring the batsmen, almost all of them
spoke spontaneously at the same pitch of voice. Probably the cacophony made them realize the
joys of the game. More balls were delivered by another bowler, a boy who was slightly taller
and a faster runner than the previous ones. The batsman continued to perform consistently.
From what I perceived, the fact that he never got “out” was the criteria to declare him and his
“side” of the team as the winner of the match. Unlike the formal broadcasted cricket matches,
it was difficult to decipher who was playing with whom on which side. Soon it was sunset, and
mobile phones in the players’ pockets started ringing; assumedly parents were beckoning sons
back home at twilight.
As I encountered Mudasir and his friends sporadically at Eidgah over the next few weeks,
he would enthusiastically explain to me how good the game was on a given day based on a
224
combination of parameters. There was always extensive explanation about new techniques that
the boys had discussed for improving their game. Some of the young players who had elder
brothers at home would bring tips and share anecdotes of their brothers’ games with the team,
adding to the collective learning and sharing knowledge of the game of cricket.
It was evident that there was a huge difference between the formal game of cricket and the
informal game, popularly called as “gully cricket” in the Indian subcontinent. For these Eidgah
boys, the game of gully cricket defined an event of sportsmanship and an opportunity to play
a game as if it was real formal cricket. Street or gully cricket is understood as a stripped-down
version of formal international cricket, which is one of the most avidly followed recreational
sports amongst men in South Asia. Formal international cricket consists of three formats: test
cricket, where two teams with 11 players each play for over three to four days; One Day Inter-
national (ODI) format, comprising 50 overs innings by each team to be completed within a
specific number of hours; and lastly T20 speed cricket, a relatively recent format of playing 20
overs innings by each team. Without digressing further into technical details of the formal game
of cricket here, it is important to underline that in gully cricket, the formation of competing
teams is adaptable. Since the number of boys playing gully cricket at a given time might be less
than 22, the teams formed are primarily based on the bowlers and fielders as one team against
the batsmen who usually plays short innings of six to ten overs. Each “over” consists of five or
six balls delivered to the batsman on strike. Needless to say, it is gully cricket players and teams
who subsequently consolidate into more coherent formal teams for inter-neighborhood, inter-
city or various small-scale league matches and subsequently graduate to join national level teams
and international clubs.
For most South Asian countries even today, gully cricket and formal cricket continue to be
predominantly sports for boys. This could be possibly explained by the nature of gully cricket,
which is usually played in open grounds, neighborhood lanes, or porches of building com-
plexes under the gaze of the public eye and presence. The word “gully” itself refers to a narrow
lane lined with houses or buildings on both sides. Gully cricket is usually coordinated and
organized by boys of a neighborhood, who sustain intimate friendships amongst themselves
and conduct small scale money collection drives that help them to procure balls and other
basic accessories for the game. The very informality and passion with which boys and young
men play gully cricket in South Asia, in many variations and across class locations, makes
cricket one of the most popular sports played and consumed in South Asia. Almost every
reputed player in South Asia ranging from Waqar Younis, Imran Khan, Kapil Dev, Moham-
mad Rafique, Virat Kohli to Sanath Jayasuriya, with various training and career trajectories
in international cricket have all recounted gully cricket as their first socialization with the
game. Traditionally access to public spaces with unobstructed freedom to move one’s body in
a democratic manner has not been inaccessible to most girls and women in South Asia. This
could explain why despite the recent formation of national women’s cricket teams in most
South Asian countries, the popularity and commercial value of the game remain anchored to
men’s cricket in South Asia.
Returning to the vignette of Mudasir and his friends playing gully cricket in a Srinagar
neighborhood as if they were a Pakistani team, I offer this reflective piece on what such children’s
game can help us understand about childhood and textures of life and the social in Kashmir.
I read the informal rules of the game – the boys’ impersonation of Pakistani cricket players
and their articulated refusal to support and aspire to be the Indian cricket team – as evidence
of the interiority formed in the lives of these young boys, seemingly reflecting the social and
political world they lived in. This by no means intends to generalize and homogenize the
cricketing practice and childhood experiences in Kashmir, for Eidgah is only one of the many
225
Sarbani Sharma
quintessential neighborhoods in the western end of central Srinagar. Eidgah as space and its
neighborhood are uniquely identified with the vast open ground for three primary purposes.
First, it provides space for large congregations for biannual Eid namaaz.5 Second, it serves as the
biggest trading venues in Srinagar for Gujjar and Bakarwal communities to sell their sheep or
goats before Eid-Ul-Azha. Third and most importantly, Eidgah hosts one of the oldest martyr’s
graveyards in Srinagar city. The demographic population of Eidgah consists of the middle to
upper-middle mercantile and service class who traditionally lived in downtown Srinagar but
later moved to the edges of downtown to accommodate growing family needs of space and
property expansion. Much recently post-2008, Eidgah has often transformed a site of fierce
battleground between armed forces and mourners during the burial of martyrs in the grave-
yard and with namaazis (a term referred to people who offer prayers) post Eid namaaz protests.
Therefore, it was not unusual for children of the neighborhood to see Eid namaaz ending with
bloodshed or waking up to smell of tear gas shells and stone pelting outside their homes.
After almost two weeks of sporadic encounters with Mudasir, I met Mudasir’s mother
who had stopped by in her car near the graveyard to pick up Mudasir to attend to a social
invitation. On seeing me wait near the car while Mudasir packed his bags, she inquired if
I was the same person who Mudasir spoke to, believing me to be a journalist. Mudasir’s
mother, who was an entrepreneur, generously invited me to her home for a warm and
hearty meal upon learning that I lived in a hostel in Srinagar. Over the years, Mudasir’s
mother became one ofbmy closest acquaintances in Srinagar. On learning that I was from
Delhi and that Mudasir had told me about their admiration for Pakistani cricket team, she
hastily told me,
These kids keep playing all the time. They pick up from adult conversations and God
knows how they understand these matters about which cricket team to support and
who to hate. Pakistani players are popular in Kashmir for obvious reasons, but some-
times Mudasir even likes Sachin Tendulkar. Life is so uncertain and complicated here,
and kids pick up these complex matters very fast.
Mudasir’s mother’s response toward his game of cricket and the complex interplay of nation-
alism in cricket indicates the intricacies of parenting and childhood in a long drawn political
dispute. Her response signals the inevitability of competing nationalist fandoms in Kashmir
as well as a possible discomfort with talking to an Indian guest about textures of affinity with
Pakistan while being mindful of civility and care in her hospitality as well as the latent anxie-
ties and struggles of parenting a child in such geographies. Aatina Nisar Malik’s (2020) recent
work on Kashmiri children and young adults playing Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG)
and Military-Mujahid games in downtown Srinagar initiates a much-needed conversation on
how children wrapped in multiple catastrophes find ways through the acts of play and games
to navigate their social and political crisis. For Malik (ibid.: 10–11) playing, in the case of both
Military-Mujahid and PUBG,
is an embodied practice where players experience emotional and affective experi-

ences that shape their subjectivity and agency, thus contributing to their sense of
identity. The “virtual and actual” in terms of online and offline experiences (for
PUBG), and “imaginary and actual” (for both Military-Mujahid and PUBG) thus
are not mutually exclusive but continuous and flowing into each other, imbued
with meaningful emotions, affects and actions constituting reality in the everyday
of children.
226
Malik (ibid.: 7) refrains from freezing the identity of Kashmir childhood through the perpetual
trope of lack, victimhood, and criminalization, and rather
locates children’s agency through playing at the intersection of “becomings” and

“beings,” that is, children’s subjectivities and agency are no doubt shaped by the pro-
cess of socio-spatial processes of subjectification, but children do not passively follow
it but are social actors in their own right, actively taking part in matters that affect and
interest them.
The fictional play frame of cricket, therefore, becomes a method for the children as well as
for me as an anthropologist to destabilize the narrative of the innocent killed or maimed Kash-
miri child and the forever unruly criminalized children, to unravel the complex and striated
everyday lives of children in Kashmir. In the following section, I analyze the work of the game
of cricket in Kashmir and the dilemmas of postcolonial nationalism in a conflict zone.
Making of India in Kashmir: The Work of Cricket and Pakistan

Apart from the several other verticals that enabled the performance of “othering” and hating
Pakistan, cricket as sports has come to be a placeholder of sedimented identities and a practice
that materially and emotionally communicated the performance of becoming an Indian and a
Pakistani. Being one of the most popular sports played and enjoyed in both the countries despite
its colonial inheritance from the British nationalism and politics seamlessly swaddled around the
game.
Cricket like all sports is a relational idiom, a sphere of activity which expresses, in con-
centrated forms, the values, prejudices, divisions and unifying symbols of a society . . .
sport is a microcosm of the fissures and tensions of a deeply divided society: fissures
that both reflects and plays upon, mitigates as well as intensifies.
(Guha 1998: 157)
It is in this context that I foreground how the complex terrains of nationalism are navigated
by Kashmiri children who have been exposed to a life in Kashmir of “double interminability,”
which can be defined as a positionality forced upon every Kashmiri to navigate between the
contemporaneous reality of continuous conflict and unrest on the one hand, and a constant
struggle to achieve the desired goal of azaadi on the other. This simultaneity of constant war
and unrest results in a continuous struggle for azaadi and forces the people of Kashmir to be in
a position that cannot be sustained for long. And, at the same time, the so-called “peace” and
“normalcy” projected by statist narratives renews this result in a continuous struggle for azaadi
(Sharma 2020: 29). Much has been written about the role of cricket in the social, economic, and
political landscape of the postcolonial states of India and South Asia at large (Dain and Calder
2007; Guha 1998: MacLean 2009; Mehta 2009). In this section, I attend to the repertoire of
children playing cricket in Kashmir, which offers a window to explore the complex landscape
of nationalism and its processual historical trajectories. This is much like the way Akesson (2014,
2016) articulates that conflict zones marred by relentless violence have even greater effect of
spatiality and its role in meaning making processes for individuals and communities wherein
contradictions of aspirations and belonging to a repertoire of nationalism has held a much dif-
ficult history of violence and repression. Contextualizing the complex contradictions of nation-
alism that are imposed upon the body politic of Kashmir, unraveling the dynamics of playing
227
Sarbani Sharma
a sport like cricket will help comprehend and conceptualize the everyday life in Kashmir away
from the binaries of national-anti national, loyalty-treachery or love-hate.
Children’s voices and actions exemplify the textures of love, yearning, and belonging around
the idea of Pakistan, which exists in the public life of the Kashmir Valley as a debate and as an
idea. In most conversations circulating in everyday life of Kashmir Valley, the love for Paki-
stan is disseminated across various publics through numerous vectors of aspiration, affinity and
association. For many, the aspiration to assimilate the Kashmir Valley with Pakistan informs a
template of a logical solution to the prolonged Kashmir dispute – one that will, at last, settle the
two-nation theory of 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent. For some, the love for Pakistan
and a constant laboring to associate oneself with a nation-state that one has perhaps neither
visited, nor been aware of its inherent multiplicities, is also an act of gratitude. This feeling of
gratitude is understood as the appreciation for all the support and advocacy that is perceived
to be provided by the Pakistani state for the Kashmiri right to self-determination movement.
To others, Pakistan is not necessarily imagined as a nation-state that would resolve the prob-
lems that have plagued Kashmiris but is seen instead as a space of affinity to Kashmiris, being a
Muslim-majority nation that permits participation in a similar ethical and religious universe of
Islamic piety and faith systems.
Notwithstanding the variations in these affective relationships to Pakistan and the internal
contestations about efficiency and utility of the Pakistani state’s role as a stakeholder in the con-
flict, the affective relationship is a lasting presence in the public life of Kashmir Valley. It is with
the latter sense that several Kashmiri households consume Pakistani popular soap operas, fashion
and beauty websites, and television and YouTube channels on Islamic spirituality and debates
on the plurality of Islamic piety. Despite the recent ban on Pakistani satellite channels of news
and entertainment in Kashmir, the coming of age in television media with over the top (OTT)
platforms like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hotstar have further diversified the consumption of
entertainment content that circumvented state-driven censorship laws so far. Though separated
by wide social, cultural, and linguistic lifeworlds, the affinity and association with Pakistan are
also related to the strong trading relations and free movement of people and kinship networks
before 1947, between cities like Rawalpindi in present-day Pakistan and places like Srinagar in
the Kashmir Valley. As historians of 1947 Partition have elaborated, the movement of people,
goods, and relationships were drastically altered only with the drawing of borders on territories
to mark formations of nation-states (Chatterjee 1993; Manchanda 2001; Noorani 1996). Yet,
post-Partition era of the Indian subcontinent left individuals and numerous communities with
the perplexing tasks of forming new universal “national” identities drawn from the fragmented
and multicultural newly formed India and Pakistan.
There is little doubt that geographies like Kashmir that drew extensive social, cultural, and
religious systems and symbols from Central Asia and Persia (Rai 2004; Zutshi 2003), far beyond
the socio-cultural landscape of South Asia, found even its elite, apathetic and exploitative politi-
cal class in a dilemma to choose its political fate with either of the newly formed India and
Pakistan (Snedden 2012). Hafsa Kanjwal’s writings on post-partition narratives of Kashmiri
Muslims illustrate the ways in which Kashmiri Muslims found themselves divided between the
new nation-states of India and Pakistan, which as separate political community that had its own
political visions did not seamlessly fit into the political trajectories of either (Kanjwal 2018: 41).
Her interlocutors underline how specifically Kashmiri Muslims in the
Indian-held state of Jammu and Kashmir had to deal with multiple contradictions and
dilemmas. One, as contestations over the future of Kashmir still remained unresolved,
they witnessed the erosion of Kashmir’s autonomy and the promises of a United
228
Nations-mandated plebiscite, as well as intense political repression . . . paradoxically,

Kashmiri Muslims had to negotiate their own aspirations for modernity and progress
after decades of poverty and misrule under their princely rulers, the Dogras.
(Kanjwal 2018: 41)
The event of the Partition, its ensuing violence, the gendered and incommensurable expec-
tations of the national integration project undertaken during the formative years of drafting
Indian Constitution accompanied by upper caste-class Hindu imagination of a modern Indian
nation-state rendered the fluid yet singular identities of identities redundant. The imagination of
converting an “idea of India” (Embree 1989) into “India as Nation-State” overnight by drawing
borders and formulating a constitution for the vast diverse population led to hasty annexations
of territories and provinces. These “nation-building” or national integration pursuits neither
affirmed the two-nation theory-rule of the partition nor resonated with the political emotions
and visions of the diverse fragmented population. This led to a series of colonial overtures by the
postcolonial state of India. Lately, the soft overtones of upper caste-class imagination of Indian
nation have taken the form of settler colonialism under the “Hindutva driven ethno-nationalist
project of national integration of Kashmir” (Zia 2020).
Indian nationalism and patriotism were always processual, and they had to be incubated
through multiple social, political, and cultural struggles for centuries together. Hence, it devel-
oped a distinct character, one that was different from the modern European nationalisms and
constitutional patriotism. A few decades into the postcolonial era, nationalism and patriotism
in India evolved only against the semantics of an “Anti-National.” With the rise of populist and
Hindutva establishment in India, nationalism and patriotism further transformed onto a con-
tinuous ahistorical testification process, through which one had to repeatedly qualify arbitrary
loyalty tests and worthiness of citizenship by annihilating all practices of dissent and democratic
engagement with differences. Therefore, Indian nationalism and patriotism came to be devel-
oped and performed only under the behest of existence of Pakistan as a nation-state, which
came to be defined as the eternal enemy, the “them” and the forever “other.” It is through the
act of opposing and hating the eternal enemy and the incommensurable “other” through a cer-
tain manner of public performativity that the contemporary “us” and “we” in India nationalism
and patriotism have come to be formed.
To reiterate the discussion from Frühstück (2017), understanding games and play enable us
to acknowledge the great deal of political work done in the affective imagination of children
and adults. The schools that Kashmiri children attend follow a curriculum that never addresses
the questions and debates of ongoing right to self-determination movement in Kashmir ( Junaid
2018) that frame their everyday lives nor do they contextualize the Pakistani historical perspec-
tives on 1947 Partition of the Indian subcontinent. Under the practices of such pedagogy in
school, complex socialization at home on being a Kashmiri Muslim, learning to survive in a
conflict-zone and loving and admiring a neighboring nation – it impresses upon me to look
into the game of cricket in Eidgah itself as an act of navigating through the structures of repres-
sion by engaging in an affective labor of love and joy. Structures of repression operating on chil-
dren are not limited to censoring any voice of dissent but also permeate structural violence that
criminalizes any alternative form of articulation and belonging other than the one caricatured
to be under the banner of “Indian national unity.” It is still not uncommon to hear of arrests and
criminal prosecution for cheering and supporting the cricket team of Pakistan in India.6 This is
despite the fact that the imagination of “nation,” “nationalism,” “national unity,” and “national
territory” in the Indian subcontinent have all been outcomes of prolonged anti-colonial strug-
gles and violent nation-state formation processes, both of which were inundated with several
229
Sarbani Sharma
debates of desired political visions of various communities which were never operating in abso-
lute isolation (Goswami 2004). Discussing the unique scope of Indian anti-colonial nationalism,
historians like Joya Chatterji (2013) have challenged the idea that an all-India nationalism domi-
nated other types of local, regional, and linguistic solidarities or nationalisms. On the contrary,
it had to jostle and negotiate with them, “seeking to co-opt them to its cause, and when they
threatened its core purposes, attempting to snuff them out” (Aziz 2017: 406). Therefore, in the
making of Indian nationalism in a geography like Kashmir it has always been crucial to mobilize
cricket devoid of its sportsmanship and to conduct constant rhetorical work of “othering” Paki-
stan. The symbolic significance of these mobilizations using a sport swaddled with nationalism
drive deep into the conscious as well as unconscious processes of child socialization in Kashmir.
Cricket as Nationalist “Playbor”

To return to Mudasir and his friends playing cricket through the fictional frame of being Shahid
Afridi, I do not read this as an act of deliberate provocation against the Indian state as a result
of socialization by their adults. Nor do I read it as a reflection of a conclusive merging of Kash-
miri identity with Pakistani national identity. Instead, following Hamayon’s (2017) argument
that fictional frames such as play reflect on empirical realities, I understand the Kashmiri boys’
adoration of Pakistani cricketers like Shahid Afridi as a reflection of the complex negotiations
of nationalism and patriotism that frame everyday life in Kashmir. I underline the conscious
articulation by boys like Mudasir about negotiating the dilemmatic positions forced upon the
Kashmiri body politic that is repeatedly assaulted, repressed, and violated by the Indian state.
The instance of seeing a non-local like myself, presumably an Indian, and asking if the voices of
those who lay dead in martyr’s graveyard in Eidgah would be communicated to publics in India
is a realization that boys playing cricket on the periphery of a martyr’s graveyard are not devoid
of influences on their game of cricket. Mudasir’s mother’s narrative that children in Kashmir
have innocuous ways of comprehending complex processes like nationalism and politics of
“support” and “opposition” in the game of cricket, reinforces the argument that the act of play
itself is a labor of navigating through the complex politics of Kashmiri aspiration of freedom.
Emotive and rigorous games like cricket form a huge impact on the ways in which play-
ers imagine their body, achievement, and identification of self (Thangaraj 2010). The leisure
activity of playing a game like cricket could possibly be seen as an apparatus to collapse the
distinction between an assumed “non-productive” leisure activity and a conscious activity for
value addition of one’s sporting skills drawing upon specific genealogies of inspiration loaded
with explicit political meanings. Recent literature in cultural studies have deliberated upon the
relationship between play and labor, sometimes referred to as “playbor” (play-labor) specifically
in the context of digital gaming world. For Trebor Scholz (2012: 9), it has become imperative
to think about the anatomy of playbor for it has today become impossible to differentiate clearly
between nonproductive leisure activity existing within the sphere of play and productive activ-
ity existing within the workplace. Hence, through the discussion on new forms of labor, time
and investment has renewed within the field of digital labor, its parallels and inspirations can be
still found in the non-virtual spheres too. In the same volume, an essay by Abigail De Kosnik
(2012) on “Fandom as Free Labor” elaborates upon Dick Hebdige’s (2005) work on subcultures
to articulate the work done by fan and affinity groups, which articulates how fans act upon
commodities and imbue them with worth via their performances that consist of displays of
certain expressions and specific actions. In Hebdige’s study, the work performed by subcultures
on commodities, the work of meaning-making, the work of recontextualizing commodities as
crucial components of their performances of attitude and style, is undertaken in self-interest, for
230
subcultures wish more than anything to be visibly distinctive and apart from the rest of society.
An affinity group invests time, effort, and imagination in everyday objects in order to make
those objects serve their needs, which include helping to consolidate and represent the group’s
collective identity, which often stands in clear opposition to societal norms (Hebdige 2005: 6).
Building on this analysis, I suggest that Mudasir and his friends constitute such an affinity
group. They may be seen as engaged in a form of playbor or “fan labor,” as their expressed
affinity with the Pakistani cricket team and its players consolidates and commodifies the object
of Pakistani cricket team or the image of Shahid Afridi. Hebdige’s work helps us understand
the value of paying attention to the nature of time, effort, and imagination into a game like a
cricket invested by young boys like Mudasir, who are constantly navigating through dilemmas of
nationalisms in a never-ending conflict that continuously represses the existence and survival as
a Kashmiri. Playing a game like cricket by Kashmiri children through fictional frames, therefore,
provides a possibility of playbor of nationalism for the children to destabilize what they learn
in their school, families, and Indian national media, while also moving away from the binary
caricatures of a Kashmiri child. The children’s conscious choice to imitate and adore Pakistani
players like Shahid Afridi while playing in the vicinity of Eidgah Martyr’s graveyard constitutes
them as an affinity group who wish to invest time, labor and imagination to conceptualize alter-
native thoughts of belonging and resistance while simultaneously working upon their individual
and collective skills of cricketing as a game.
While my doctoral project of comprehending the multiple articulations and aspirations of
Azaadi through the multiple voices and lives of various Kashmiri adults was the result of inten-
tional and concentrated pursuits, the voices and actions of children drew my attention seren-
dipitously. Meeting and listening to the boys in Eidgah was in several ways, a step away from
the polemics of long-standing political discourse on Kashmir, now ubiquitously sedimented
in every texture of life. Most significantly it offered a unique glimpse in the paradoxes and
complexities of nationalism that plague a life in a militarized territory like Kashmir. It is in this
context of relentless cycles of violence and crisis that fold into the everyday life of Kashmir that
I insist on paying attention to the realm of play of a Kashmiri child that could take us beyond the
oscillating caricatures that assign innocence or criminality to Kashmiri children. The chapter
underlines the ways in which children’s practices of expressing their emotions around play are
influenced by multiple pedagogues in their lives, which take us beyond the image of a Kashmiri
Child as a passive victim of violence or a criminalized child innately attracted to violence.
Notes
1 For a detailed report on loss of working hours in schools and colleges in Kashmir, see Hindustan Times
2017.
2 Public Safety Act (PSA) is the most frequently used preventive detention law used by the state in Kash-
mir to detain any individual without any trial for two years.
3 For report on de-radicalization camps for Kashmir children and youth, see The Wire 2020.
4 All names of individuals have been changed to protect their identity and safety. At the time I conducted
ethnographic fieldwork in Kashmir between 2012 and 2014, institutional review boards for human sub-
jects research were not commonplace in my university in India. As a researcher who studies occupation
and its various impacts on Kashmiris, I was deeply aware and conscious of how irreconcilable power
differences between researchers and vulnerable populations – particularly in contexts of prolonged
conflict – can wittingly or unwittingly compromise the safety of informants. During the period of my
fieldwork, I consciously chose not to pursue structured and systematic data collection on children in
Kashmir. Instead, I offer here a reflective meditation on how young Kashmiri boys rely on their every-
day “play” to fashion their identities amidst enduring forms of violence.
5 Mandatory congregational prayers on the day of Eid, obligatory upon practicing Muslims.
6 For detailed analysis on series of such criminal prosecution in India, see BBC World Service 2014.
231
Sarbani Sharma
Works Cited
Akesson, Bree. 2014. “Contradictions in Place: Everyday Geographies of Palestinian Children and Families
Living Under Occupation.” PhD Thesis, Department of Social Work, McGill University.
———. 2016. “Palestinian Children Forging National Identity through the Social and Spatial Practices
of Territoriality.” In Childhood and Nation: Interdisciplinary Engagements, edited by Zsuzsanna Millei and
Robert Imre, 141–162. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Aziz, Zaib un Nisa. 2017. “Passages from India: Indian Anti-Colonial Activism in Exile, 1905–20.” Histori-
cal Research 90(248): 404–421.
BBC World Service. 2014. “Kashmiri students suspended in India for ‘supporting Pakistan’ in cricket”.
May 5.
Chatterji, Jaya. 2013. “Nationalisms in India, 1857–1947.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nation-
alism, edited by John Breuilly. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ:
Dain, Edmund and Gideon Calder. 2007. “Not Cricket? Ethics, Rhetoric and Sporting Boycotts.” Journal
of Applied Philosophy 24(1): 95–109.
De Kosnik, Abigail. 2012. “Fandom as Free Labor.” In Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory,
edited by Trebor Scholz. New York: Routledge.
Denov, M. and B. Akesson. 2016. “Children and Political Violence: At the Intersection of Rights and
Realities.” Children and Society 30(5): 337–344.
Detention and Permanent Emergency in Kashmir.” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 49(3):
314–337.
Embree, Ainslee. 1989. Imagining India: Essays on Indian History. New York: Oxford University Press.
Frühstück, Sabine. 2017. Playing War: Children and the Paradoxes of Modern Militarism in Japan. University
Goswami, Manu. 2004. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Guha, Ramachandra. 1998. “Cricket and Politics in Colonial India.” Past & Present 161: 155–190.
Hamayon, Roberte. 2017. Why We Play: An Anthropological Study, translated by Damien Simon. Chicago:
HAU Books.
Hebdige, Dick. 2005 [1979]. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge.
Hindustan Times. 2017. “ Since July 2016, Kashmir’s schools and colleges stayed shut on 60% of working
days”. May 30.
Jayaram, Rahul. 2018. “Of Dropping the Gully Cricket World Cup, and Other Tales of Mimicking
My Heroes.” Daily O, July 18. www.dailyo.in/humour/gully-cricket-wasim-akram-sachin-tendulkar-
imran-khan-inzamam-ul-haq-underarm-bowling/story/1/25536.html.
JKCCS. 2018. Terrorised: Impact of Violence on the Children of Jammu and Kashmir. Edited by Irfan Mehraj,
Natasa Rather, Sheikh Adil, and Syed Javaid Kazmi. Srinagar: Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil
Society.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2018. “Epitaphs as Counterhistories: Martyrdom, Commemoration, and the Work of
Graveyards in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan,
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2018. “Reflections on the Post-Partition Period: Life Narratives of Kashmiri Muslims in
Contemporary Kashmir.” Himalaya 38(2): 22–60.
Korbin, Jill E. 2003. “Children, Childhoods, and Violence.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32(1): 431–446.
Leonard, Madeleine. 2010. “Parochial Geographies: Growing up in Divided Belfast.” Childhood 17(3): 329–342.
MacLean, Malcolm. 2009. “A National(st) Line in Postcolonizing Cricket: Viv Richards, Biographies and
Cricketing Nationalism.” Sport in Society 12(4–5): 537–550.
Malik, Aatina Nisar. 2020. “Mapping Children’s Play and Violence in Kashmir.” Childhood 27(3): 354–368.
Manchanda, Rita, ed. 2001. Women, War and Peace in South Asia: Beyond Victimhood to Agency. New Delhi:
Sage Publications.
Mehta, Nalin. 2009. “Batting for the Flag: Cricket, Television and Globalization in India.” Sport in Society
12(4–5): 579–599.
Noorani, A G. 1996. “Partition of Kashmir.” Economic and Political Weekly 31(5): 271–273.
232
Rai, Mridu. 2004. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir. Princeton, NJ:
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley:
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy and Carolyn Fishel Sargent. 1998. Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scholz, Trebor, ed. 2012. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera and Shahrazad Odeh. 2018. “Arrested Childhood in Spaces of Indifference: The
Criminalized Children of Occupied East Jerusalem.” Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 30(3): 398–422.
Sharma, Sarbani. 2020. “Laboring for Kashmir’s Azadi: Ongoing Violence and Resistance in Maisuma,
Snedden, Christopher. 2012. The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Thangaraj, Stanley. 2010. “Ballin’ Indo-Pak Style: Pleasures, Desires, and Expressive Practices of ‘South
Asian American’ Masculinity.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3): 372–389.
The Wire. 2020. “CDS Bipin Rawat Advocates Putting Young Kashmiri Children in ‘De-Radicalisation
Camps.’ ” January 16.
Zia, Ather. 2020. “The Haunting Specter of Hindu Ethnonationalist-Neocolonial Development in the
Indian Occupied Kashmir.” Development 63(1): 60–66.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2003. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. New
Delhi: Orient Blackswan.
233
SECTION IV
Religion, History, Politics

Hafsa Kanjwal
How do we understand the role of religion and religious identities in Kashmir’s past and present?
The chapters in this section approach this question from a variety of perspectives – including
the hagiopolitics of repression to assemblages to sacred necropolitics to traces – all the while
imbuing religion and religious figures as critical to understanding developments in Kashmir.
Iconic Kashmiri historical figures like Lal Ded, Nund Reshi, and Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani are
revisited in Dean Accardi and Rafiq A. Pirzada’s two chapters. Accardi examines the histories of
how these Kashmiri local saints become part of a “hagiopolitics of repression” in which
religious figures revered by the local population for the divine order and power they
represent are systematically reappropriated and reconfigured to no longer serve the
needs of the people but rather to reinforce the dominance of the ruling regime.
Pirzada moves beyond existing narratives of the processes of Islamization in medieval Kashmir
by foregrounding the analytic of “assemblages” to describe the “dynamic process of adoption,
adaption and reconfiguration of earlier traditions and spaces undertaken through a complex
yet creative network of relationships and multiplicities invoking emigrant Sufi sayyids, ulema,
sultans, nobles, rishis, neo-convert elites, and landed aristocracy.” In this chapter, Kashmiri local
saints like Nund Reshi and Ali Hamadani play a crucial role in serving as conduits between the
Perso-Islamicate tradition and the existing Brahmanical order. Bringing the Islamic tradition to
the present, Umer Jan extends Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics to argue for a “sacred
necropolitics,” which takes into account the agency of subjects upon whom the biopolitical
sovereignty of death is enacted. He argues that Kashmiri rebels and the population at large has
appropriated necropolitics by wresting “away the sovereign right of the allocation of death from
the structures of India’s (necropolitical) military occupation.” Here, shahadat, or martyrdom,
becomes an important component of anti-India resistance.
A number of chapters in this section also explore the relationship between Kashmiri Muslims
and Pandits. Accardi presents asceticism as something that brings together Hindus and Mus-
lims under a shared conceptual framework that also “shaped religious and political discourses
and practices that undergirded the establishment of an early modern state in Kashmir.” At the
same time, he critiques discourses of kashmiriyat, arguing that figures like Lal Ded have been
mistakenly appropriated as promoting syncretism or interreligious harmony. Discourses that
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-21
Hafsa Kanjwal
foreground kashmiriyat as being “authentically Kashmiri” run the risk of situating political
opinions not in line with the “syncretic ethos of kashmiriyat” as precluding one being called
Kashmiri or having legitimate political aspirations. The danger of this lies in “deciding current
politics of the basis of cultural essence and aligning the present with the past instead of the will
of those governed.” Similarly, Mohamad Junaid challenges the discourses of syncretism and
Kashmiriyat that underscore the “taming” of Kashmiri Islam, in which Kashmir was “essentially
a Hindu space in which Islam had gradually lost its orthodoxy.” He shows how tehreek history-
writers in Kashmir challenge colonial Brahman accounts of Kashmir as essentially a Hindu
civilization. More importantly, he argues that Kashmiris as a people do not reject syncretism,
but highlight how it “historically emerged through centuries of cultural, religious, material and
linguistic interactions and traffic with the Persianate world, Central Asia, and subcontinent.”
The analytic of assemblage that Pirzada invokes is also resonant here.
Ankur Datta’s chapter foregrounds how the displacement and departure of Kashmiri Pandits
is marked by ambiguity as it raises different imaginaries of Kashmir as a homeland and as home.
He poignantly refers to the keys and material objects owned by Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu
and New Delhi as “traces” of a displaced present, “portals to homes and homelands somewhere
else.” These traces also emerge in the “re-establishment” of shines and temples in these new
cities, which become part of a “project of remembrance.” He concludes with reflections on
the return of Kashmiri Pandits to the Valley, and asks how in the context of present violence,
a future that is difficult to predict, and a past that is a wasteland, “what kind of homeland will
Pandits return to?”
Bringing our attention to the processes of knowledge productions and epistemology,
Mohamad Junaid and Gowhar Fazili’s two chapters expose the hypocrisy in both Indian liberal
and scholarly discourses on Kashmir. Junaid argues that Kashmiri “tehreek history-writers see
Indian historiography as an ideological scaffolding for Indian control over Kashmir” and that
“the emergence of tehreek history-writers and their work can be fully understood only by read-
ing them as oppositional logics to the official Indian historiography.” In particular, he provides
a critique of the subaltern studies school in leaving “unexamined the question of postcolonial
occupation” which “makes invisible the politics of those subordinated groups like Kashmiris
who view India not just as external but as an occupier state.” Fazili situates this erasure by Indian
liberals in particular by speaking of a “malleability of ethics,” in which he argues for a “deeper
cultural orientation towards the notion of truth that makes it impossible to negotiate claims
based on ethics.” This malleability is situated in the “deep-rooted regressive Brahmanical values
and intellectual traditions.” In turn, he argues that the Indian occupation in Kashmir should be
seen as not only a “realist neo-colonial project driven by national interest but an outcome of a
deeper cultural problem with what passes off as Indian values.” In an interesting contrast with
Jan’s discussion of martyrdom, Fazili argues that the Brahmanical order lacks a concept of mar-
tyrdom – which rejuvenates community and ethical orders through acts of moral courage and
“bearing witness to truth against the will of the powerful at the risk of losing ones life.”
Finally, almost all of the chapters in this section assert Kashmiri selfhoods and notions of
self-sovereignty. These emerge in Accardi’s chapter, which argues for the “possibility for Kash-
miris to redefine and redeploy those saints in ways that render saints an alternative geography
of resistance.” Saints do not simply play the role of providing miracles, but are also “integral
to alternative frameworks to pursue justice, build community, engage in social and political
activism and produce countermemory.” It emerges in Pirzada’s discussion of the auradi fatiha,
which serves as an iconic example of an assemblage. Kashmiri notions of selfhood also appear
in Datta’s discussion of Mashaemit Gharrih, an online multimedia space that brings together a
younger generation of Kashmiri Muslim and Pandit youth. By allowing for “different voices
236
Religion, History, Politics
to be presented on their own terms through connections, similarities and differences,” Datta
argues that “possibilities of imagining home can emerge which account for and acknowledge
different histories and experiences of violence and suffering.” Junaid’s discussion of tehreek
history-writing – which “finds expression in Kashmiri literature, political tracts, art, poetry, and
social media commentaries” – represents “acts of anti-colonial memory and form a reservoir of
critical knowledge,” asserting notions of selfhood and sovereignty that counter Indian historio-
graphical accounts. And finally, in Jan’s discussion, the practices at martyr’s funerals and the last
phone calls of Kashmiri rebels to their families which are subsequently shared across a “digital
culture of subversion” represent a dominant mode of popular political resistance in Kashmir. By
imbuing death with characteristics of the sacred, Kashmiris are able to wrest away the sovereign
right of the allocation of death from India’s occupation.
237
17
RELIGIOUS AND POLITICAL
POWER IN KASHMIR
Recollecting the Past for the
(Post)colonial Present
Dean Accardi
Introduction
Kashmir is increasingly referred to as “the most dangerous place in the world” (Winter-Levy
2019; Editorial Board 2019; Popham 2000; Mir 2020). Situated at the borders of India, Pakistan,
and China, Kashmir has been the focus of four official wars, countless military skirmishes, and
ongoing armed resistance. Yet, far from losing their heritage and culture amidst such upheaval,
Kashmiris find their cherished local saints invoked by nearly every party wishing to assert claims
over the rightful belonging and future of Kashmir.
This chapter analyzes two notable instances in the recent past in which local Kashmiri saints
were invoked to make claims over Kashmir’s political belonging: Pakistani President Zia-ul-
Haq’s 1987 memorialization of ‘Ali Hamadani to justify his regime’s Islamization programs
and Pakistan’s political claims over Kashmir; and Indian Prime Minister Modi’s 2015 speech
that invoked Lal Ded, Nund Rishi, and Kashmiriyat to claim Kashmir rightfully belongs to
India. To provide context and contrast to Modi’s use of Kashmiriyat, this chapter also examines
a prior invocation of Lal Ded and Nund Rishi for Kashmiriyat by Nyla Ali Khan, scholar and
granddaughter of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. These analyses highlight the dangers of using
Kashmiri saints to fulfill agendas of imperialism and settler colonialism, mapping what I call “the
hagiopolitics of repression” deployed against Kashmiris. However, the state’s reliance upon the
popular social imaginary of these saints renders them a possible alternative geography of resist-
ance, serving as means to disrupt current state usage of these figures and the agendas for which
they are invoked and provide an alternative means to assert Kashmiri self-sovereignty.
Before engaging in these analyses, however, one must first understand the broader contexts
in which these saints exist. Who are these saints? How were they constellated together in
the past, and how did representations of these saints serve sociopolitical purposes in the past?
Moreover, how do these historical saints and their shrines continue to provide vital significance
for contemporary Kashmiri social life and religious practice?
Saints of the Kashmiri Sultanate

This chapter discusses four early modern Kashmiri saints that continue to play a prominent role
in Kashmiri identity, religion, and politics: Lal Ded, Nund Rishi, ‘Ali Hamadani, and Hamza
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-22 239

Dean Accardi
Makhdum Sahib. All four of these saints lived during the Kashmiri Sultanate (1320–1586 CE),
a period that looms large over Kashmiri public memory and identity. Many Kashmiris consider
this period “the last time Kashmiris ruled themselves” – that is, before Kashmir was conquered
and ruled successively by the Mughals, Afghan Durranis, Punjabi Sikhs, Dogras of Jammu, and
currently India and Pakistan. As a result, figures from this period are often revered as founders of
Kashmiri culture and thus serve as a potent means by which to assert claims over Kashmir. Fur-
thermore, from the tributes to these saints found in Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s Javid Nama and
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s Atish-e-Chinar; to ‘Ali Hamadani’s shrine and mosque complex,
the Khanqah-i-Mualla, being a major center of political agitation for Kashmiri independence
in the 1940s; to Srinagar being home to a Lal Ded Maternity Hospital, Nund Rishi College of
Education, and Sheikh ul Alam Airport, there is little doubt these saints continue to play a vital
role in everyday life in contemporary Kashmir.
Who, then, are these saints? Uncovering the real-life details of living, breathing saints of the
premodern past is a difficult if not impossible task. However, a general overview is tentatively
provided based upon commonalities found across a broad reading of historical sources.
Accounts of Nund Rishi tend to agree that he was born into rather poor circumstances
in the late fourteenth century. His spiritual inclinations led him to a life of intense asceticism
involving fasting, chastity, poverty, and wilderness living for the purposes of religious devotion.
While some accounts assert he was initiated and/or instructed by Sufi masters of his day, most
concur that Nund Rishi was foremost an Uwaisi, meaning his true initiation and religious
instruction came from beings in the spiritual world, such as deceased Sufi masters, prophets, and
angels. Nund Rishi’s intense asceticism, devotion, miracles, and teachings drew attention and
admiration from the Kashmiri populace as well as from other eminent Sufi masters – attracting
many devotees to his newly founded Rishi Order of Sufis.
Nund Rishi appears to have chosen the term Rishi to connect his ascetic religious practices
to rishis of Kashmir’s ancient past. Such positive appropriation of religiosities preceding the birth
of the Prophet Muhammad attests to a view that Islam is eternal and Divinity consistent such
that if someone had produced genuine miracles in the past, that miracle-worker must have been
a saintly recipient of God’s blessings and thus worthy of emulation. Nund Rishi is even said to
have professed himself the immediate spiritual successor of Lal Ded – who is often considered a
non-Muslim (Hindu, Shaiva, or otherwise) or at least born non-Muslim.
In contrast to Nund Rishi, there is simultaneously less historical evidence and more con-
testation over Lal Ded. She has been claimed as an archetypal Hindu bhakti saint, a proponent
of Kashmir Shaivism, an elite Sufi mystic, a pious Muslim woman, a syncretic saint embodying
Kashmir and its people, and/or the first poet of the modern Kashmiri language. Born into a
non-Muslim family in the early decades of the fourteenth century, Lal Ded turned against the
social expectations of adolescent girls and chose to adopt the life of an itinerant naked ascetic.
Many stories circulate of her confronting religious authorities of her day as their social and
spiritual equal, if not superior.
Unlike Lal Ded and Nund Rishi, ‘Ali Hamadani lived most of his life outside of Kashmir.
Born in the early fourteenth century to a prominent Sayyid family in the city of Hamadan, ‘Ali
Hamadani spent much of his early life in discipleship to the Kubrawi Sufi saint ‘Ala al-Daula
Simnani (1261–1336). In the 1370s, ‘Ali Hamadani began to travel extensively, including to
Kashmir, where sultans granted him and his followers substantial landholdings and noble status.
After establishing religious institutions and spreading Kubrawi Sufi teachings across Kashmir,
Hamadani died during his travel out of the Valley. While he was buried in Khatlan in current
day Tajikistan, several of his valuable possessions have been housed and venerated ever since in
the Khanqah-i-Mu‘alla mosque complex in Srinagar. ‘Ali Hamadani is celebrated across the
240
Religious and Political Power in Kashmir
world today for his high Islamic scholarship and legal erudition. However, the earliest histories
and hagiographies of ‘Ali Hamadani from Kashmir depict him not as a courtly legal scholar
but as an extremely self-disciplined, austere, miracle-wielding mystic saint of the Kubrawi Sufi
Order who guided Kashmiri elites and commoners alike. ‘Ali Hamadani thus resembles Lal Ded
and Nund Rishi in being an ascetical, mystical saint in early Kashmiri accounts.
Hamza Makhdum was born into the Lone Raina family of Kashmiri nobles at the end of
the fifteenth century. After studying extensively at the madrasa of the Kubrawi Sufi master
Isma‘il Shah, Hamza received initiation into the Suhrawardi Sufi Order from Sayyid Jamal
al-Din Bukhari. While other Suhrawardi Sufis are said to have previously visited Kashmir, it
is Sheikh Hamza Makhdum Sahib elevated the Suhrawardi Order to prominence in Kashmir.
He was granted a prominent location to engage his religious practices and teach his disciples
on the slopes of Koh-i-Maran, a.k.a. Hari Parbat, the very same hill in the center of Srinagar
where the Sultanate court and royal cemetery were located. Both well-educated elites and
commoners became his disciples, providing a venue in which vertical and horizontal social
alliances were forged. Unlike his Suhrawardi predecessors, Hamza Makhdum embraced asceti-
cism due to his close relationship with Hardi Rishi, a latter saint of Nund Rishi’s Rishi Sufi
Order. Hamza Makhdum thus brought together a vast, intertwining social network spanning
a significant cross-section of Kashmiri society. In turn, his disciples composed hagiographies
that interwove Suhrawardi, Rishi, and Kubrawi Sufi Orders and saints. In doing so, these
writings simultaneously captured the breadth of the Kashmir’s religious landscape of the day
and rendered these diverse traditions consistent and coherent in ideology and practice, posi-
tioning ascetical mystical sainthood at the center of religious and political life in early modern
Kashmir.
Most hagiographies and histories written during the Kashmiri Sultanate assert that these
saints interacted and influenced one another all while respecting each other’s advanced spiritual
status. While it is comforting to believe that such saints interacted with one another in such a
congenial manner due to their virtue and benevolence, critical analysis of these writings with
the knowledge that most historians and hagiographers of the Kashmiri Sultanate were simulta-
neously religious leaders and members of the royal court reveals other sociopolitical motives for
honoring these saints and representing camaraderie among them. For instance, by connecting
Sufi Orders and their leaders with revered non-Muslim religious figures and sites across the
Kashmiri landscape, these writings simultaneously nativized Islamic figures and Sufi Orders
(i.e., made Islam “Kashmiri”) as well as “Islamicized” the soil (i.e., made Kashmir “Islamic”)
(Zutshi 2014).
However, since this reflexive sanctifying process requires mutually dependent Muslim and
non-Muslim elements to be effective, these writings do not produce a religiously exclusive
Kashmir. Rather, Hindu and Muslim religious figures are intimately interwoven with each
other and the land of Kashmir itself. Furthermore, hagiographers and historians of early modern
Kashmir also recorded, participated in, and promoted a pervasive and widespread acknowledge-
ment of the authority of asceticism. This common grammar of asceticism they articulated not
only brought together Hindus and Muslims under a shared conceptual framework, but also
shaped religious and political discourses and practices that undergirded the establishment of
an early modern state in Kashmir. Therefore, these saints and the early modern writings about
them were imbricated with the sociopolitical contestations of their day, and partly because of
this, they became deeply embedded in Kashmiri identities and politics from that time forward.
Thus, while we may correctly identify current invocations of these saints as “re-appropriations,”
it is imperative to understand that these saints have been appropriated from the very beginning,
serving social and political ends from the very start.
241
Dean Accardi
The Popular Life of Saints

These saints of the Kashmiri Sultanate and their shrines continue to play a vital role in con-
temporary Kashmiri social life. In her dissertation “Muslim Life and Rituals: A Case-Study of
Major Shrines of Kashmir,” Gousia Khan details the everyday practices Kashmiris perform at a
number of prominent saint shrines across Kashmir as well as the ideas they hold toward those
revered saints (G. Khan 2007). Regarding devotion at the shrine of Sheikh Hamza Makhum
Sahib, Khan notes how both “traditional” and “modern educated” Kashmiris invoke Hamza
Makhdum to aid them in their everyday affairs, including some who “could not think of start-
ing their day without seeking the blessings of the Shaikh.” Khan asserts that saints’ shrines are
“visited by hundreds of men and women every day . . . from various quarters of Srinagar and
every nook and corner of the Kashmir Valley” (51–52) in hope that a saint’s intercession before
God can lead to divine aid in their everyday life. While some individuals visit Sheikh Hamza’s
shrine for concrete aims, such as asking the saint to help restore the well-being of someone seri-
ously ill, numerous others visit Makhdum’s shrine for less transactional purposes, such as devo-
tees seeking elevated spiritual states or people simply seeking peace and respite from tumultuous
everyday life. Thus, saint shrines in Kashmir do not simply function as sites to seek divine favors,
but also serve as community centers – gathering places for forging social connections as well as
a place to seek psychological and emotional relief and betterment.
It should come as no surprise, then, that these shrines take on a political value, as political
concerns draw together a breadth of one’s social, emotional, and personal lives. Khan rightly
calls attention to the fact that a saint’s shrine is often referred to as a Darbar-i-Sultan (“Sultan’s
Court”). This term is not merely metaphorical: saints are considered the Lord/God’s friends or
representatives (auliya), each with their own demarcated territorial domain (vilayat) over which
they assert authority and are thus responsible – their shrines serving as their administrative head-
quarters. Thus imagined as a kind of alternative bureaucratic order, saints’ shrines serve well as
sites to address the broader sociopolitical affairs of Kashmir, especially when the official politi-
cal apparatus is thought to be failing the people it is theoretically meant to serve. To this end,
Khan recounts stories in which Sheikh Hamza Makhdum is said to have directly intervened in
pertinent political matters in Kashmir’s past, such as the claim that it was Makhdum who “drove
out” the “tribal invaders” in October 1947. Khan is hesitant to confirm or deny such claims
but notes that there can be no doubt that such notions contributed to saint shrines becoming
significant political centers of Kashmiri politics over the last century.
The Shaikh’s spiritual intervention may appear to be preposterous on sound histori-

cal reasons. But as a student of social history, I cannot ignore completely the sub-
liminal impact of historical (tribal invasion) and spiritual forces (the Shaikh’s supposed
political interference) on the Kashmiri mind. This also explains why the shrine of
Shaikh Hamza Makhdum, like the Dargah of Hazratbal, became a strong bastion of
the National Conference after 1947.
(G. Khan 2007: 58)
Indeed, the fact that many Kashmiris believe “most matters ranging from domestic affairs to
politics of the Kashmir Valley are decided in the court of Shaikh Hamza” (G. Khan 2007: 57) is
of great historical importance if one is seeking a robust understanding of the social, cultural, and
political history of Kashmir. Such an intertwining of religion and politics – despite the assertions
of modernist philosophers – does not mark Kashmiris as backward, irrational, or unmodern,
for indeed we find many scholars today analyzing what appears to be our current postsecular
242
world, from Lara Deeb’s Enchanted Modern in Lebanon (Deeb 2006) to examinations of the
obvious role of Evangelical Protestant religiosity in current American politics. Rather, early
modern saints like Sheikh Hamza Makhdum Sahib play a significant role in how Kashmiris seek
to understand themselves and their society, how they navigate and integrate the personal and the
political into what it means to be Kashmiri in their public and private lives, and indeed how one
is to act upon those understandings to engage the tumultuous world all around.
Ather Zia’s engagement with Zooneh in Resisting Disappearances provides an excellent exam-
ple of how saints and their shrines are integral to an individual’s negotiating the difficulties
of contemporary life in Kashmir (Zia 2019: 39–43). Zooneh’s son Syed Ahmed was a victim
of enforced disappearance, being abducted from a marketplace by Indian counterinsurgency
forces. Police and courts proved ineffective if not blatantly obstructive in locating her son or
even his body, yet Zooneh did not abandon her cause but rather engaged in practices that Zia
identifies and theorizes as a practice of “affective law,” which resists the official (false) narratives
provided by agents of the state. Zia also aptly notes, “Zooneh’s resistance is not necessarily to
dismantle the official narratives but to provide ‘memory alternatives’ or countermemory” (36).
Part of Zooneh’s practices of affective law and resistance involves appealing to the saints, who
are thought to champion justice and – wielding an agency beyond the state – may be able to
bring true justice withheld to her by the state. Mirroring the kinds of statements of devotees of
Makhdum Sahib documented by Gousia Khan, Zia quotes Zooneh as declaring,
They [saints] are the ones really ruling Kashmir, and the entire universe, but they are
invisible; their saya [shadow] is on everything. Only they have the power to return
my son. Useless Bhaarti [Indian], earthly laws bind these judges, lawyers, and all the
government officers. . . . But my saints are majaz [lawful/competent]. . . . My saints
are invisible miracle-makers even if they are not visible to our eyes.
(40)
Accordingly, Zooneh frames her appeal to this alternative court of justice of the saints and atten-
dant activism as “a visible form of ibadat [worship]” (40) which includes almsgiving, attending
saint shrines, and active involvement with the Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons
(APDP). Thus, for Zooneh, the saints are not just the potential providers of miracles to solve
one’s problems, but are integral to alternative frameworks to pursue justice, build community,
engage in social and political activism, and produce countermemory.
In these ways, the saints become integral to how many Kashmiris navigate the tumultuous
circumstances of everyday life in Kashmir. However, the relationship is reciprocal – the saints are
seen as actively concerned and involved in Kashmiri life, society, and politics, and likewise the
saints, their legacies, and their shrines are actively shaped by those invoking them in everyday
life, rendering them potent figures for Kashmiri identity, society, and politics precisely through
how they are infused with popular memory and veneration. It is no surprise, then, that many
political leaders decide to incorporate the saints into their political agendas for Kashmir.
Pasts for the Present: ‘Ali Hamadani and Zia-ul-Haq

In October 1987, the first Shah-e-Hamadan International Conference was held in Muzaffar-
abad, Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan, to pay tribute to ‘Ali Hamadani and his life’s work.
Both scholars and Pakistani political elites participated in this conference, including President
of Pakistan General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. While not explicitly mentioned in Zia-ul-Haq’s
speech, it is noteworthy that this conference took place in 1987, the same year as the Jammu
243
Dean Accardi
and Kashmir Legislative Assembly elections that involved such rampant electoral malfeasance
and betrayal of political activists that it is credited with precipitating the armed uprising of 1989
and subsequent widespread political resistance in Kashmir. Those of renewed discontentment
in Indian Occupied Kashmir were likely on Zia-ul-Haq’s mind and in part those to whom his
speech was directed.
After greeting the eminent participants in the conference, Zia-ul-Haq begins his speech:
Sayyid Ali Hamadani was a multi-dimensional personality [who] lived in [a] Sufi way
and instead of worldly pursuits chose the path of Shariat and “Tareeqat” with a stress
on supplication and Sufism. Shah Hamadan adopted the method of selfless devotion,
piety and purification of soul. Shah Hamadan in his more than 170 books dealt with
the subject of faith and conviction, religious status of moral injunctions and prohi-
bitions, secrets and mysteries of various forms of worship, rights of people and the
obligations of Government.
The great Sufi who could have attained power and glory and would have easily
gained authority and rulership gave more importance to fasting, [a] life of self-control
and isolation. He never deviated from his noble mission. The rulers sought his counsel
and guidance. . . .
The people whose own self had the quality of piety and purity of character were
needed to fully realize the dream of establishing an Islamic welfare society in Pakistan.
(Hamadani and Riaz 1988: 19–20)
In this passage, Zia-ul-Haq’s depiction of ‘Ali Hamadani mirrors the popular image of Hama-
dani, as one who “gave more importance to fasting, [a] life of self-control and isolation,” that is,
a pious, ascetic Sufi. However, at each turn, Zia-ul-Haq returns to focus on politics, govern-
ance, and rulership. In fact, the very pious religious pursuits with which Zia-ul-Haq first defines
Hamadani are framed in terms of (at first in contrast to, and then in connection with) worldly,
political power. Zia-ul-Haq is reconstructing of ‘Ali Hamadani in terms of his own Pakistani
Islamization programs (“fully realize the dream of establishing an Islamic welfare society in Paki-
stan”), advancing the idea that proper governance, especially that of Pakistan, should be based
on the strict adherence to, and enforcement of, Islamic law alone, that is, presumably without
consideration of worldly wealth and power.
As his speech continues, Zia-ul-Haq further articulates his reconstruction of ‘Ali Hamadani
in terms of Islamization.
There is hardly any respect for the elders left in our society nor any love and affection
for the younger generation, an attitude of free for all is prevailing, rights of the people
are being neglected and the system of society is turning hollow and devoid of spiritual
and social values. . . .
In fact, he [Hamadani] moulded afresh the Valley of Kashmir into the shape of
Islam, irrespective of distinctions between the king and the beggar, the rule and the
ruled, the monarch and the people and was able to render such great spiritual achieve-
ment whose influences persisted not only to this day but would live forever.
I would go even to the extent of declaring that if the conquests of Muhammad Bin
Qasim had not been followed up by the work of . . . Ali Hamadani and other great
men like him, “We would have had not Pakistan today nor Azad Jammu and Kashmir.”
Instead, “We would have been living under the dominance of non-Muslims without
any will of our own to move a single step.” . . .
244
He [Hamadani] liked to live in isolation so that he could separate himself from the
world of fun and frivolousness. But he did not renounce the world. When he found
anyone, from a common citizen to the ruler of the time, deviating from the right path
he would not spare him from moral stricture and his strictures were effective. . . . In
this connection I mention a couple of fables about Prophet Hazrat Yusuf (peace be
upon him) one relating to art of rulership and [an]other connected with rights of
the parents. Both the incidents were very instructive in their own way and invited
attention to Islam which what to speak of human being did not tolerate the death of
a hungry dog on the bank of a distant river but today the adherents of the same faith
like to avoid payment of zakat when they were rolling in millions. . . .
I hope that such a conference would become a permanent feature so that the mis-
sion and teachings of the great Sufi and reformer were brought home to the youth and
people at large as a perpetual source of inspiration and guidance.
(Hamadani and Riaz 1988: 21–22)
Zia-ul-Haq performs a series of rhetorical maneuvers in this portion of his speech. First, he
laments the current state of Pakistani society and culture, which he says is suffused with rampant
moral failure. Second, he contrasts this moral failure to the piety and austerity of Hamadani –
that is, invoking the popular image of Hamadani as an ascetic, mystical Sufi – and he elevates
this Hamadani as a model for the current people of Pakistan. Third, he alludes to the two-nation
theory as undergirding the modern Pakistani state, highlighting the notions (1) that Islam and
South Asian Islamic religiosity and culture should be considered wholly separate, distinct, and
developed in mutual exclusion from non-Muslim religiosities, cultures, and political paradigms
in South Asia, especially Hindu; and (2) that Muslims cannot be ruled by non-Muslims or their
faith would be suppressed. Fourth, he shifts the representation of Hamadani from his popular
image as an austere, ascetic, miracle-wielding Sufi to one of a legal scholar, a mufti, who would
police anyone who deviated from the religious strictures he set down – an image acutely parallel
to Zia-ul-Haq’s own political alliance with conservative muftis, his Islamization policies, and his
harsh enforcement of the Hudood Ordinances. Fifth, he publicly shames those Pakistani elites
who oppose his Islamization programs as desiring wealth above all else (“avoid payment of zakat
when they were rolling in millions”) and in doing so render themselves corrupt Muslims whom
Hamadani himself would chastise, thus justifying his own crackdown on his political opposition.
Bringing these all together, Zia-ul-Haq establishes himself and his Islamization programs as simul-
taneously fulfilling the revered Hamadani’s work and the raison d’être for Pakistan’s existence.
However, Zia-ul-Haq’s selective reinterpretation of Hamadani’s legacy to glorify himself
and justify his political actions is neither smoothly executed nor easily accepted. The fact that
Zia-ul-Haq identifies Hamadani first as an ascetic Sufi who “gave more importance to fasting,
[a] life of self-control and isolation” and then returns to this aspect of Hamadani throughout
his attempt to reframe Hamadani in terms of Islamization belies the fact that ascetic sainthood
continues to form the basis of Hamadani’s popular authority. Indeed, this paradigm of authority
based in asceticism seems so deeply rooted in the legacy of Hamadani that Zia-ul-Haq could
not avoid mentioning it when invoking Hamadani even though it appears to work against Zia-
ul-Haq’s own desire to foreground the enforcement of conservative jurisprudence as the true
basis of Islam and the Pakistani state. Without incorporating the popular image of Hamadani as
an ascetic Sufi, Zia-ul-Haq’s assertions that Hamadani was a precursor to his own Islamization
programs and justifies his crackdown of political opposition would appear a blatant self-serving
fabrication of the past – or even a desecration of a beloved saint’s legacy for his own selfish ends,
an appalling hypocrisy from one claiming to be a champion of piety and Islam itself.
245
Dean Accardi
Consequently, Zia-ul-Haq may have inadvertently undermined his own agenda. Hamadani’s
authority is inextricably intertwined with a paradigm of ascetic religious authority that is shared
with non-Muslim religious figures and sources of Kashmir. To invoke Hamadani is to recall
a past in which the source of religious authority was not distinct across religious traditions,
since both Muslims and non-Muslims during Hamadani’s time accepted asceticism as a potent
source of religious authority. Furthermore, it invokes a paradigm of Islamic religious author-
ity that does not require jurisprudence, muftis, or state intervention. In other words, honoring
‘Ali Hamadani as a hero of Pakistan in order to create an Islamic body politic founders on the
politics of Hamadani’s own ascetic body, which manifests an authority seemingly inescapably
linked to non-Muslims and an Islam beyond that of the orthodox jurisprudence at the core of
contemporary Islamization.
Lal Ded and Kashmiriyat

In her “Land of Lalla-Ded,” Nyla Ali Khan identifies Lal Ded as a Sufi poetess and “a fitting
symbol of the syncretic ethos of Kashmir,” a “syncretic ethos of Kashmir [that] has been violated
by the outburst of religious nationalism, secular nationalism, and ethnonationalism that have
facilitated political and social structural violence” (N. Khan 2007: 23). The “syncretic ethos”
Khan is referring to is central to her formulation of Kashmiriyat:
The traditional communal harmony in Kashmir enabled the peaceful co-existence

of Muslims and Hindus, mutual respect for their places of worship, and an ability to
synthesize not just cultural but religious practices as well. The deep reverence for each
other’s shrines and the relics housed in those shrines is a well-entrenched aspect of the
culture.
(25)
This depiction of Kashmiri heritage and identity as being one of unique cultural and reli-
gious harmony may appear to be an apolitical description of Kashmiri culture, but it is not
without an accompanying political vision.
The notion of “Kashmiriyat” wasn’t handed down to me an unachievable and abstract

construct but, on the contrary, it was crystallized for me as the eradication of a feudal
structure and its insidious ramifications; the right of the tiller to the land he worked
on; . . . and the ability to look beyond one particular location in order to locate myself
in a social world.
(N. Khan 2007: 33)
Khan’s list of concrete political agenda items imply Kashmiriyat is tied to a politics of increased
social welfare programs that are concomitant with socio-political autonomy for Kashmir.
There are numerous problems with how Khan presents Lal Ded and Kashmiriyat here. Many
stories of Lal Ded have little to do with syncretism or promoting interreligious harmony. Fur-
thermore, Hafsa Kanjwal incisively critiques how this version of “Kashmiriyat,” while appearing
to accommodate both Hindu and Muslim Kashmiris, in fact erases much of Kashmiri Muslim
history in its effort to project “even-handedness.” Kanjwal also demonstrates how this narra-
tive of Kashmiri history obfuscates how Kashmiri Muslims were treated as second- or third-
class citizens during Dogra rule and post-Partition, policies aimed at redressing these inequities
being met with strong opposition and then resentment by many elite, or at least comparatively
246
privileged, Kashmiri Pandits. Thus many Kashmiri Muslims view this proposed cultural histori-
cal narrative of Kashmiriyat with deep suspicion (Kanjwal 2018).
However, another serious issue with how Khan invokes Lal Ded here as an embodiment of
this Kashmiriyat (and this Kashmiriyat as Kashmir’s true heritage and culture) is that it opens the
door to shifting the debate over Kashmir’s political belonging and what policies should govern
over Kashmir away from the current will of Kashmiri people to questions of Kashmir’s essence
and past. Khan does indeed assert “the unacceptability of any political solution that did not take
the aspirations and demands of the Kashmiri people into consideration” (N. Khan 2007: 33).
However, she also implies that if the expressed will of the Kashmiri people opposes that which
is articulated in her notion of Kashmiriyat – what she describes as “religious nationalism, secular
nationalism, and ethnonationalism that have facilitated political and social structural violence”
(23) – then Kashmiriyat should guide political policies over Kashmir against that which “vio-
lates” the “syncretic ethos of Kashmir.” It is almost as if expressing political opinions that are
not in line with the “syncretic ethos” of “Kashmiriyat” puts into question, or possibly precludes,
one’s being considered truly “Kashmiri,” and thus those aspirations and demands are not worthy
of consideration, or indeed should be quashed.
Deciding current politics on the basis of cultural essences and/or aligning the present with
the past instead of the will of the people governed is a dangerous proposal. For example, if
policies today are wholly decided according to reviving a glorious past or retaliating against
a previous imperial regime, it forecloses the possibility of generating political options in the
present that do not merely correspond to, and thus share the same framework as, the past (Scott
1995). This is not to say politics should not address historical grievances, but rather that such a
historicist framework carries the possibility of shifting political debates away from the very real
struggles, pains, and needs of the present to historical debates about what is the correct vision of
the past out of which current political decisions should emerge. Likewise, if policies are decided
according to upholding a particular notion of a people’s true essence, it not only carries the
possibility of serving as a litmus test for belonging – which disenfranchises certain members of
society and could quickly devolve into ethnic cleansing and or even genocide – but it also can
once again shift political debates away from addressing the current struggles of the people to
defining abstract notions.
These approaches to politics that delegate responsibility for political decision-making to
something other than the people governed and their expressed needs also frequently serve to re-
inscribe political power to only those elites who have the requisite education and social stand-
ing to authoritatively assert their understandings as objective facts over and above any contrary
claims made by everyday people. Furthermore, by shifting those decisions into the domains
of historical scholarship and philosophical abstraction, politicians are able to effectively deny
ethical responsibility for their political decisions since those decisions are merely extensions
of objective facts and not their own choices. Indeed, in such a scheme, no one is ultimately
responsible for political decisions: scholars can claim their scholarship is objectively true and
produced without consideration of political implications, and politicians can claim their policies
are merely responses to those facts rather than choices reflecting their own desires.
Secondary consequences of such a political paradigm may also include fostering anti-intel-
lectualism or even a reconfiguration of a society’s culture and everyday practices. Tying a regime
of disenfranchisement that is unresponsive to the needs of the people to scholarship can result
in the political frustration of the masses being accompanied by hostility toward the kind of
knowledge and knowledge-production their disenfranchisement was contingent upon. Moreo-
ver, if certain revered figures like Lal Ded or other saints are understood as an embodiment of
both Kashmiri identity and a particular politics, then revering Lal Ded becomes both a litmus
247
Dean Accardi
test for belonging and an endorsement of those politics. Then if one opposes those politics,
one is compelled to no longer revere Lal Ded, but in doing so, one’s belonging and status as a
true Kashmiri are put into question. Such a paradigm in time generates resentment toward such
figures, as they have become tied to the furthering of people’s oppression and disenfranchise-
ment, which in turn potentially produces hostilities toward institutions connected with those
figures and others who revere those figures, shifting a society’s cultural landscape with regard
to those figures.
Modi’s Kashmiriyat
A perfect example of the dangers of shifting politics away from the will of the people to argu-
ments of essences and the past – and the kind of co-optation and hostilities it can produce – is
how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have deployed
Kashmiriyat to justify Indian imperialism over Kashmir. In November 2015, Modi visited Srina-
gar to promote his own political vision of an Indian Kashmir. Before his arrival, BJP organizers
posted banners throughout Srinagar proclaiming, “We welcome you to the land of Nund Rishi,
Lal Ded” (M. Khan 2016). In his speech later that day, after repeatedly invoking the phrase
“Kashmiriyat, Jammuriyat, Insaniyat” (“Kashmiri-ness, Jammu-ness, human-ness”), subtly elid-
ing any distinction between the three, Modi declared,
Brothers and sisters, without Kashmiriyat India is incomplete, not just Kashmir itself.
It is because of this, this Kashmiriyat – which is the pride of India – that of anyone
who is truly without communalism, [it can be said that] he emerged from this soil
alone. From where did that Sufi tradition come from? It was from this very soil that
it taught connection – that it taught to make kinship. And that very tradition, that is
our Kashmiriyat.
(Modi 2015)
Less than a year after that visit, Modi’s concluding remarks at the All Party Meeting on
Jammu & Kashmir reinforced this notion:
Jammu & Kashmir is often called the crown of India. In fact, Jammu & Kashmir is
a symbol of the age old commitment of equanimity towards all creeds (sarv-panth
sambhaav), where Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Muslims have been living together for
centuries. The state of Jammu & Kashmir is the symbol of our founding fathers’ faith
which defines us as Indian in spite of our diversity. Jammu & Kashmir is not only a
matter of our territorial integrity but also defines our nationhood. . . .
It is also a fact that Kashmiri Pandits have been displaced from their centuries-old
ancestral dwellings in [the] Kashmir Valley. Such atrocity against a particular commu-
nity is the misdeed of terrorists trained and armed with weapons by Pakistan and their
sympathizers. These can never be the deeds of those who believe in “Kashmiriyat.”
(The Hindu 2016)
Twisting the understanding of Kashmiriyat and the saints used to symbolize it, Modi re-
appropriates not only revered early modern Kashmiri saints but Kashmiriyat itself as in fact
India’s heritage and tradition, making Kashmir and its claims to a unique cultural heritage
instead a subset of Indian culture and nationhood. Furthermore, through conflating Kashmiri
armed resistance to Indian military occupation with violence enacted on Kashmiri Hindus and
248
India’s “sworn enemy” Pakistan, Modi positions himself as the authority on Kashmiriyat and
Kashmiri resistance fighters as either disingenuous or untrue to their cause.
Directed toward local Kashmiri Muslims, this speech appears to lock Kashmiris into an
unwinnable “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim” paradigm, in which Muslims are prompted to
abandon all personal, social, religious, and political commitments to prove their patriotism
and loyalty to a neoliberal order of non-Muslim majoritarian domination or be considered
backwards, seditious terrorists (Mamdani 2004). However, directed toward a non-Muslim
Indian audience, this speech dog whistles the insidious “Going Muslim” paradigm insight-
fully deconstructed by Huma Dar (2009) and Deepti Misri (2016). Built on the Islamophobic
premise that “Muslims may be more extreme because their religion is founded on bellicose
conquest, a contempt for infidels and an obligation for piety that is more extensive than in
other schemes” (Varadarajan 2009), the “Going Muslim” paradigm ensures that Muslims are
never afforded full citizenship nor full human rights, a cornerstone of the Hindutva ideology
championed by Modi’s Bharatiya Janatiya Party. In this “Going Muslim” scheme, no matter
how much Muslims may try to prove themselves to be “Good Muslims” through fully sub-
mitting to extreme patriotism to the non-Muslim majoritarian state, they are nevertheless
viewed with suspicion, for at any moment, even a “good Muslim” might “go Muslim,” sud-
denly shedding all that “goodness” in a flash and becoming a terrorist, like a sleeper agent.
By conceptualizing Muslims as perpetual outsiders to be viewed with constant suspicion, this
“Going Muslims” paradigm subjects Muslims to perpetual imperial subjugation no matter
their official legal status.
However, this brings us to a central question: why are these authoritarian leaders invoking
locally revered Kashmiri saints at all? Why do authoritarian leaders feel the need to promote
their oppressive policies to the people over which they will assert those policies anyway? Fur-
thermore, why when doing so do they invoke locally revered figures? And finally, in each
instance, they appear intent to first mention and incorporate popular memory and representa-
tions of those revered figures before altering them to fit their own agendas. Why not simply
assert that the revered figures are in line with their policies and not bother trying to tie it to
popular understandings of those figures?
I argue that such speeches attempt to control the discourse around potent social symbols and
assert social control in the process. Zia-ul-Haq and Modi’s speeches are instances of a broader
hagiopolitics of repression over Kashmir in which religious figures revered by local populations
for the divine order and power they represent are systematically re-appropriated and reconfig-
ured to no longer serve the needs of the people but rather to reinforce the dominance of the
ruling regime. However, if Kashmiris are largely unconvinced by these speeches and reject their
assertions, why even recite them?
One answer is that the rhetoric impact of such speeches is insidiously effective even to an
unreceptive audience. While initial instances of such re-appropriation may be quickly and easily
dismissed, the repetition of state-sponsored reconfigurations of these saints could very well wear
away at the previous legacies and popular memory, replacing it with its own. Or, much like with
Lal Ded being defined as an embodiment of both Kashmiri identity and a particular politics of
Kashmiriyat, constant repetition could lead to the saints being irrevocably associated with these
regime’s new propaganda program such that the populace eventually abandons such figures as
their cultural symbols due to their now being so tainted with the regime’s legacy. In either case,
the local population is stripped of their previously revered figure, or at least their previous asso-
ciations and symbolic value, resulting in Kashmiris being deprived of anchors to their independ-
ent cultural and religious identity that the saints previously vivified, in turn gradually eroding
the unique cultural identity itself and/or the resistance to assimilation it previously affected.
249
Dean Accardi
Ironically, however, these same insidious processes expose several exploitable cracks in the
edifice of an authoritarian regime’s attempted hegemonic domination. That such tactics require
rhetorical continuity with past and popular notions of the saints to be effective means that subject
populations can exert some agency over the frameworks of the authoritarian re-appropriations
of local culture. In short, saints can become a geography of resistance. Far from simply reject-
ing the re-appropriated version and defiantly asserting their own, the resistance can capitalize
on the dominating regime’s dependence on these local saints and traditions, even amplifying
it, and then shift the meaning of those saints and traditions to serve their own ends such that
subsequent state invocations of those saints serve the people’s reconfigured purposes rather than
that of the state; in short, exploiting state processes of repression for resistance.
Conclusion
When the policies and politics to rule over Kashmir are shifted from the will and needs of
the Kashmiri people to upholding an abstract notion of Kashmiriyat established in an idea of
Kashmir’s true cultural heritage, which in turn is built upon a particular authoritative historical
interpretation of Kashmir’s past saints rather than how everyday Kashmiris remember, invoke,
and integrate those saints into their daily lives and political actions, that political paradigm can
be easily co-opted by other political elites like Modi and the BJP government to serve their
own political aims without any deference or recourse to the Kashmiri people themselves. The
Modi government’s unilateral abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution
on August 5, 2019, and subsequent military lockdown of Kashmir – all enacted without the
consent of the Kashmiri people – appears less surprising and less politically impermissible when
a paradigm of legitimate rule over Kashmir even against the will of Kashmiris themselves had
already been justified.
However, it is hoped that the re-appropriation of Kashmir’s saints to fulfill agendas of impe-
rialism and settler colonialism can lead to their own undoing. Past appropriations and political
usages of saints always persist, haunt, and potentially interrupt new re-appropriations. Authori-
tarian leaders may deploy what I call a “hagiopolitics of repression” to hegemonically assert
power over Kashmir, relying upon popular memory and reverence of these saints to simultane-
ously imbue their political agenda with the saints’ authority and strip the saints of their popular
symbolic value. However, tying the state’s agenda to the popular memory of these saints opens
the possibility for Kashmiris to redefine and redeploy those saints in ways that render saints
an alternative geography of resistance, exploiting the state’s insidious methods to instead serve
resistance to state oppression.
Works Cited
Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad. 1985. Atish-e-Chinar. Srinagar: Ali Muhammad and Sons.
Dar, Huma. 2009. “ ‘Going Deeper’ Not ‘Muslim’: Islamophobia and its Discontents.” Pulse, December 3.
https://pulsemedia.org/2009/12/03/going-deeper-not-muslim-islamophobia-and-its-discontents/.
Deeb, Lara. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Editorial Board. 2019. “India Tempts Fate in Kashmir, ‘The Most Dangerous Place in the World.’ ” New
York Times, August 5. www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/opinion/kashmir-article-370.html.
Hamadani, Agha Hussain and Muhammad Riaz. 1988. Shah-E- Hamadan Commemorative Volume: Proceed-
ings of the Shah-E-Hamadan International Conference, Held on October 2–4, 1987, at Muzaffarabad, AJK on
the Occasion of 622ndAnniversary of Amir Kabir Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadani, Shah-E Hamadan (b. 714-d. 786
A.H.). Islamabad: Islamic Research Institute Press, International Islamic University.
Hasan, Mohibbul. 2005 [1959]. Kashmir under the Sultans. New Delhi: Aakar Books.
250
The Hindu. 2016. “Modi’s speech at all party meeting on Jammu & Kashmir.” The Hindu, August 12.
www.thehindu.com/news/resources/Modis-speech-at-all-party-meeting-on-Jammu-amp-Kashmir/
article14572729.ece.
Iqbal, Muhammad. 1966. Javid-Nama. Translated by Arthur J. Arberry. London: Allen & Unwin.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2018. “Reflections on the Post-Partition Period: Life Narratives of Kashmiri Muslims in
Contemporary Kashmir.” HIMALAYA 38(2) (Fall): 40–60.
Kaul, Jayalal. 1973. Lal Ded. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi.
Khan, Gousia. 2007. “Muslim Life and Rituals: A Case-Study of Major Shrines of Kashmir.” PhD Diss.
Srinagar: University of Kashmir.
Khan, M. Aamir. 2016. “BJP invokes Sufi saints to welcome PM.” The Tribune, October 20. www.tribu-
neindia.com/news/archive/j-k/bjp-invokes-sufi-saints-to-welcome-pm-155485.
Khan, Nyla Ali. 2007. “The Land of Lalla-Ded: Politicization of Kashmir and Construction of the Kash-
miri Woman.” Journal of International Women’s Studies 9(1) (November): 22–41.
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Mir, Ghulam. 2020. “Biden Presidency Can Impact ‘Most Dangerous Place in the World.’ ” Columbus
Dispatch, November 21. www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/11/21/biden-presidency-
can-impact-most-dangerous-place-world/3777425001/.
Misri, Deepti. 2016. “Bollywood’s 9/11: Terrorism and Muslim Masculinities in Popular Hindi Cinema.”
In Global Asian American Popular Cultures, edited by LeiLani Nishime, Tasha G. Oren, and Shilpa Dave,
276–289. New York: New York University Press.
Modi, Narendra. 2015. “India is Not Complete without Kashmiriyat: PM Modi at Public Meet-
ing at Sher E Kashmir Stadium, Srinagar.” Accessed June 30, 2020. www.narendramodi.in/
text-of-pm-s-address-at-the-public-meeting-at-sher-e-kashmir-stadium-srinagar-375321.
Popham, Peter. 2000. “ ‘The World’s Most Dangerous Place’ Is Already at War.” The Independent,
March 18. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-world-s-most-dangerous-place-is-already-
at-war-282458.html.
Scott, David. 1995. “Dehistoricising History.” In Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity & History in
Modern Sri Lanka, edited by Pradeep Jeganathan and Qadri Ismail, 20–33. Colombo: Social Scientists’
Association (SSA).
Varadarajan, Tunku. 2009. “ ‘Going Muslim.’ ” Forbes, November 9, 2009. www.forbes.com/2009/11/08/
fort-hood-nidal-malik-hasan-muslims-opinions-columnists-tunku-varadarajan.html.
Winter-Levy, Sam. 2019. “Washington and the ‘Most Dangerous Place in the World.’ ” Foreign Policy,
February 24, 2019. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/02/24/washington-and-the-most-dangerous-
place-in-the-world/.
Zia, Athar. 2019. Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation & Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: Uni-
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2004. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. New
York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2014. Kashmir’s Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
251
18
TEHREEK HISTORY WRITERS
OF KASHMIR
Reconstructing Memory at the Margins
of Postcolonial Empire
Mohamad Junaid
Introduction
My memory is again in the way of your history.
– Agha Shahid Ali, Kashmiri poet
“How come Indians who write so much about the British colonialism,” Rehman exclaimed,
“won’t see India’s rule in Kashmir as a colonial occupation!” Sitting along the banks of Jhelum
in Srinagar in 2014, we were discussing the difficulties I was having writing the “historical
background” section of my research on young Kashmiri activists. He was bitter as he recognized
in my predicament his own diagnosis of Indian historiography. Then in his late 60s, Rehman
had read, as he told me, “almost all Indian books on Kashmir” and had come to an unsenti-
mental conclusion about memory and forgetting in nation-states: “Sarkaer (official) historians,”
he said, “produce selective amnesia among citizens” to present the state with an “aura of logic
and permanence.” For him, sarkaer historians were those who saw India’s control over Kashmir
as natural and Kashmir itself as a footnote to India’s state-building project.
Rehman’s views were not isolated sentiments. In my interviews with Kashmiri academics,
student-activists, journalists, writers, and poets about the region’s political history, there was
more or less a consensus that Indian historiography had prioritized “nationalism” over “truth.”
Invariably, they saw India as a “qabiz qaum” (occupying nation) practicing “samrajiyat” (imperi-
alism). Accordingly, for them, the long-standing Kashmiri resistance movement against Indian
rule was a matter of “national liberation,” and not “separatism” as typically proclaimed by Indian
commentators, who assumed a harmonious preexisting union between the Indian state and
Kashmir. These ideas were part of an explanatory framework that had enabled a “non-official”
understanding of Indian control in Kashmir and of political events, while presenting a coherent
raison d’être of the resistance movement. Essentially, the framework involved contestations over
the representation of Kashmir’s history within the Indian historical discourse. For these reasons,
one can subsume it under the rubric of Tehreek, the term Kashmiris use for their historical and
cross-generational movement for self-determination.
I use “Tehreek” to refer to that movement, but also to describe the persistent oppositional
perspectives shared as an explanatory framework among Kashmiri intellectuals who justify the
252 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-23

Tehreek History Writers of Kashmir
goal of self-determination. Tehreek as an explanatory framework acts simultaneously as a public

discourse, a style of argumentation, and a habit of mind. It has found expression in Kashmiri
literature, political tracts, art, poetry, and social media commentaries. As such it is capacious, if
not coterminous with the entirety of modern Kashmiri political culture. And, as I describe in
this chapter, a key expression of this framework – history writing – has become a powerful cri-
tique of Indian historiography on Kashmir. Yet, it is in a curious position of being quite visible
as a default discourse with which all Kashmiris contend, and being remarkably invisible in the
expert analyses of Kashmir as a “political dispute.”
As a political conflict, Kashmir has long been a topic of expert debate and academic writing
in South Asia, but there has been practically no serious engagement with Kashmiri political
discourse. Even when addressed, it is subjected to pseudo-psychological analyses. For instance,
Pratap Mehta, a leading Indian intellectual, claims that Kashmiri political “utterances” are
trapped in a “web of misunderstandings,” riven by an “odor of conspiracy,” and lead to the “dark
cave of suspicion.” He grandiloquently asserts: “In all narratives about Kashmir, there is only a
subtext, no text” (Mehta 2010: 2). But there is text – about Kashmir, by Kashmiris. Much of
that text is not addressed to Indian readers, for it does not consider India to be its geographical,
historical, or cultural referent. Even then, the genre of history-writing in Kashmir that engages
Tehreek movement’s key claim of the right to self-determination is both substantial and specifi-
cally addresses the Indian state’s ideological apparatus and the place of Indian historiography
within it. For Indian experts not to know and yet make claims is part of the politics of disregard
that anthropologist Ann Stoler recognized as symptomatic of “imperial disposition” (Stoler
2010: 255).1
Tehreek history-writing not only counters India’s ideological claims but also shapes politi-
cal subjectivity in Kashmir. Aside from religious texts and literature, Tehreek history writings
remain the most widely read texts in the region, to the extent that they have created their own
lively public sphere. Rehman was a Tehreek intellectual, not a history writer, but his own think-
ing had been shaped after reading Tehreek history writers’ accounts. Through engagements
with him and other Kashmiri intellectuals, and in my own pursuit of a relatively stable account
of Kashmir’s modern history, I grew interested in understanding the shape of this unrecipro-
cated dialogue Kashmiris seemed to have painstakingly sustained over and despite the violence
of the Indian state. How did the autobiography of a dominant postcolonial state like India
appear to those, like Rehman, who lived in its colonized margins? How did Kashmiri history
writers respond to India’s self-image as a “postcolonial democracy”?
In this chapter, I draw upon the work of those I call “Tehreek history writers” and read it
against the grain of Indian narratives on Kashmir. I trace the anti-colonial themes in Tehreek
history (henceforth TH) writings as their authors seek to retell Kashmir’s past and present. As
activist-writers broadly aligned with the self-determination movement, TH writers see Indian
historiography as an ideological scaffolding for Indian control over Kashmir. Accordingly, they
question its foundational claims on Kashmir. Though shaped by the experience of living under
a regime of military occupation,2 I contend that the emergence of TH writers and their work
can be fully understood only with reference to the “official” Indian historiography. In them-
selves, however, they represent acts of anti-colonial memory and form a reservoir of critical
knowledge.
Postcolonial Occupation and Amnesia

In 1947, Indian national leaders inherited an empire from the British, and as Kashmir was
annexed under India’s rule, this new postcolonial elite would treat Kashmiris, who refused to
253
Mohamad Junaid
accept New Delhi’s authority, just as viciously as the British had treated dissidents in its colonies.
India introduced repressive colonial-era laws to crush Kashmiri mobilizations for independence3
and its rule in Kashmir came to be marked by a grievous record on human rights, a milita-
rized governance, and the abandonment of democratic principles. The Indian mainstream dis-
course on Kashmir left little doubt that India viewed Kashmiris as colonial subjects whose basic
freedoms were subservient to India’s own cultural conception of “territorial integrity,” whose
political rights could be denied in the name of “national interest” and “security,” and who could
not be trusted to govern themselves.4
Indian nationalist historians had been copious in writing teleological narratives of India
under such elaborate signs as “the Idea of India” and “Discovery of India.” These accounts
exalted India as “regaining her lost ancient glory” (that is, pre-Muslim past) or as being guided
by “righteous principles” (as opposed to the “insufficiently imagined” Pakistan) – both of these
notions then converged in accounts of India annexing Kashmir as a unilinear story of righteous
progress and national integration.5 For their part, Indian “postcolonialist” critics questioned
such nationalist accounts, mainly by emphasizing a disjunction between the Indian elites and
subaltern groups.6 They also produced valuable insights into unacknowledged forms of experi-
ence and knowledge within postcolonies,7 occasionally even recognizing continuities between
colonial and postcolonial states.8 However, they didn’t go far enough, and replicated some of
the same invisibilities and silences associated with the scopic and epistemic regimes of Indian
nationalist historiography. The political topos of Indian postcolonialism remained primarily
structured by the logics of disjunction, disruption, or dialogue posited between the former
colonizers (British) and the formerly colonized subjects (Indians). Writing 40 years after India’s
independence, Edward Said, in his foreword to Selected Subaltern Studies, the pivotal text in
Indian postcolonial scholarship, said as much when he wrote: “I do not think it is an exag-
geration to say . . . that rewriting Indian history today is an extension of the struggle between
subaltern and elite, and between the Indian masses and the British raj” (1988: vi).
Subaltern Studies, a prominent expression of Indian postcolonial historiography, made a
point of the constitutive heterogeneity of colonial subjects (Spivak 1988: 10–11), but omitted
using its own conceptual tools to analyze the constitutive hierarchies in postcolonial India. Most
conspicuously, it left unexamined the question of postcolonial occupation, that is claims made
by non-dominant subjects of the postcolonial state about the colonial forms and practices of
power and knowledge administered under India after 1947. “Postcolonial occupation” denoted
the condition where former colonies declared themselves “independent” but proceeded to
reproduce themselves in the colonial image, mainly by reifying colonial cartography and occu-
pying territories of non-dominant nations that were previously under colonial occupation.9 In
particular, Indian postcolonialists not only failed to examine the contention of Kashmiris who
saw a colonial redux in India’s rule in Kashmir, they also assumed the silence of Kashmiris –
which is nothing but a political act, one of ignoring instead of ignorance, an “averted gaze,” to
use Stoler’s phrase (2010: 255). In recent departures, some Subaltern Studies scholars have dis-
missed even those early concepts that took the postcolonial state as “external” to the subaltern
groups, and now see these groups engaging with the state as a “political society” (Chatterjee
2012). This new formulation may explain the politics of certain non-elite groups within India’s
mainstream political sphere, but it makes invisible to scholarship the politics of those subordi-
nated groups, like Kashmiris, who view India not just as external but as an occupier state.
It is important to examine these omissions in Indian nationalist and postcolonial writings, and
some scholars have begun to do so (Dar 2007; Kabir 2009; Kaul 2011; Anderson 2013; Osuri
2017; Kanjwal 2019). However, it needs to be recognized that such an examination would not
be possible without the resistance movements that grew against postcolonial occupation. Here
254
Said’s method of contrapuntal reading of the “empire’s cultural archive” is valuable. He argues that
there has to be “a simultaneous awareness both of the metropolitan history that is narrated and
of those other histories against which (and together with which) the dominating discourse acts”
(Said 2012: 51). Just as Said’s musical metaphor uncovers a “principle of domination” running
throughout European texts about the colonized world, in the Indian texts about Kashmir a sim-
ilar pattern can be discerned – except for the rhetoric of universalism, which is not eschewed
but replaced with “India” itself unreflexively standing in for the universal. However, instead of
simply playing off Indian texts about Kashmir against each other to trace this pattern, we must
grant a provisional privilege to the work of TH writers and read their narratives against as well
as over the dominant Indian ones.
In challenging the Indian historiography on Kashmir, TH writers, I argue, are reclaiming a
subjugated knowledge and shaping Kashmiri political subjectivity by creating and politicizing
memory. Indeed, memory is not by its very nature critical of power; it is politicized when what
the official history authorizes as historical facts are at variance with the people’s actual experi-
ences and their memories of those experiences (Crapanzano 2004: 167). In subjugated societies,
the concern with memory arises because genuine sources of remembrance or commemora-
tion are absent in the dominant accounts and in the archives (Trouillot 1995; Stoler 2010). If
memory exists at all, it is through a process of remembering, which requires active creation (Feier-
man 1990). Creation here does not imply “invention” or an “instrumental or planned selective
appropriation of the past” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 2012; Ranger 1993), but an active contesta-
tion with and deployment of silenced pasts against official histories. This form of remember-
ing, to use Homi Bhabha’s words, is never a “quiet act of introspection or retrospection” but a
process of “intense discovery and disorientation.” To remember in subjugated societies, writes
Bhabha, is “a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense
of the trauma of the present” (2012: 90).
Like all acts of gathering traumatic memory, TH writings essentially exist as fragments. My
attempt to find patterns in their writings itself takes the form of gathering. By bringing together
their dispersed arguments and texts, this chapter affirms what TH writers themselves believe
in, that history is not in the background but at the forefront, and the Kashmiri movement for
self-determination is first and foremost about narrating Kashmiris back into their own history.
Tehreek History Writers

My interest in TH writers grew for two reasons. First, like them, it was hard to ignore the
silences about the occupation in Kashmir within the Indian historiography, especially in the
writings of the much-celebrated Subaltern Studies collective. The silence was conspicuous
because Subaltern Studies appeared to have the conceptual tools suited precisely for an analysis
of such an occupation10 and had otherwise critiqued Indian nationalist historiography on other
counts. Of the 83 articles published in the dozen volumes of their flagship publication Subal-
tern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society (1982 to 2005), there was not a single
article on Kashmir – even during the 1990s when the collective had gained global recognition
(Ludden 2002) and Kashmir was under intense military repression. If Kashmir was evoked at
all, it was subsumed under the overarching master-sign “India.” This included artifacts of the
Kashmiri past, which were appropriated as “Indian history.”11 In their rhetoric against “elite
historiography,” the collective appeared to assume subaltern experience, before and after 1947,
as shared more or less uniformly across the geographical construct that became India, leaving
unanalyzed “Indian history” itself as a master narrative under whose sign discrepant subaltern
histories – including Kashmiri ones – had become silenced.12 To me, this silence was nothing
255
Mohamad Junaid
but a “sanctioned ignorance . . . inseparable from colonial domination” – reflecting Subaltern

Studies group’s own indictment of elite historiography (Spivak 1988: 7). TH writing, by con-
trast, was an oppositional historiographical praxis: a people denied the right to narrate their own
past had taken it upon themselves to write it.
Second, my interest in TH writers grew as I discerned an emergent attentiveness to new
historical discourses among young Kashmiri activists. Especially after mass protests in 2008
in Kashmir,13 many of them were reading and referencing TH writings. For them, political
activism for Kashmiri independence involved not just confronting Indian state’s violence, but
also an active commitment to countering Indian accounts of Kashmir’s history. Indian officials
described these activists as “agitators” and “anti-nationals” to be punitively contained or brain-
washed, but the latter possessed a historical knowledge that, in their own estimation, made them
invulnerable to Indian propaganda.
In my count, there are around two dozen Kashmiris who have undertaken history writing
as a vocation and a mode of challenging the Indian nationalist historiography. Early examples
include Yusuf Saraf ’s Kashmiris Fight for Freedom (1979), G.M.D. Sufi’s Kashir: Being a History of
Kashmir (1948), and Prem Nath Bazaz’s The History of the Struggle (1954). Akhtar Mohiuddin’s
Fresh Approach to the History of Kashmir (1998) is an archetype of this genre. Among contempo-
rary writers, Zahir-ud-Din’s Flashback (2013) and Khalid Bashir’s Kashmir: Exposing the Myth
Behind the Narrative (2017) have been influential among younger activists. In Urdu, P.G. Rasool’s
Mumlikat Kay Aakhri Din (“The Last Days of the Republic,” 2001) and Munshi Ishaq’s Nida-e-
Haq (“Call of Truth,” 2014) are significant texts. Historical autobiographies, Sheikh Abdullah’s
Atish-e-Chinar (“The Fire of Chinar,” 1985) and Syed Ali Geelani’s multivolume Rudad-e-Qafas
(“The Secrets of Prison,” 1995), can all be seen as part of the TH writing genre.14 While the
differences between some of these texts are significant,15 what are remarkable are the common
themes that relate them to each other. Due to limits of space, I can trace only some of these
common themes, especially the representation of 1947 events, the colonial nature of Indian
control, and the reconstruction of Kashmir’s history to challenge Indological discourses.
I use the term history writers instead of historians for these writers simply because they are
not professional historians. They are neither based in academic institutions, nor do they claim
authority based on training in historical methods. They – some of whom are no longer alive –
come from varied backgrounds, and include activists, political leaders, former judges, journal-
ists, local literary figures, or even former bureaucrats. A few of them have momentarily been
in relative positions of power, like Sheikh Abdullah who was the Prime Minister (1948–1953)
and Chief Minister (1975–1981) of Kashmir, but almost all have experienced or continue to
experience different degrees of imprisonment, exile, excommunication, repression or harass-
ment. Like professional historians, though, they have devoted considerable intellectual effort
and passion to their work.16 Also pertinent to mention is that while history writing is an
important element of their works, many of them produce considerable writings in other gen-
res as well.17
TH writers are autodidacts and self-motivated. Those I interviewed said they had either “felt
the desire” to “record the present for the future generations” or were “thrown into writing”
to show the “true picture of the Kashmir question.” What unites them is their shared under-
standing of the Tehreek movement’s origins and the acceptance of its key claims. For them,
the movement started in 1931 – more precisely on July 13, 1931, when the forces of the state’s
Hindu-Dogra rulers massacred Muslim-Kashmiri protestors outside a jail in Srinagar, leading
to the first mass demonstrations for equal rights and sovereignty of Kashmiris “as a people.” TH
writers uphold three central Tehreek claims: “1947” marks the beginning of Indian occupa-
tion, not a transition to “freedom” (as the Indian nationalist historiography frames the event);
256
Kashmir is a realm in its own right, distinct from India; and the “Kashmir question” is about the
right to self-determination.
Early TH writings emerged after 1953, as the Indian control grew with Nehru arresting his
hitherto-favored Sheikh Abdullah and fracturing his National Conference, and, unwittingly,
loosening Abdullah’s authoritarian hold over Kashmiri public sphere. India backtracked on
the promise of plebiscite and claimed Kashmir on the contention that the last Dogra ruler had
signed an “Instrument of Accession” with India. TH writers found this claim not just against
democratic principles and a repeat of the colonial predilection to give feudal princes arbitrary
powers over people’s fates, but also contradicting the actual course of the events in 1947. This
became the initial spur to their writings. TH writers, however, wrote mostly in the aftermath of
the pro-independence protests and armed movement in 1989–1990, a period marked by India’s
violent counterinsurgency campaign.
TH writers did not form a “school” or a group and have remained independent of each
other. Only in some cases have I found a conscious or sustained mutual engagement with
each other’s texts, even though they all share the same interpretive frameworks and concep-
tual themes. When the state isn’t proactively suppressing them, TH writings circulate within
Kashmiri activist circles and even within the broader Kashmiri public sphere. However, Indian
officials see TH writings as seditious or, at the minimum, a subversive discourse best kept under
control. In Kashmir’s state-run and private schools only Indian nationalist history texts are
allowed.
TH writers’ works are often self-published or are serially published in local newspapers.
Though some adopt a formal tone, like Geelani whose Rudad-e-Qafas is written in a high Urdu
prose, others like Zahir-ud-Din write in a conversational style. The writings are mostly in Eng-
lish and Urdu, rarely in Kashmiri – understandably because, institutionally denied learning their
native language in schools, most Kashmiris speak their tongue but can hardly read or write in it.
Younger Kashmiris, however, read and write in English and Urdu, and TH writers see them as
their main audience. Their writings also circulate over the internet. However, the Indian gov-
ernment’s draconian digital surveillance of Kashmiris has led to a recourse to closed social media
groups and anonymous accounts, which a TH writer told me was like adopting “guerrilla writ-
ing tactics” under a system “determined to deprive the movement of all intellectual support.”
In short, my anthropological interest in TH writers is about tracing a genealogy of Kashmir’s
political present by – to borrow Clifford Geertz’s phrase – “looking over the shoulders of those
already doing so.” Later, I briefly outline how TH writers signify key events in ways that fun-
damentally diverge from Indian accounts, how they read the dilemmas of Kashmir’s present as
traumatic remnants from the past, and how they contest dominant paradigms of Indian writings
on Kashmir.
Recasting “1947”
In narrating the Tehreek movement, the historical injustice of “foreign control” remains the
cardinal trope in TH writing, and Kashmiri emancipation via “self-determination” its key moral
principle. These ideas course through their writings like an “interpretive master code” repur-
posed for a subversive project.18 The code inhabits TH writings in a form analogous to how
the aspiration of azaadi (freedom, or national liberation) and resistance to Indian occupation
inhabit Tehreek activism, as an infallible moral disposition that enables a non-official apprehen-
sion of political experiences and events. The continued Kashmiri resistance reinforces the TH
writers’ worldview, even as TH writings shape Kashmiri political subjectivity. Within this code
or framework, the year “1947” symbolizes the foundational trauma.
257
Mohamad Junaid
Unlike in India and Pakistan, where 1947 is officially celebrated as the year of independence,
TH writers see it as a year of external “annexation” as well as internal “political blunders.” They
trace an essential continuity in the Kashmiri historical relation to “the state” before and after
1947, when the Dogra dynasty (in power since 1846) handed control to India. Accordingly,
they represent the anti-feudal struggle before 1947 and the anti-occupation struggle after 1947
as part of one unbroken movement: Tehreek. 1947 is thus traumatic not because any funda-
mental change in Kashmir’s condition took place; it is traumatic because a singular possibility of
freedom was forcibly taken as well as naively lost.
India invaded and annexed Kashmir in October 1947. The invasion accompanied suppres-
sion of ongoing rebellions that had broken out all over the region against Dogra rule. It also
provided a cover for Dogra forces and their Hindu nationalist allies from India to carry out an
ethnic cleansing of Muslims in the Dogra-stronghold of Jammu. In a matter of few months,
most of Jammu’s Muslims would be either killed or forcibly dislocated. TH writers cite news-
paper reports of the era to claim that close to 237,000 were killed, while a few claim numbers
as high as half-a-million. They describe this ethnic cleansing as the “Jammu Massacre.” By the
spring of 1948, Kashmir itself would be cleaved into two by Indian and Pakistani forces, sever-
ing many historical subjects of the state from each other. In the years ahead, the Jammu Mas-
sacre was erased from official memory (Rashid 2020), but the event’s significance became even
more pronounced in TH writings.
TH writers see 1947 as a year of “blunders” largely due to Sheikh Abdullah’s “naivete” or
“opportunism” – the charge depends on how much one blames Abdullah for India’s annexation
of Kashmir. In August 1947, when the British asked “princely rulers” to accede to either India
or Pakistan, Kashmir’s Dogra ruler hesitated. But by October, when growing unrest within the
state made his position untenable, he acceded with India. According to TH writers, the acces-
sion went against the popular desire for independence. It also flouted the Partition logic; he was,
they argue, bound to consider the state’s Muslim majority and geographical contiguity. Why a
Hindu ruler went against the “required choice” – to join Pakistan – is not a mystery to those
TH writers who would have favored Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan. For others, he did con-
template independence, but Indian leaders convinced him that a Hindu-majority India would
protect his interests against his subjects. Under the pretext that tribesmen from the Northwest
frontier had launched attacks against the state,19 the Dogra ruler hurriedly signed the Instrument
of Accession and gave control to Indian forces invading Kashmir, provoking a war with Pakistan.
Abdullah, the key Kashmiri leader and just released from a Dogra prison, endorsed this decision,
believing that India would honor its pledge to hold a “plebiscite” once the hostilities were over.
India never held the plebiscite. Instead, in 1953, as Abdullah started publicly questioning the
accession, he was removed as the Prime Minister and arrested.
In TH writings, Abdullah’s motives are extensively discussed. He is alternately seen as favor-
ing independence, autonomy under India, and even joining Pakistan – but based on his terms,
that is via the plebiscite. He is also seen as a “tall leader” (for land redistribution), immoral (for
leaving Jammu’s Muslims to their own fate), or naïve (for trusting Indian leaders like Nehru).
Though his may have been acts of political naivete in 1947, Abdullah’s later compromises,
especially in 1974–1975 when he dropped the plebiscite demand to secure a demoted posi-
tion of “chief minister,” became the privileged prism for more contemporary TH writers to
see Abdullah’s entire political career as opportunism rather than just miscalculations. However,
unlike in Indian accounts that see Abdullah as representing all Kashmiris (even while treating
him with suspicion), he is but one among many Kashmiri leaders who feature in TH writings.
For instance, his position regarding the Jammu Massacre is seen as inextricably tied to his tragic
rivalry with the Muslim Conference leader from Jammu, Chaudhary Gulam Abbas.
258
The events of 1947 are not the only ones recast in TH writings; other dates are also invested
with meanings, either as traumatic or as resurgence. 1586, for instance, when Mughals first took
control from Kashmiri rulers, is the year Kashmir is seen as having lost its “independence,” with
Mughals becoming the first of a series of “foreign rulers.” In this reframing, 1846 is also critical.
That year the British East India Company, via the Treaty of Amritsar, “sold Kashmir and its
people” to the Dogra warlords of Jammu. In contrast to these events of loss, 1931 is catharti-
cally remembered as one when Kashmiris “finally rose up for their emancipation” in revolt
against the Dogras. In the same vein, 1990 is the year of the second mass uprising, this time for
freedom from Indian control. Kashmir’s political history is thus narrated as a “long struggle” for
self-determination and freedom from foreign control. TH writers like Zahir-ud-Din point to
several other instances of revolt and protest in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Kashmir
as part of this struggle, though these were localized instances, unlike the mass mobilizations of
1931 and 1990.
Colonial Continuities
TH writers draw from historic anti-imperialist movements, especially Palestine, which remains
a key reservoir of anti-occupation metaphors. But they also invoke India’s own anti-colonial
movement – its prominent figures and metaphors – to justify the Kashmiri struggle. To validate
armed resistance, they might turn to Bhagat Singh, the Punjabi revolutionary revered in Indian
anti-colonial narratives. For the ethics of hunger strikes, public fasts, or voluntary arrests, they
might invoke Gandhi – if only with a twinging sense of betrayal that marks Gandhi’s role in
India’s annexation of Kashmir.20 Symbolization of Kashmiri protest also mirrors anti-colonial
practices in British India. Major political campaigns, like the 2010 “Quit Kashmir” protests
echoed the “Quit India” campaign of 1942 and was first adopted as early as 1944 during the
anti-Dogra struggle. Use of terms like hartal (strike), chalo (march), or samraj (empire) in TH
writings suggests symbolic proximity to South Asia’s anti-colonial past.
Such invocation is not contextless borrowing but is undergirded by actual connections
between British colonial practices and laws in India and Indian practices and laws in Kashmir.
Laws like the Public Safety Act or the Armed Forces Special Powers Act not only resemble
repressive laws the British applied in India but are in letter and spirit the same laws. It is not hard
to see, therefore, why TH writers trace similarities between the practices and the language of
Indian counterinsurgency in Kashmir and what India’s own historians uncovered in the archives
of British counterinsurgency campaigns.
In recasting the events of 1947 and invoking colonial continuities, TH writings throw into
sharp relief the ideology in Indian historiography. Below, I briefly outline two paradigmatic-ide-
ological modes of Indian writing that symbolically appropriate Kashmir as “integral” to India,
and which provoke TH writers’ counterclaims. The first relates to India’s state ideology, and the
second to the civilizational discourse of Indian nationalism. Both share assumptions even if their
political objectives appear different.
Indian Historiography and the Appropriation of Kashmir

India’s state ideology was shaped principally by Nehru and his emphasis on “secularism” as
India’s self-identity. In his mind, Kashmir occupied a strategic and sentimental place (Anderson
2013: 80), with its Muslim majority exemplifying India’s exceptional status as a tolerant, secular
state. In India, secularism was notionally understood as equal treatment of all religions, and
technically it meant relative autonomy of minority religious groups in regulating their own civil
259
Mohamad Junaid
affairs. In the Indian secularist discourse on Kashmir, however, “secularism” indexed a peculiar
notion of “syncretism,” one not so much about cultural or religious intermingling (as com-
monly understood by the idea), as about the taming, or “moderation” of Islam’s assumed fanati-
cism under Hinduism’s influence. Historians working closely with Indian government agencies
posited a gentle heterodox “Sufi Kashmiri Islam” as different from the extremist orthodox
“Pakistani or Arab Islam.”21 The “gentleness” of Kashmiri Islam was attributed to its unprob-
lematic co-habitation under a broader “Hindu” or “Indic” culture. In secularist accounts, Kash-
mir is seen as an essentially Hindu space in which Islam had gradually lost its orthodoxy (Parmu
1969; Bamzai 1994).
As the historian Mridu Rai argues, within the Indian secularist discourse, Kashmiriyat (Kash-
miriness) was deployed as an ideological vessel to mark this symbolic role for Kashmir (Rai
2004: 224–225). Official historians narrowly denoted Kashmiriyat as a quality (syncretism) and
as a “regional” character, carefully avoiding describing it in “national” terms, as understood
by Kashmiris like Abdullah who had evoked it as a political strategy to build inter-religious
bridges after 1931. In practice, the term has acted as an ideological inoculation against Kash-
miri demands for economic and political rights. Official accounts depict Kashmiri Muslims
protesting for rights or resources under the Dogra or the Indian state as relapsing into religious
fundamentalism and not being true to Kashmiriyat.
In constructing Kashmiri identity in terms of Kashmiriyat, official secularist historians purged
it of its political content, conveniently postulating Kashmir to have found a natural home within
a “secular” India instead of a “communal” Pakistan. Disregarding Kashmiri aspirations for inde-
pendence, they proclaimed 1947 to have already ushered “freedom” for Kashmiris. Within the
secularist paradigm, post-1947 Tehreek mobilizations are characterized as “separatism” driven by
“Islamic fundamentalists” and “Pakistani proxies,” and not as an authentic Kashmiri movement.
Kashmiris are represented at best as “alienated,” not as conscious subjects of their own history,
and treated as “subversive” for being naïvely receptive to Pakistani manipulation that threatens
not just India’s territorial integrity but also its secular foundations (Ganguly and Bajpai 1994).
These ideological uses of Kashmiriyat do not sit well with the TH writers’ understanding of the
pre-1947 social order in Kashmir when religious identity was almost coterminous with class
identity. For them, Indian secularist accounts had not asked how a syncretistic Kashmiriyat could
have existed under the feudal Dogra-Hindu state, which had practically disempowered Kashmiri
Muslims into serfdom, while elevating Hindu upper castes as a privileged minority (Rai 2004).
The second – and the hegemonic – paradigm of Indian writing on Kashmir draws from a
civilizational discourse within Indian nationalist historiography known as “Indology” (which
mirrors the West’s orientalist discourse).22 This paradigm, which literary historian Aamir Mufti
has called the “sacred-secular Indic complex” (2010: 272–273), was shaped by colonial accounts
of India as essentially a Hindu civilization.23 This civilization had presumably degenerated under
medieval Muslim rule, from which it had then been liberated by the British. In the twentieth
century, this account was reconstructed by Hindu nationalists, and was later adopted by Nehru
in his Discovery of India, who presented a teleological account of the “Indian nation” from what
is described as the “glorious age of Hinduism” in ancient India, through the medieval period
of “Muslim interruptions,” to the modern Hindu “reawakening.” But while Nehru emphasized
a secular postcolonial nation-building, Hindu nationalists denounced secularism as “appease-
ment” of Muslims and saw the erasure of Muslim identity as key to the return of a “glorious
Hindu era.” Both Nehru and the Hindu nationalists deploy in their writings the territorial
symbol of Bharat Mata (Mother India goddess) as a bodily metaphor for India (Ramaswamy
2001). For the Hindu nationalists the symbol represents India as a sacred body beset by Muslim
“enemies”; for Nehru, the Hindu icon is an organic spirit pervading “all Indians.”
260
Within Indology, Kashmir is portrayed as a cradle of the ancient Hindu-Sanskrit civilization,

and therefore intrinsically connected with India (for instance, Kaul 2018). The roots of Indo-
logical discourse on Kashmir lie in the late nineteenth-century Dogra state, which, in search
of legitimacy as Hindu sovereignty over a predominantly Muslim population, sought to locate
Kashmir as part of the sacred pan-Hindu geography. The British, seeking to stabilize imperial
frontiers in the Great Game, provided the Dogra claims ideological support. Early Indologists
like Aurel Stein, a British official deputed to Kashmir, collaborated with upper-caste Hindus in
the Dogra court and used Indological philology and archaeology (Rai 2009) to consolidate the
notion that Kashmir was a Hindu realm. These colonial-Brahmin collaborations posited a grand
Hindu past buried under a degenerated Muslim present desperate for excavation.
In this civilizational paradigm, Kashmir’s anti-feudal and anti-occupation struggles are repre-
sented as attacks against the Hindu state, “genocide” of Kashmir’s Hindus, and as acts of “Islamic
terrorism.” The conversion of Kashmiris to Islam, from the 14th C onward, is represented as
“forced conversion.” Some versions of this narrative see Kashmiris as essentially Hindus, who
must renounce Islam and “return” to their “original religion.” Far from countenancing Tehreek as
legitimate, it is seen as an Islamic affront on the Hindu body-politic, requiring punitive excision.
Oppositional Logics of Tehreek History Writing

TH writers’ responses to Indian paradigms of writing on Kashmir are consistent, if fragmented.
In this last section, I highlight a few examples of these responses from three TH writers. As a
critique of Indian nationalist paradigms, two main oppositional logics can be discerned in TH
writing, both seeking to place Kashmiris as actors in their own unfolding history. Before these
logics can be outlined, however, a few qualifications must be stated outright. First, TH writers
do not reject syncretism, but refuse to see it through the “Hindu-Muslim” lens in the manner
of Indian secularist historiography. Instead, they affirm Kashmiri society to have historically
emerged though centuries of cultural, religious, material, and linguistic interactions and traffic
with the Persianate world, Central Asia, and the subcontinent.24 Second, though they represent
Kashmiris as “a people,” TH writers are neither preoccupied with a nationalist teleology, nor
do they see a grand design in history itself. Finally, “Kashmir” as a geographical referent in their
writings is place-centered, and a layered landscape of events, memories, and identity, unlike in
Indian historiography in which “India” as a territorial referent is spatially imagined, sacralized,
and indistinguishable from the map of the British Indian Empire.
The first oppositional logic, exemplified by Akhtar Mohiuddin’s text Fresh Approach to the
History of Kashmir, contests the Indological claims of the pre-1947 colonial-Brahmin and the
post-1947 Indian nationalist historians, while tracing alternative sources and trajectories of
Kashmiri history. Mohiuddin, for instance, suggested that the caste system and a desire to escape
its strictures may have been the key forces behind Kashmir’s historical transformations. Accord-
ing to his account, the Brahmanical-caste system was externally imposed upon indigenous
Kashmiri communities after the Aryan-Vedic influx into Kashmir around 1500 BCE, and even-
tually resistance to caste led to mass conversions, first to Buddhism and later to Islam. Discarding
the colonial-Brahmin “origin story” of Kashmir which privileged Brahmanical myths as facts,
Mohiuddin connected Kashmiri past with the pre-Vedic Indus Valley Civilization by analyzing
archaeological finds at Neolithic sites such as Burzahom in central Kashmir, and by decentering
Sanskrit and revealing the proto-Dravidian roots of the Kashmiri language. He demonstrated
that Aurel Stein’s use of Sanskrit-mythological texts in his archaeological search for a “civili-
zational” past was erroneous.25 Mohiuddin’s short but compelling account has inspired more
recent TH writings that continue to challenge colonial-Brahmin accounts.26
261
Mohamad Junaid
The second oppositional logic in TH writing, typified by Zahir-ud-Din’s books Bouquet and
Flashback, is centered on illuminating events and figures significant to the Tehreek movement,
but invisibilized in dominant narratives. These are events and figures forgotten within the Parti-
tion stories and in the accounts of India-Pakistan elite politics. Zahir-ud-Din’s is a revisionist
account of Kashmiri protests from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. Like other TH writ-
ers, he has a moral view of history, believing the annexation in 1947 to be unfair and unjust to
Kashmiris. His writings usually take the form of micro-histories of events and actors, especially
those associated with the Plebiscite Front, a Kashmiri party created after 1953 to demand the
right to self-determination. His “archives,” in his own words, are “the voices of old activists”
who participated in Tehreek, especially those who challenged Abdullah. “History does not
forgive anyone; we have to put people in the witness box,” he told me in 2014. Accordingly, he
evaluates the “roles” different actors had played, even as he compiles and serializes hundreds of
oral accounts. His work primarily reveals the disaffection within the National Conference over
the accession with India as reflecting the general Kashmiri disposition. Zahir-ud-Din argues
that Jammu Massacre was intrinsic to the events that led to the Treaty of Accession, and its
silencing was an early, disquieting sign of how India intended to rule Kashmir without regard
for the lives and aspirations of its people. He also uses short historical vignettes to shed light
on texts – legal documents, political tracts, assembly speeches – that support Kashmir’s case for
independence.
Another approach within TH writing has taken the form of “chronicle,” more or less, in
the way Hayden White (2014) defines it as an ostensibly narrative-less recording of calendrical
events.27 Shakil Bakshi, part of a student organization instrumental in the 1990 uprising, for
instance, maintains a public diary called “Today in History.” His entries are factual notes on
political events in Kashmir. His accumulating diary, which he sometimes publishes on social
media, lists events, like “massacres,” “deaths,” “arson by Indian soldiers,” “public statements,”
or “visits of dignitaries” that occur on particular days. This mode of history writing creates a
shadow archive of violence in Kashmir, an archive of the fractured or dis-membered present that
may be discovered later but of which no official record would have existed otherwise.
These organizing logics of TH writing cannot be subsumed as nationalist or ethnic history
because they respond critically to the dominant nationalist paradigms and mobilize a different
set of imagery than the one typically deployed to mass-produce a nationalist imagination. TH
writers do not summon a “glorious past” or a future of “greatness.” We must not read their
evolving accounts simply to find historical “truths” or as a more accurate history. We must,
instead, trace the sharp focus they cast on key assumptions of the hegemonic, official account,
as well as on the nexus of power and knowledge within the postcolony. TH writings evoke a
restlessness with postcolonial historical representation and challenge the categories of the post-
colonial archive. As seditious recitations of history, they trouble both the subtle and the not-so-
subtle ruses of postcolonial authority.
Among TH writers there is a deep sense of colonial déjà vu. Even a cursory look at the his-
torical accounts of colonialism in India and the forms of Indian control in post-1947 Kashmir
would reveal the obvious resemblances. Yet, India’s postcolonial historiography remained silent.
As the Indian state deployed explicit colonial laws and practices to create a punitive state of
emergency in the region after 1990, India’s postcolonialist historiography averted its gaze. Given
this nexus of power and knowledge, TH writers suggest that Kashmir has been turned into a
structural component of the Indian nationalism28 – a necessary colonial residue. The hegemonic
mode in which postcolonial India is imagined requires Kashmir as a colony to simultaneously
furnish the new state its self-identity and affirm its destiny as a postcolonial empire, which
would, in form and aspiration, replicate past subcontinental empires.29
262
Mohiuddin, Zahir-ud-Din, and Bakshi all grew up in Srinagar’s Batehmalyun area. A poorer
neighborhood of the city, Batehmalyun is crammed under the weight of a large Indian military
base, which replaced the Dogra forces stationed there till 1947. Batehmalyun was also the scene
of state-led arson several times, most traumatically in 1965, when Indian soldiers burnt the area
down. All three writers were closely associated with the Tehreek. Mohiuddin, who died in
2002, joined the Hurriyat Conference, a Tehreek formation, for some time in the early 1990s.
Zahir-ud-Din was a student activist. Bakshi led a radical group of youth, some of whom were
the first to take up arms against the state in 1990, even though Bakshi himself chose “resistance
in the form of writing,” as he prefers to say. Their being born in Batehmalyun is coincidental,
but their shared experiences despite growing up there at different times (Mohiuddin lived in
Batehmalyun during the Dogra era, while Zahir-ud-Din and Bakshi during the 1970s and
1980s) shows “colonial continuity” is not just an abstract concept but a felt, lived experience.
Postscript
Postcolonial historiography in India has addressed the question of “difference,” that is those
forms of life and experience that remain unaccounted for or outside the purview of the domi-
nant European epistemes. But it has not addressed that which remains uncannily “similar” to
colonialism within the postcolonial state. It disregards the continuing forms of state-imperial
practices, constitutive hierarchies, and legalized spaces of exception. Its attention remains fixated
on India’s colonial past, even within a present so thoroughly disfigured by India’s own colonial
practices in places like Kashmir. No insights from their studies of colonialism are allowed to
“travel” to understand postcolonial occupation, either theoretically “from situation to situation,
from one period to another” as Said put it (1983: 226), or in the most basic sense from India
to Kashmir (even though the distance from Delhi to Srinagar is a fraction of that from Delhi to
London). Even when Indian postcolonialists grudgingly acknowledge colonial traces in Indian
control in Kashmir, their analyses remain trapped in nationalist cartographic imaginaries.
In 2019, India revoked the last remnants of Jammu and Kashmir’s “autonomy,” dismembered
the state into two directly controlled “union territories,” detained thousands of Kashmiris, and
passed new landownership laws that opened Kashmir for Indian settlers – an outright settler
colonial project. Partha Chatterjee, a key Subaltern Studies collective member, wrote of this
as a “test bed of a new model of internal colonialism” (2019). While Chatterjee described the
Indian policy in Kashmir as involving a dual logic of “democracy at home” and “autocracy in
the colonies,” which reflects his formulation of “rule of colonial difference,” (1993: 14–34), his
emphasis on “internal colonialism” continued to center “India” as a naturalized space of analysis
and posit Kashmiris as having no claim to an independent history and territory.30 Overlook-
ing Kashmir’s anti-feudal movement and the foundational violence that accompanied India’s
annexation of Kashmir, Chatterjee presents the events of 1947 simply as a “dominion state” ver-
sus “princely state” constitutional affair complicated by some princes “toying with the idea of
not joining either India or Pakistan.” Underlying Chatterjee’s view is the recurring assumption
that Kashmir had found a natural home within the Indian federal set-up like all other “princely
states.” Instead of a question of popular sovereignty to be resolved via an established process of
decolonization, he sees Kashmir as a constitutional hiccup in the Indian state-building process,
and as such a sub-plot of Indian history to be resolved as a “domestic” Indian affair under new
rules India itself would have to create. Unsurprisingly, evoking Kashmir as an internality of
Indian statehood echoed the official rhetoric that “Kashmir is an internal matter of India.”
In this ongoing context, TH writers remind us that if colonialism was based in physical and
epistemic violence, so is the postcolonial occupation. Though they seek answers in history, their
263
Mohamad Junaid
tenor of urgency reflects an ethical commitment to ending the colonial violence in Kashmir.
In their pursuit, they have created an archive of the present and sought to re-suture memory in
Kashmir. While intensely focused on their own condition, their work unwittingly addresses the
wider phenomenon of postcolonial occupation. For them, Kashmir is incipiently connected to
those other conquered peoples and regions currently under colonial forms of control. Crucially,
TH writers have cast a critical optic on the willful ignorance within Indian postcolonial histo-
riography. If Kashmir has been an epistemic black hole within modes of writing that theorize
India as a postcolony, TH writers have squelched spaces in the margins and given themselves
the permission to narrate their own history.
Notes
1 These “imperial dispositions” are marked by “an ability to excuse oneself from wrought engagement”
and a “refusal to witness” by those with privilege and standing (Stoler 2010: 256).
2 On military occupation in Kashmir, see Visweswaran (2012); Junaid (2013); Duschinski et al. (2018).
3 These laws included: Enemy Agents Ordinance (1948), Public Safety Act (1978), Disturbed Areas Act
(1990), and Armed Forces Special Powers Act (1990), etc.
4 Several Indian writings reveal this view explicitly, including the ex-governor of Kashmir, Jagmohan’s
My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir (1991), or former head of India’s external intelligence, A.S. Dulat’s
Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years (2015). Others are journalistic accounts but have prominently shaped the
Indian view of Kashmir, including Tavleen Singh’s Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors (1995) and M.J. Akbar’s
Kashmir: Behind the Vale (2002).
5 In this, Nehru’s The Discovery of India (1946) is the foundational text, about which writes historian San-
jay Subrahmanyam, “Somewhat paradoxically, in view of his later reputation as an apostle of secular-
ism, Nehru . . . accepted a very negative view of Islam . . . portray(ing) the situation in India after AD
1200. . . as the decline and atrophy of an already perfect civilization” (2013: 3). Among more recent
works in this unstoppable genre are Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India (1999) and Ramachandra Guha’s
India After Gandhi (2006).
6 For an early manifesto of these critics, see Guha (1988).
7 On postcolonial historiography in India, see Chakrabarty (2000).
8 For instance, Sundar (2007).
9 Joseph Massad uses the expression “post-colonial colony” to delineate this phenomenon. He writes:
“The United States, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Israel . . . instituted themselves as post-colonial
states . . . and instituted their political status as “independent” in order to render their present a post-
colonial era. Yet, the conquered peoples of these territories continue . . . to inhabit these spaces as
colonial spaces, and to live in eras that are thoroughly colonial” (Massad 2006: 13). I use “postcolonial
occupation” instead of “postcolonial colony” to distinguish regions not explicitly subject to settler
colonialism (at least until recently) but nevertheless under colonial forms of control.
10 Guha’s “Prose of Counter-Insurgency” (1983, vol 3. Subaltern Studies) for instance, articulated a frame-
work that could have enabled them to discard the tired colonial metaphors in Indian writings on
Kashmir.
11 For instance, Guha opens his book Dominance without Hegemony (1997) by calling Kalhana’s Rajtarangini
(a poetic chronicle of Kashmir’s ancient rulers) an “Indian” text.
12 Dipesh Chakravarty, a Subaltern Studies historian, appropriately sought to provincialize “Europe” as a
“hyperreal category” and an “indeterminate geographical referent” of the academic discourse of his-
tory, but, in the same breath, he laments how another hyperreal category “India,” and “Indian history,”
were in a position of subalternity to this discourse (1992: 1–2).
13 That year protests against Indian government’s land transfer policies led to some of the largest pro-
independence demonstrations in Kashmir.
14 There are historical accounts of Kashmir by Kashmiri historians, like Kashmir’s Transition to Islam by
Ishaq Khan (1994), which enter Tehreek discourse but aren’t a part of the TH writing genre as they
follow academic conventions. Additionally, Kashmir has a premodern tradition of “history writing” –
from mytho-poetic accounts, like Kalhana’s Rajtarangni (“The River of Kings,” 12th C) to mystical
ones, like Hasan Koihami’s Tareekh-e-Hasan (“History by Hassan,” 3 vols., 1880s), which double up as
chronicles of their times.
264
15 For instance, while Abdullah doesn’t say much about the 1947 ethnic cleansing of Jammu’s Muslims,
others see it as a foundational event. Abdullah’s autobiography takes the tone of an apologia, promi-
nently using the trope of “personal betrayal” by Indian leaders to interpret political events in Kashmir.
I include it as part of TH genre only because it engages Tehreek themes and remains a contested text
among TH writers.
16 In other contexts, such practitioners might be called “homespun historians” (Peterson and Macola
2009). I avoid using the term because of its patronizing connotations.
17 Mohiuddin, for instance, was a short story writer, who took up history writing toward the end of
his life.
18 Hayden White argues that such codes are “operation(s) by which the contents of experience which
resist description in unambiguous prose representations can be prefiguratively grasped and prepared for
conscious apprehension” (2014: 34–38). On “master codes,” see Bennington (1994: 74–78).
19 The frontier tribesmen had historically shared cultural, geographical, and kinship ties with Kashmir
and had likely heard of the Jammu massacre from fleeing Muslim refugees. India claimed Pakistan sent
them. Among Kashmiris the tribesmen came to be remembered for their lack of organization rather
than their war-fighting skills.
20 Gandhi had persuaded the Dogra ruler to accede with India and supported the invasion of Kashmir
(Anderson 2013: 86–88).
21 India’s Ministries of Education and Information and Broadcasting were at the forefront, deputing histo-
rians and journalists to write on Kashmir. During the 1960s, the education minister and later external
affairs minister M. C. Chagla himself wrote a book on the subject Kashmir 1947–1965, published by
the Information and Broadcasting ministry’s Publications Division.
22 For an overview of Indology, see Inden (1994). Inden writes as an Indologist himself and shares several
unexamined assumptions with other Indologists he criticizes.
23 Mufti locates the roots of Indology in Orientalism which privileged the Aryan-Vedic Sanskrit texts
as the essence of the subcontinent as a “single cultural entity” and which brought “the ‘nation-think-
ing’ . . . to bear upon culture and society in the subcontinent” (473).
24 Abdul Ahad Azad’s Kashmiri Language and Poetry is an early example of this historical “syncretism.”
25 The colonial-Brahmin narratives had primarily used Kalhana’s Rajatarangini as a historical source mate-
rial. For more, see Junaid (2019).
26 For example, Bashir (2017).
27 White argues chronicles are facts – acting as “primitive elements” of history – and involve selecting and
arranging data to make it comprehensible to audiences (5–11).
28 Visweswaran has also suggested that not only is India’s occupation in Kashmir “new imperialism,” but
occupation itself and its otherization of Kashmiris has been foundational to the postcolonial state form
(2012: 443).
29 Discovery of India is full of a romantic longing for past empires. Quite revealingly, on August 15, 1947,
Nehru stood on the ramparts of the Mughal-built Red Fort in Delhi and raised the Indian flag, its
hitherto Gandhian charkha replaced with the Mauryan chakra. Nehru was symbolically laying claim
over a historic continuity with the two largest empires that the subcontinent had ever seen, Mauryan
and Mughal.
30 The framework of “internal colonialism” has been previously used by Gyandendra Pandey, another
Subaltern Studies scholar, to show how Dalits and Muslims remained colonized in postcolonial India,
but since they were both “widely distributed” and “have no independent territory,” they “cannot
escape.” He goes on to say, “they cannot easily lay claim to an independent history and culture . . .
they gain their identity at least in part by their incorporation into the dominant culture or society”
(Pandey 2006: 1781). Quite clearly, this framework does not apply to Kashmiris, who, contra Chat-
terjee’s assumptions do have a consolidated territory in which they have been historically present.
Works Cited
Abdullah, Sheikh. 1985. Atish-e-Chinar. Srinagar: Ali Mohammad & Sons.
Anderson, Perry. 2013. The Indian Ideology. New York: Verso.
Bamzai, P. N. K. 1994. Culture and Political History of Kashmir. 3 vols. New Delhi: MD Publications.
Bashir, Khalid. 2017. Kashmir: Exposing the Myth Behind the Narrative. New Delhi: Sage Publication.
Bazaz, Prem Nath. 1954. The History of the Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir. New Delhi: Kashmir Publish-
ing House.
265
Mohamad Junaid
Bennington, Geoffrey. 1994. Legislations: The Politics of Deconstruction. New York: Verso.

Bhabha, Homi. 2012. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1992. “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’
Pasts?” Representations 37: 1–26.
———. 2000. “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography.” Nepantla: Views from South 1(1): 9–32.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press.
———. 2012. “After Subaltern Studies.” Economic and Political Weekly 47(35): 44–49.
———. 2019. “Kashmir is the Test Bed for a New Model of Internal Colonialism.” The Wire, August 28.
Crapanzano, Vincent. 2004. Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago:
Dar, Huma. 2007. “Cinematic strategies for a porno-tropic Kashmir and some counter-archives.” Journal
of Contemporary Thought 26: 77–110.
Feierman, Steven. 1990. Peasant Intellectuals: Anthropology and History in Tanzania. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Ganguly, Sumit and Kanti Bajpai. 1994. “India and the Crisis in Kashmir.” Asian Survey 34(5): 401–416.
Geelani, Syed Ali. 1995. Rudad-e-Qafas. Islamabad: Institute of Policy Studies.
Guha, Ranajit. 1988. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” In Selected Subaltern
Studies, 37–43. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. 2012. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Inden, Ronald. 1986. “Orientalist constructions of India.” Modern Asian Studies 20(3): 401–446.
Ishaq, Munshi. 2014. Nida-e-haq. Lahore: Ferozsons.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2013. “Death and Life under Occupation: Space, Violence, and Memory in Kashmir.”
———. 2019. “To be Kashmiri in the Present: Politics, Ethics, and History in the Work of Akhtar Mohi-
uddin.” In A Desolation Called Peace, edited by Ather Zia and Javaid Bhat, 149–192. Harper Collins.
Kabir, Ananya J. 2009. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Ann Arbor: University of Min-
nesota Press.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2019. “The Violence on Kashmir Is Epistemological as It Is Physical.” Jaddaliya,
December 11.
Kaul, Shonaleeka. 2018. The Making of Early Kashmir. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Kaul, Suvir. 2011. “Indian Empire (and the Case of Kashmir).” Economic and Political Weekly 46(13): 66–75.
Ludden, David, ed. 2002. Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalization
of South Asia. London: Anthem Press.
Massad, Joseph. 2006. The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Mehta, Pratap B. 2010. “Kashmir as a Syndrome.” India International Centre Quarterly 37(3/4): 2–11.
Mohiuddin, Akhtar. 1998. Fresh Approach to the History of Kashmir. Srinagar: Book Bank.
Mufti, Aamir R. 2010. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry 36(3):
458–493.
Osuri, Goldie. 2017. “Imperialism, Colonialism and Sovereignty in the (Post) Colony: India and Kash-
mir.” Third World Quarterly 38(11): 2428–2443.
Parmu, R. K. 1969. A History of Muslim Rule in Kashmir: 1320–1819. New Delhi: Peoples Publishing
House.
Peterson, Derek and Giacomo Macola. 2009. Recasting the Past: History Writing and Political Work in Modern
Africa. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Ranger, Terence. 1993. “The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa.” In Legitimacy
and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa, edited by T. O. Ranger and O. Vaughan, 62–111. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2009. “To ‘Tear the Mask off the Face of the Past’: Archaeology and Politics in Jammu and Kash-
mir.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 46(3): 401–426.
266
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. 2001. “Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India.” Imago Mundi 53(1): 97–114.
Rashid, Iffat. 2020. “Theatrics of a ‘Violent State’or ‘State of Violence’: Mapping Histories and Memories
of Partition in Jammu and Kashmir.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 43(2): 215–231.
Rasool, P. G. 2001. Mumlikat ke Akhri Din. Srinagar: Ali Mohammad and Sons.
Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1988. “Foreword.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by R. Guha and G. C. Spivak, v–x. New
York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2012. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
Saraf, Muhammad Yusuf. 1979. Kashmiris Fight for Freedom. 2 Vols. Lahore: Ferozsons Ltd.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Selected Subaltern Studies,
edited by R. Guha and G. C. Spivak, 3–36. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stoler, Ann L. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2013. Is Indian Civilization a Myth? Fictions and Histories. New Delhi: Permanent
Black.
Sufi, G. M. D. 1948. Kashir: Being a History of Kashmir. Lahore: University of the Panjab.
Sundar, Nandini. 2007. Subalterns and Sovereigns: An Anthropological History of Bastar, 1854–1996. Second
edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Varshney, Ashutosh. 1993. “Contested Meanings: India’s National Identity, Hindu Nationalism, and the
Politics of Anxiety.” Daedalus 122(3): 227–261.
Visweswaran, Kamala. 2012. “Occupier/Occupied.” Identities 19(4): 440–451.
White, Hayden. 2014. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD:
JHU Press.
Zahir-ud-Din. 2013. Flashback: Kashmir Story Since 1948. Srinagar: Best Sellers.
267
19
REMEMBERING HOME,
IMAGINING THE FUTURE
Changing Meanings of Home Among
Kashmiri Pandits
Ankur Datta
Introduction
Since 1990 the Kashmiri Pandits, as the Hindu minority of the Kashmir Valley are known, have
been affected by a mass displacement that took place with the beginning of the current conflict
in Jammu and Kashmir between the Indian state and a movement for independence in Kashmir
from the Indian state. The displacement of the Pandits has been controversial and occupies a
space that remains difficult to navigate. One explanation of their flight is that the Pandits were
attacked over the faith affiliation and alleged association with the Indian state, while the other
explanation is that their departure was engineered by the Indian state to discredit the move-
ment for independence. It is a fact that they represent one of most significant groups of conflict
induced Internally Displaced Persons in the region.
In this chapter I retrace earlier work with the Pandits on the questions of home and home-
land. I explore if meanings of home have changed over time, keeping in mind the persistence
of conflict in Kashmir, the state of exile and displacement for many Pandits and recent events
such as the abrogation of Article 370. What was and is now home for the Pandits? Where may
they find home in the future? The material that I draw upon consists of ethnographic research
I conducted a few years ago in Jammu and New Delhi (2005–2007, short trips in 2008, 2012,
2017), interactions with colleagues in relation to work on Kashmir, and knots that I continue
to struggle with in my work.
Traces of Home
What do we call home? Where is it located? While home in an immediate sense speaks to place,
it is more than a built structure. For an anthropologist like Mary Douglas, home is produced
through routinized practices in a particular context that orient life (1991: 289–290). Home
therefore consists of tangible structures and practices and relationships (Blunt and Dowling
2006). In contrast homelessness in that sense can then be read as an absence or denial of a life,
practices and relationships that orient one in the world. In earlier work I have explored how
Pandits related to place. What appeared then was a significant tension between the achieve-
ment of routine everyday life to varying degrees of success and failure and the making of home.
268 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-24

Remembering Home, Imagining the Future
Most conversations about home seemed to speak to structures, relationships, and a landscape
left behind in Kashmir, which were at odds with life in the present in Jammu (see Datta 2017a).
While articulations of the past, nostalgia and memory remains important, in hindsight there
were other ways of thinking about home, in the past and in the present. As I was often reminded
by people from the field, they may have a house in Jammu or New Delhi or anywhere else, a
life that may thrive or stagnate, but it did not mean that they felt at “home” where they were
attuned to the rhythms of life (see Stewart 2011).
In her work on migrants in Rome, Napolitano writes about an anthropology of traces. A city
like Rome is marked by different periods of history all of which leave a trace on the landscape.
These traces go beyond the material and are best seen as knots where stories condense (Napolitano
2014: 57). This excerpt from an essay by a young writer by the name of Pratush Koul who grew
up in Jammu is particularly revealing and connects well to the idea of the trace:
Recently, while getting the walls of our house in Jammu painted, my parents chanced
upon a bunch of keys hidden inside an old box on a shelf. Father held the keys close
to his chest. Mother broke down. I asked them about the keys. They made me sit next
them and told me about each one of the keys. “This big key unlocked the drawing
room,” they said. “This small one unlocked the kitchen. This one unlocked the bed-
room and this one unlocked the granary,” they went on and on.
Dad and Mom then handed the keys over to me. I wondered if the keys served a
purpose any more. Of what value were they now? I realised that the bunch of keys to
a house not there might be the most valuable possession of our family.
(Koul 2019: 82–83)
Traces are found everywhere in different forms across many households. One of the first things
that struck me, when I began fieldwork in Jammu in 2005 and moved around the city visiting
the different camps and neighborhoods, were the doors to a household. Often a door would
reveal not only a person’s name and quarter/house number, but also the name of a neigh-
borhood, a village, or a district in Kashmir. These doors seemed to be portals to homes and
homelands somewhere else. While going through descriptions of households in the camps or
elsewhere in my old fieldnotes, I came across mentions of things, such as photographs of scenes
of a life in Kashmir. In some households, photographs of a recent life in Jammu predominated
instead, alongside other markers of life such as out of date calendars and posters of scenery
from sites outside Kashmir. Objects such as old carpets, small deities or images of the Hindu
pantheon specific to the region, or even dried leaves from a chinar tree, which I treated then as
background detail, now speak to a life and history like Pratush’s keys.
Yet new traces also emerge such as the re-establishing of shrines from Kashmir in cities such
as Jammu and New Delhi. Some of these shrines include the construction of a temple in Jammu
as a replacement for the Uma temple in South Kashmir, which had been vandalized and allowed
to decay, to the various replicas of existing Kashmiri shrines built in Jammu which seeks to
simulate the experience of its original to the extent possible. The reception of the replicas is not
always certain. The replica of the Kheer Bhavani temple, that was built in Jammu was accepted
by some migrants whereas others disagreed as ecological elements such as spring water, which
was essential to the “original” could not be replicated (see Datta 2019).
The replica of Hari Parbat however is especially intriguing. Hari Parbat is a hill in Srinagar
that looms over the city. Apart from a Mughal fort that is visible, the hill is also known for a being
a home to places of worship for Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs: the Makhdum Saab Dargah, the
Sharika Temple, and the Gurudwara Chati Patshahi. Conversations on Hari Parbat with Pandits
269
Ankur Datta
would often open up a discussion of faith, landscape, routine and eventful life in the city. The rep-
lica of Hari Parbat that I have visited is located in a village in the Indian state of Haryana and built
in an area which incorporated a hill. Much of this was possible with the involvement of a Kashmiri
Pandit who was associated with a prominent NGO located near the chosen site. The village is as far
removed from the city of Srinagar as it can be. During one of my first visits to the replica back in
2007, I was amused by the sight of camels close to the gates of the main temple premises. However,
when one crosses the temple gate, visitors have to climb a flight of stairs leading to the top of the
hill. The crest of the hill where the temple structure is located simulates the experience of visiting
the “real temple.” During a visit several years later, I saw more of the complex was built up, which
now included a field with a large tableau of mountains and figures in pherans.
The replicas of shrines emerge out of a politics and project of remembrance, even though
they are not exact copies, but reformulations of what exists or existed. The replica does not
include the other shrines at the original hill. Other pressures can emerge as well. I was told by
many Pandits how traditionally offerings to deities such as Sharika required meat related prod-
ucts such as offal, which were discontinued in exile as people from local Hindu communities
would frown upon the practice. The replicas in any case speak to a sacred geography that is
deeply meaningful for the Pandits in relation to a displaced present (Singh 2014). Furthermore,
they serve as new traces of life and home now being remade outside Kashmir that will be inter-
esting to revisit when the displacement and exile becomes a deep history with the passing of
time. What will this accretion of traces do to changing meanings for home for the Pandits over
time, in terms of lives, built structures, and even ideas of homeland, especially when such sites
become a part of everyday life outside Kashmir?
Other Possibilities of Home

When I lived in Jammu from 2005–2007 for fieldwork during my doctoral studies, every con-
versation with the Pandits emphasized nostalgia for homes, homelands, landmarks, and other
sites in Kashmir. Much of the pain of exile emerged out of a contrast between home in the
past in Kashmir and home in the present in Jammu. Whenever I would ask my respondents
why they left, the narrative of the 19th of January would emerge which drew on large crowds,
violence, and fear. Yet if I pressed on and asked them what they thought may have led to that
situation, what often followed was an expression of bewilderment. This pervades much of the
writing in a series of texts put together by the writers such as Arvind and Siddharth Gigoo and
Varad Sharma (for example see Gigoo and Sharma 2015), who invited many displaced Pandits
to contribute short texts about their homes and lives they left behind, their flight from the Val-
ley, and the early years in Jammu and elsewhere as they remade life. These texts have emerged
at a time when a public memory is crystallizing their experiences. Interestingly many of the
essays, testimonies, and memorials after a point spill into each other, as they repeat similar
experiences and motifs. This is not to dismiss their efforts, as many of the contributors are not
professional writers. In any case, this project produces a certain archive where home is defined
by overwhelming loss for a certain generation.
Shorter visits and encounters I had over the years suggest newer possibilities. When I first
returned to Jammu after completing my doctorate in 2012, things felt uneven as the camp that
was the focus of my ethnographic work had been shut down by then. While everyone knew the
camps would be shut at some point, with populations consolidated at a place called Jagti located
just outside Jammu city, their closure was an important moment and marked the end of an era.
During that visit I returned to Purkhu camp, where I did fieldwork, emptied of people. The
basic structures of the One Room Tenements (ORT), which were the housing units assigned
270
to each family, were still visible though the walls separating quarters were demolished, cover-
ing the lanes in rubble. Names painted on fallen doors, frayed posters and old announcements
remained on the few walls left standing as testament to people who once lived there. An area
that developed a life of its own over the years and that had become home had easily been taken
apart. Other camps such as Muthi camp have not only been emptied but have become sites of
new construction work, thereby effacing any remaining trace of the camp.
Jagti in some ways seemed an improvement, providing families an apartment with attached
bathrooms, kitchens and more space as opposed to the single box like room of 9 feet by 14 feet.
It appeared no different from any other lower-middle income residential apartment complex
in design seen across North India. When I went to visit the family I knew best from Purkhu at
Jagti after my doctoral studies, I had taken a copy of my thesis to show them what I had written
and watched them quickly flip through dry text to a few photographs of Purkhu camp. This
family was deeply nostalgic for Kashmir and often spoke of nothing else. Yet I was surprised to
see how they dwelled on the few photographs of Purkhu Camp I had included in my thesis.
While they looked at the photos, a neighbor of theirs who also lived in Purkhu camp at one
time had come over to visit as well and also started to show an interest in the photos. Together,
they started to locate each photograph of camp quarters and lanes and the families who lived
there. This family, who otherwise hated the camp at one time, mourned the loss of that which
had been built there.
That the city of Jammu has become a possible home apart from Kashmir is apparent in
encounters and conversations with a younger generation who grew up or were born outside
Kashmir. While they shared their parent’s nostalgia, many of them were quite open about
Jammu being “home.” During a visit to Jagti, I remember watching Rohan Bhatt, who is
around my age and whose family I have often written about, lecturing a group of boys who
were close to finishing school and about to head out into the world. Rohan’s lecture, one
I heard many times before from him, referred to Kashmir as rishiwaer or the abode of sages and
how it is their home. The boys, while respectful, replied “whatever you say brother, Jammu is
our home.” In earlier work I had written about how the Pandits were often dismissive of Jammu
as a city. A common statement I encountered then was “Yahan pe bas bandar, dangar aur mandir”
(all there is here are monkeys, donkeys and temples). This sentiment however is changing. Many
younger Pandits seek to leave Jammu for reasons of work, education or for any other oppor-
tunity. However, while Kashmir remains a point of origin, Jammu is the place where home in
terms of relations are to be found. There are also indications of a political settlement in the city
as well in different forms. Earlier work I had engaged in draws on a history of some antagonism
with locals in the early 1990s when the Pandits first arrived in Jammu (see Datta 2017a). In
2008, a wave of protests took place in Kashmir, due to a plan by the state government to transfer
land in Kashmir to the Shree Amarnath Shrine Board which manages the Hindu pilgrimage to
the Amarnath caves. These protests were the first large-scale protests to take place after several
years and brought to the fore a new generation of protestors. However, when the state govern-
ment revoked the land transfer, protests took place for the first time in Jammu ostensibly against
the Valley’s politics. There was also a sense of things having changed apparently with the par-
ticipation of some Pandits in the Jammu protests. While it is difficult to discern the involvement
of the Pandits in those protests, it seemed that their participation earned them “respect” from
locals such as the Dogras.
While further work may confirm this shift, these sentiments also point to the changing
senses of where home is to be found. If home is to be seen in terms of social and political rela-
tionships and new lived structures, then for a younger generation, cities like Jammu become
home in the present while Kashmir remains a part of an idealized past. How do such notions of
271
Ankur Datta
home connect to homeland? In an essay by Indu Kilam, a poet, translator, and professor based
in Jammu since displacement, we are taken along on a trip to Kashmir to attend a wedding.
What emerges in the short text is an overwhelming sense of tension between returning to a city
that was both familiar and a source of bewilderment. It is the at end of the essay where things
become especially poignant, when she gets ready to return to Jammu:
Sitting in the aircraft to be flown back, I thought of what I had left behind-the murky
dark waters of the Dal, sad and poignant tales, apprehension and distrust writ large on the
faces of friends, sad poetry of my friend Naseem, who was and continues to be my soul-
mate, stories of rape, violence and death-no this was not my land-it was not worth being
mine. Landing at the small, decrepit airport of Jammu, where I am still called a “migrant,”
I noticed a gulmohar tree laden with beautiful, burnt-orange flowers and I realized that
Jammu has its colours too. Ironically, it took a long time for me to realize this.
(Kilam 2015: 146)
Another essay by the filmmaker Ajay Raina takes the reader to an even more uncertain space.
Raina writes about his imagination of Kashmir in relation to his life and work. From discussing
his desires of making a film on Kashmir to his own politics and movements in his life, there is
a tension that marks exile. He also discusses his film “Tell them, the tree they had planted has
now grown,” which documents his return to Kashmir some years before. While Raina writes
that this film is one he “hates to watch but likes to show to others” (2015: 128), what I am
intrigued by is an apparent tension that is captured in his homecoming. Raina’s film has its
share of critics from some liberal audiences. The film does not present a flattering picture of
different armed groups and their connection to Islamist politics, from which violence against
Pandits is presented. A well-known documentary filmmaker even dismissed it as a right-wing
film (See Kramer 2018; Raina 2015: 129). However, the film also follows Raina’s journey back
to Kashmir, visiting Srinagar and eventually his ancestral village and documents his attempts at
making sense of what happened as well. It follows connections, reconnections, and images of
encounters which may not be known to outsiders, regardless of their politics.
Raina occupies a difficult location. While his film is criticized as one sided, he is also involved
with a travelling film program that shows films on Kashmir featuring all perspectives which has
been attacked by Hindu nationalist activists. This criticism misses out tensions that are apparent
in coming to terms with the displacement of the Pandits and of the matter of return. What does
it mean to return home, albeit one that has changed? Does it help alleviate a state of unset-
tledness? What happens when one is forced to deal with and rethink their preconceptions, and
when one of those pertains to finding home? While loss is critical in Raina’s work, it is not an
inventory of property, objects, or “culture,” which are common tropes. Rather it is the loss of
certainty. When he writes about a visit in 2013 and reacts to the pollution that affects the Dal
lake, a waterbody he knew so well, he asks “Where is that Dal? Now that the imagination has
died, exile is itself a great relief. Let another revolution come” (Raina 2015: 131).
The process of coming to terms with home takes time. For Kilam this is clearly obvious, as
at the time that I conducted research in Jammu, which predates the essay I refer to, the tension
and difference between Jammu and Kashmir was immensely stark. For someone like Raina, that
process seems to remain incomplete as exile becomes the state of being in the world, which does
not mean Kashmir, or its idea, is left behind. As he wrote in an email exchange:
I prefer the idea of being in exile to the idea of returning home . . . which is not
home anymore, but only a wound. If at some point of time, home was in Kashmir.
272
Now, Kashmir is home, definitely. Because, howsoever I try, it’s one thing that will
keep following me.
An Uncertain Homeland
On August 5, 2019, the Indian government led by the ruling National Democratic Alliance
of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pushed a resolution for the abrogation of Article 370, split-
ting Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. While
the abrogation of Article 370 was a campaign promise of the BJP, the ease with which it was
achieved in the Indian parliament was surprising and revealing of changes in the Indian polity.
The abrogation was preceded by a period of expanding the heavy military presence in Kashmir
and followed by a severe lockdown and disruption to communication systems that continues to
the present. While reports spoke of outrage in the Kashmir Valley over this decision, Jammu in
contrast was reported to be largely supportive.
News reports suggested that the Pandits supported the abrogation and saw it as righting a
historical wrong. While they were affected by the lockdown and communication blackout in
the state, though not to the extent as was the case in Kashmir, at that moment, it seems they
were coming to terms to a new possibility. One of my closest respondents had said they were
mostly happy and satisfied at the turn of events. Another respondent, whose family I have
often written about, defended the manner in which it was done, arguing that if it followed
the constitutionally mandated way “the people there (in Kashmir) would not have allowed
it.” Others I spoke to in the months to follow reiterated that there was little opposition to the
abrogation in Jammu. Yet some people I knew expressed mixed feelings about the fact that a
locked down atmosphere persisted in Kashmir and how one’s homeland has become a political
experiment.
How do Pandits approach a notion of homeland in light of recent events? One of the earliest
endeavors is Panun Kashmir or Our Kashmir, which argued that Pandits and Muslims can no
longer share the same space and demanded the carving of a Pandit homeland from Kashmir,
which would be a union territory of India and where the Indian constitution would prevail (see
PKM 2004). While Panun Kashmir and its different factions were well-known, it was difficult
to assess their effect in everyday life. Interestingly its reception among migrants varied. While
the project had its supporters, it also had critics among migrants. One resident of Purkhu camp
I had interviewed back in 2006 dismissed their plan as carving a Pandit state would justify letting
Muslims have their own state, which the government of India would not allow. Another elderly
man I had met in Nagrota camp criticized the demand of Panun Kashmir to invite Indians from
the mainland to settle in Kashmir as a distinctive point. According to him, one would need
outsiders to come as Pandits being Brahmins will not provide labor such as cleaning the streets.
During fieldwork in 2005–2007 it seemed that Panun Kashmir worked best as a form of politi-
cal organization in the diaspora that provided a myth of return, which is seen across displaced
and refugee populations (Al Madawi 1994).
While the Pandits in Jammu are otherwise in their state of Jammu and Kashmir, they embody
a quality of diasporic life as defined by being dispersed from a homeland or a place of origin, share
multiple attachments and working out localizing strategies for life where they live ( James1994:
303). Brian Axel (2002) points to a tension involved in being in diaspora and the idea of home-
land that defined them as a people which produces a “diasporic imaginary.” Hence I saw Panun
Kashmir as a diasporic imaginary which produced an idea of homeland that sustains and consti-
tutes community for the Pandits who have become associated with life outside Kashmir. This was
apparent in conversations with activists who supported a Pandit homeland as an idea but whose
273
Ankur Datta
professional ambitions would take them further from the Valley rather than see a settlement and
resumption of life in Kashmir (see Datta 2017b). As Zetter (1999) points out, a myth of return
does not mythologize return but rather mythologizes home in the past to sustain the present.
Another question that is difficult to answer is whether a project like Panun Kashmir matches cur-
rent policies and their effects on Jammu and Kashmir. Will Panun Kashmir matter now?
Homelands are not static entities as the abrogation clearly shows. The celebration by Pandits
as reported was accompanied by statements about how the Pandits can now return, though as a
young Pandit journalist I spoke to pointed out, they may be seen as settlers and occupiers and
not as a people returning home. The current process in Jammu and Kashmir speaks more to the
political ambitions of the BJP and Hindu Nationalism rather than any consideration of a Hindu
population in the region. What is missed out is that there have been many Pandits returning to
Kashmir from time to time to work in various government departments. Pandit colonies were
being constructed over the last few years and some people I know would keep returning to con-
nect with friends and others they knew. But whether such returns will lead to resettlement and
restoration of lives left behind three decades ago is difficult to answer, and requires an attention
to the biographies and desires of those taking the return journey. Anyone returning to Kashmir
will be returning to a militarized landscape inhabited by a population they may not agree with.
Rather than return, they will be coming to a landscape subject to tremendous violence and risk
to life. In a present marked by violence, where the future is difficult to predict and the past is a
wasteland, what kind of homeland will Pandits return to?
A Vital Politics of Remembrance

In 1990, when a popular armed insurgency against the Indian state broke out, the
minority Pandit community fearing for their lives had to flee Kashmir. An intensive
state led crackdown followed in Kashmir killing thousands of native Muslims. Whilst
minority Pandit community suffered in scorching heat in refugee camps away from
home, the Muslims faced the brunt in their homes.
Although Kashmiri Muslim and Pandits share intertwined histories, culture and
livelihood for centuries, the conflict exploited the fault lines. Conflict unsettled
many equations in Kashmir, with both communities getting entangled in different
polarized narratives.
Many however would say the brotherhood at individual levels between Kashmiri
Pandits and Muslims has survived.1
And so begins Mashaemit Gharrih-the forgotten homes, a multimodal digital project put together by
four student journalists-Hanan Zafar, Akhilesh Nagari, Arpita Singh, and Tahira Noor Khan.2
Mashaemit Gharrih is a project that seeks to engage with the idea of home in Kashmir. While
the Pandit displacement is the focus of this project, what is equally striking are the connections
made between Pandits and Muslims and life among Kashmiris outside and inside the Valley.
Mashaemit Gharrih features videos, interviews, and articles published by the contributors, a
photo gallery of contemporary life in Kashmir along with notes by the four journalists regard-
ing their experiences and columns by invited commentators. Let us start with the homepage.
What is striking are range of voices provided through several video presentations. The first
video visitors encounter is of the poet Afaan, a young Kashmiri who came of age and witnessed
the resurgence of protests in 2008 when he expressed his anger at the state by becoming one
274
of the “stone pelters.” The conversation with Afaan takes place in New Delhi along one of its
many anonymous roadways and flyovers when he shares his experiences and thoughts of home.
Another video features the Kashmiri Pandit performance artist Inder Salim. Both Afaan and
Inder Salim are artists who are shaped by and reflect upon their experiences inviting us to new
perspectives on being Kashmiri. While Afaan reflects on being away from home, I keep think-
ing of a box of used charcoal Inder Salim points to as nostalgia in his video. The other two
videos feature a conversation between one Pandit and one Muslim, who reflect on their friend-
ship, and a special feature of Pandit Rajendra Koul, a migrant who devotes his life to the repub-
lishing and distribution of his father’s poetry among young Kashmiris today. The video feature
of Rajendra Koul is particularly moving when he talks of his father’s work and his attempts at
preserving and recovering the Kashmiri language.
What sets this this initiative apart is an ability to bring Pandit and Muslim voices together in
some kind of dialogue. By presenting Afaan, Inder Salim, and Rajendra Koul and their testi-
monies, and the conversation of two friends together, visitors to the site can hear people speak
on their own terms and not in a form locked in a competition or a zero-sum game that defines
most conversations about Pandits and Muslims. Each of the voices presented throughout the
website speaks on its own terms without drowning out the other and offers a multidirectional
reading of memory, a kind of back forth movement that can be shared (see Rothberg 2009: 17).
For Hanan and Akhilesh, the Kashmiri connection and giving every voice a space is essen-
tial to this project. Hanan, who in conversation was clear that home is in Kashmir, was inspired
by how little understanding there was of Kashmir in relation to politics and its people, espe-
cially among people from India he met at college. This sense of exploring the very layers
compelles his interest in the project leading to the website. Born to migrant Pandits, Akhilesh
shared a complex history of movement. While his parents and their families were displaced and
made the exit south to Jammu like thousands of others, Akhilesh ended up growing up in dif-
ferent towns as his parents were in transferable professions, until his mother returned to Jammu
as a final settlement. For Akhilesh, who in conversation said that home is where his family is,
the “migration”/“exodus” appears to be processed between relatives and family angry at their
condition and at Muslims and other relatives like his late grandfather who held on to a senti-
ment and memory of better times and friendship with Muslims. For both Akhilesh and Hanan,
who come from different experiential histories of conflict, the project is a way to consider and
acknowledge all voices and thereby bypassing competing differences. As Akhilesh pointed out
in conversation, what matters is finding connections amidst the different voices being shared
Mashaemit Gharrih also compels one to revisit the idea of home. Tahira, the visual editor
of the project, referred to herself a “silent spectator,” and found herself reflect on her sense of
belonging:
I think working on Mashaemit Gharrih has made me more empathetic with the expe-
riences and demands of the Kashmiri people for self-determination. It has also made
me unhappier and restless. I was growing up as a patriotic Indian but a series of events
back to back scare me. I am scared for the future and the society that we are becoming.
Current times, a lot of times make me feel alien to the country that I grew up in. It’s
the country I love and have called home. I do not have an alternate homeland. So the
project has unsettled my identity and sense of home all the more.
The power of Mashaemit Gharrih lies in its presentation of voices from different contexts and
scales regarding the meaning of home. While the visitor confronts ruminations, remembrances
or stories of preservation and salvaging what was once lost, the viewer is also taken to the
275
Ankur Datta
contemporary in the form of the photo essay of contemporary life in the Kashmir. There is an
unsettledness of time as visitors are confronted with the past and present simultaneously, where
the past is revisited without being ossified while the present continues to unsettle. There is an
overwhelming sense not only of sentiments of home, but also one a sense of “homeawayness”
where the boundary between being at home and away from home is constantly being crossed
(Chen 2018: 32, 52). It is this tension that this project captures for its visitors, reclaiming a
counter-political space for some Kashmiris.
Conclusion
This chapter engages with changing meanings of home for the Kashmiri Pandits who were dis-
placed in 1990. It emerges from earlier work which explores home as an idea and home making
as a process of remaking life. What stood out was a sense of home first being defined by loss and
secondly by recovering from loss in everyday ordinary life. While the Pandits got on with the
business of life and survival with some measure of dignity over the years, a sense of loss remains.
Critical to this was a politics of nostalgia, where anything like houses, the weather and relation-
ships in the past made the present pale in comparison. Home seemed marked by a tension for
a community becoming defined by movement, displacement, and diaspora in practice, if not in
name, and yet yearning for a rooting in place.
This chapter brings up other possibilities that point to how the meaning of home and
homeland may have changed over time. One of the first approaches emerges through a revisit-
ing of older ethnographic data and searching for traces that remind one of homes left behind
in Kashmir and of marks made by the Pandits over the years in Jammu. These traces serve as
markers and connections to the past and an engagement with the present and the future. I have
also brought in conversations that consider a younger generation that has recently come of age
for whom Jammu becomes home. In that sense the impossibilities of home gradually give way
to possibility instead.
Homeland speaks to larger forms of political community. As Douglas points out, home is
defined by routine and relationships. Regardless of its material form, home “starts by bringing
some space under control” (Douglas 1991: 289). If we extend this idea and see homeland pro-
jects as a form of ordering space, an imaginary of homelands past, present and future becomes
clear. But I wonder if the idea of home as ordering space suggests that a homeland is best
understood as an aspiration. It will be interesting is to see how certain imaginaries of ordering
life confront existing political realities and possibilities, and how it will influence an ordering
and orientation of life outside Kashmir.
In such circumstance, projects like Mashaemit Gharrih provide a vital space in the discus-
sion of home and homelands. By allowing for different voices to be presented on their own
terms, through connections, similarities and differences, possibilities of imagining home can
emerge which account for and acknowledge different histories and experiences of violence
and suffering. By foregrounding these ideas in conversations, art and reportage, a connection
is made across different sites, time scapes and crucially, generations. Multidirectional projects
like Mashaemit Gharrih point to homemaking as a process, where one is constantly working
and moving toward home, working with objects and symbols, different languages and media
on offer through which a sense of self can be formed (see Selwyn and Frost 2018). Whether
the Pandits are finally able to achieve a sense of home where life can be lived with acknowl-
edgement, dignity and justice in the face of a protracted conflict and displacement is another
matter.
276
Notes
1 See https://mashaemitgarrih.wixsite.com/forgotten-homes/introductory-text.
2 See https://mashaemitgarrih.wixsite.com/forgotten-homes.
Works Cited
Al-Madawi, Rashid. 1994. “The Myth of Return: Iraqi Arab and Assyrian Refugees in London.” Journal
of Refugee Studies 7(2–3): 199–219.
Axel, Brian Keith. 2002. “The Diasporic Imaginary.” Public Culture 14(2): 411–428.
Blunt, Alison and Robyn Dowling. 2006. Home. London: Routledge.
Chen, Shuhua. 2018. “Homeawayness and Life-Project building: Homemaking among rural-urban
migrants in China.” In Travelling Towards Home: Mobilities and Homemaking, edited by Nicola Frost and
Tom Selwyn, 34–54. New York and Oxford: Berghahn.
Clifford, James. 1994. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9(3): 302–338.
Datta, Ankur. 2017a. On Uncertain Ground: Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi:
———. 2017b. “Uncertain Journeys: Return Migration, Home and Uncertainty among a Displaced
Kashmiri Community.” Modern Asian Studies 51(4): 1099–1125.
———. 2019. “ ‘That was Natural, This is Just Artificial!’: Displacement, Memory and Worship at a Kash-
miri Hindu Shrine Replica.” History and Anthropology 30(3): 276–292.
Douglas, Mary. 1991. “The Idea of Home: A Kind of Space.” Social Research 58(1): 287–301.
Gigoo, Siddhartha and Varad Sharma, eds. 2015. A Long Dream of Home: The Persecution, Exile and Exodus
of the Kashmiri Pandits. New Delhi: Bloomsbury India.
Kilam, Indu. 2015. “Upon Revisiting Kashmir.” In From Home to House: Writings of Kashmiri Pandits in
Exile, edited by Arvind Gigoo, Shaleen Singh, and Adarsh Ajit, 143–146. New Delhi: Harper Collins.
Koul, Pratush. 2019. “The Keys to a House Not There.” In Once We Had Everything: Literature in Exile,
edited by Arvind Gigoo, Siddhartha Gigoo, and Adarsh Ajit, 82–84. New Delhi: Vitasta Publishing.
Kramer, Max. 2018. “At the Limits of the Personal: The Kashmir Conflict via Explorations in the Ethical
Space of Film.” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 9(3): 289–301.
Napolitano, Valentina. 2014. “Anthropology and Traces.” Anthropological Theory 15(1): 47–67.
Panun Kashmir Movement. 2004. Kashmir Documentation: Pandits in Exile. New Delhi: Utpal Publications.
Raina, Ajay. 2015. “Writing Exile in my Imagination.” In From Home to House: Writings of Kashmiri Pan-
dits in Exile, edited by Arvind Gigoo, Shaleen Singh and Adarsh Ajit, 125–131. New Delhi: Harper
Collins.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization.
Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Selwyn, Tom and Nicola Frost. 2018. “Home and Homemaking in a Time of Crisis.” In Travelling Towards
Home: Mobilities and Homemaking, edited by Nicola Frost and Tom Selwyn, 1–14. New York and
Oxford: Berghahn.
Singh, Devinder. 2014. “Reinventing Agency, Sacred Geography and Community Formation of Dis-
placed Kashmiri Pandits in India.” In The Changing World Religion Map, edited by Nicola Frost and Tom
Selwyn, 397–414. Heidelberg: Springer.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(3):
445–453.
Zetter, Roger. 1999. “Reconceptualising the Myth of Return: Continuity and Transition among Greek
Cypriot Refugees of 1974.” Journal of Refugee Studies 12(1): 1–22.
277
20
LIBERAL SILENCE ON
KASHMIR AND THE
MALLEABILITY OF ETHICS
IN INDIA
Gowhar Fazili
Introduction
The chapter seeks to understand the persistence of a long-standing condition: the refusal of the
Indian state and society to countenance a meaningful political process that would let the people
of Jammu and Kashmir ( J&K) determine their political future without fear and repression. It
seeks to explicate how and why the Indian state, its liberal establishment, and more widely the
society at large, have been complicit in this refusal. Taking unilateral change in the constitu-
tional and political status of the erstwhile J&K on August 5, 2019 in what was the only Muslim
majority state in a supposedly secular India as a starting point, I ask: What explains the lack of
public outrage over the issue in the country, particularly among its liberal sections, despite the
historical centrality of J&K state and its fate in India to their self-image as inheritors of a secular,
democratic tradition? What enabled the Indian state to carry out such a monumental change in
the part of J&K under its control with absolute disregard to its people, despite its avowed com-
mitment to the rule of law, constitutionalism, democracy, minority rights, and federal principles
enshrined in its constitution – the grounds on which it assumes a moral high ground relative to
the supposedly totalitarian regimes like China or feebler democracies like Pakistan? What made
it possible for the response of the Indian opposition and diversity of political interests (regional
parties, minority groups, leftist and centrist parties, and civil society formations representing
a range of social concerns) in the country to remain subdued on the changes in J&K brought
about by the Indian state in violation of the social contract – that is, the respect for the will
of the people – in which the postcolonial polity in India is supposed to be grounded? Given
the lack of outrage, the various political interests in India appear to have fallen in line with the
right-wing central government on the issue.
Although the latest political assault on the people of Kashmir has been most drastic in its
import, it is not an exception within the ongoing political drift in India. With the introduc-
tion of the amendment bills like CAA and NRC that prioritize granting of citizenship rights
to the people of certain communities over others, clearly excluding Muslims, we see Muslims
in India on the verge of being formally rendered less than equal citizens. The legal safeguards
for cultural, economic and political rights of minorities, and various other socially and eco-
nomically underprivileged and excluded groups are being steadily dismantled. The regime has
278 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-25

Liberal Silence on Kashmir
undermined the state governments run by the parties in opposition, and has more generally,
encroached on constitutional powers of the states. It has simultaneously hollowed out the judi-
ciary, the investigative agencies and various other institutions meant to safeguard individual
and group rights. While the liberal elite and marginal interests in India have offered a measure
of resistance on some fronts, however feeble and diminishing in intensity,1 on Kashmir there
is a marked silence, as though there were an unspoken consensus among Indians on the issue.
But for a few opinion pieces by intellectuals condemning the move in Kashmir,2 the manner
in which it was carried out, or its long-term implications for the rest of India, much of Indian
society has been conspicuous in its silence, if not overtly triumphant. What makes this silence
and triumphalism possible? What explains the ease with which the liberal elite in India, and
Indians generally, yield ethical ground and fall in line with the imperatives of power and the
state?
By liberal elite I mean the political and intellectual leadership largely drawn from a certain
cross-section of caste, class and community that has inherited power from the British and has
dominated the moral discourse in the subcontinent for the better part of the last century. This
includes the Nehruvians, the Gandhians, and the leadership of a range of center-left forma-
tions that have not only controlled the state and bureaucracy but also the public discourse
through their extraordinary overrepresentation in politics, academia, cultural domains (cinema,
literature, music, art), and media. It is this class that appropriated the legacy of the struggle for
independence and strove to give postcolonial India a moral face. Despite India’s serious failings
with regards to how it has dealt with the oppressed and excluded groups, this class has provided
the state with legitimacy through its active participation in state building. The liberals claim
that though justice may get delayed under the existing regime in which they are invested, it will
not be denied in the long run. Things are expected to get better as time goes by. In reality, on
many fronts, like systematic denial of political rights to the people of Jammu and Kashmir, the
status of minorities in India, the status of the oppressed castes, communities, and genders more
widely, things in India seem to have become increasingly worse over the time, even while the
liberal elite has conveniently come to terms with each stage of this worsening condition. What
makes the commitment to the “civilizational values of compassion and tolerance” supposedly at
the heart of “the Idea of India” so feeble and unsubstantial?3
I address this question through a reevaluation of the moral foundations of the Indian society
and state, and its political culture at large. I argue that the liberal framework through which
India has been examined in the past and the language of rights in which claims have been made
against it by various marginalized groups may have been misplaced from the very beginning.
The rights-based claim-making assumes that the social order against which these are made is
committed to certain basic values like the equality of all human beings and respect for human
dignity, the autonomy and free will of individuals, and, by extension, the autonomy of the
diverse cultures and meaningful communities they inhabit. For a nation to be ethical, this
commitment must be demonstrable not only in word but also in deed. Besides the obvious
discrepancy between word and deed of the Indian leadership and intellectual class, the relative
ease with which they are able to backtrack on their stated principles and falter in fulfilling their
commitments to various groups at critical junctures warrants examination. The intellectual
dishonesty in refusing to come to terms with this sordid legacy and the ability to continue
functioning as unfazed moral beings is what I call the malleability of ethics. While a degree of
self-delusion among the dominant groups may be widespread, like the belief among people in
White-dominated cultures that they are not racist despite overwhelming historical and empiri-
cal evidence to the contrary, I argue that in India a deeper cultural orientation toward the idea
of truth makes it impossible to negotiate claims based on ethics. In Western societies the idea of
279
Gowhar Fazili
ethics has evolved in conjunction with long-drawn-out struggles. It is possible to stage resistance
against racism, social and political injustice from within their cultural traditions. However, it is
not so in India. It is this profound lack that makes it increasingly impossible for the oppressed to
make claims on the state or the society which was possible around the time of India’s independ-
ence from the British. I will engage with the idea of ethics in the Hindu Brahmanical tradition
to which, I argue, this malleability of ethics can be traced. I will briefly engage with the ideas
of Ambedkar, Kosambi, and Uberoi who take a less romantic view of India’s ancient, medieval,
and modern past – the tenacity of its deep-rooted regressive, Brahmanical values and intellectual
traditions, its enduring social architecture based on marking and then oppressing entire commu-
nities of people, and its inherent potential to resist progressive change, to further explain what
I mean by the malleability of ethics in India.
Apart from the cultural problem with the idea of truth and ethics, the longue-durée calculus
of the Indian state, as in many modern states, has been to concentrate power in the hands of
a few – a small section of people located at the intersection of caste, class, and community.
This intersection, which in the ultimate analysis is an upper caste, upper class, Hindu forma-
tion, perceives itself and its heritage to be at the heart of Indian nationhood, rendering the
rest as lacking in legitimacy, if not altogether dispensable. While majoritarian regimes across
the world exhibit somewhat similar attitudes toward marginal groups, I interpret the lack of
concern in the Indian society over India’s treatment of the people of Kashmir and the sys-
tematic undermining of their political rights to be rooted in a peculiar relationship that the
hegemonic upper-caste culture in India has to the notions of truth and ethics that renders them
exceptionally malleable.
The Bogey of Secular Democracy in Kashmir

Postcolonial India’s relationship to J&K is from the inception grounded in violence and decep-
tion. The everyday physical and psychological violence that the Indian state has been able to
unleash in Kashmir with impunity for decades, is not a result of extra-legal or unconstitutional
exceptions that can be mitigated through litigation or electoral democracy, but inscribed into
the very fabric of the relationship forged under duress between the two. This violence, materi-
alized through a range of cartographic, constitutional, and juridical maneuvers, initiated under
exceptional circumstances and reinforced over time, has been aptly termed as “occupational
constitutionalism” by Duschinski and Ghosh (2017). Through a close examination of a range
of legal proceedings between 1917 and 1950, Duschinski and Ghosh (ibid.) demonstrate the
reinforcement of “India’s authoritarian rule” which systematically “undermined J&K’s sovereign
status.” Recent developments in J&K need to be seen in continuation with the legacy of such
constitutionalism.
Even as it is a continuation of India’s constitutional occupation of Kashmir, the hubris that
the state demonstrated on August 5 warrants a fresh reevaluation of the frameworks through
which India has been understood in the past. The old platitudes about the nature of postcolo-
nial India, its leadership and its intellectual traditions have become untenable. Though already
under serious challenge by the emerging, independent scholarship on Kashmir (see for example,
Rai 2004; Kak 2011; Robinson 2013; Duschinski et al. 2018; Kanth 2018). August 5 brings
the violence of Indian intellectual and academic enterprise in Kashmir into a fresh perspective.
Not only the “idea of India,” the moment of crisis warrants that the ways in which the past, the
present and the future of Kashmir has been inscribed, receive fresh scrutiny. We must see Indian
occupation in Kashmir not only as a realist, neo-colonial project driven by national interest, but
an outcome of a deeper cultural problem with what passes off as Indian values.
280
On August 5, 2019, the Indian Parliament, through an unprecedented “legal” maneuver,

deoperationalized Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, the two constitutional
provisions through which the relationship between J&K and the Indian state had been forged.4
This action initiated the dissolution of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, its splitting into two
Union Territories – Ladakh, and Jammu & Kashmir – both to be administered directly by the
central government. Resulting in a fundamental cartographic change in an internationally dis-
puted region, the action has profound implications for the manner in which the people of the
fragmented territory would henceforth be governed. It nullifies all special rights and privileges
as state subjects that the people had incrementally earned through a long-drawn-out political
struggle against the erstwhile princely state prior to the establishment of independent Paki-
stan and India. With the deoperationalization, all the symbols and rituals that memorialized
the long drawn people’s struggle in Kashmir, such as the Martyrs’ Day marking the uprising
of July 13, 1931, the state flag, the official commemoration of Sheikh Abdullah’s anniversary,
formally incorporated by the state government into its everyday practice have been expunged,
effectively rendering Kashmir into a landmass without meaning, a place without a people’s
history.
Significantly such monumental changes were carried out unilaterally by the government of
the self-proclaimed “largest democracy in the world,” executed suddenly, stealthily, unconsti-
tutionally, without a debate, without a pretense of consultation with the people to whom the
transformation would apply, and literally under the barrel of the gun. Understandably, such
brazen imposition required that India contain public reaction in Kashmir through mass incar-
ceration of political leaders, activists as well as ordinary citizens, including the leadership of the
state-propped political formations nurtured by it all along. The whole population was preemp-
tively put under curfew for an unspecified period of time and deprived of all possible means of
communication. An unprecedented reinforcement of armed forces was brought into Kashmir,
a place already notorious for being the world’s most militarized zone.5 The Supreme Court of
India, the court of the last resort, readily fell in line and dragged its feet on the appeals chal-
lenging the constitutionality of the state action. In the immediate aftermath, the courts refused
to intervene even in defense of personal liberty and freedom of press – the two priorities in
constitutional democracies that guarantee fundamental rights.6
Interestingly, the ruling BJP claimed that it had not subjected the people of Kashmir to
anything worse than what Jawaharlal Nehru had already done to them.7 The primeval betrayal
attributed to Nehru carried out immediately after India’s independence involved incorporation
of J&K into the Indian union through subterfuge, without ascertaining the will of the people.
Sending in its army supposedly to prevent a forced takeover of the state by “tribal invaders”
from Pakistan, the Indian state promised the people the right to decide their political future
after the restoration of “peace.” However, as India consolidated its armed presence in Kashmir,
it backtracked on the promise and over the time expunged all references to it. Given the forced
incorporation, the possibility of political freedom and dignity in Kashmir has been undermined
by the Indian establishment from the very beginning. This undermining was carried out not by
the overtly xenophobic regime that is now in power but by the leadership that is globally cele-
brated as having been progressive, liberal, secular, and democratic, and considered to be the true
inheritor of the anti-colonial struggle in India. Nehru, the quintessential liberal leader, removed
the elected Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, from power
in 1953 and put him in prison to consolidate India’s control over the region. This was meant
to appease the Jan Sangh and Praja Parishad in Jammu, a Hindu right-wing formation earlier
involved in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the region (Korbel 1953; Puri 2003; Snedden
2001). These formations and their sympathizers within the Congress party were unhappy with
281
Gowhar Fazili
the sweeping land reforms, limited autonomy of J&K and the fact that the state was being run
by a popular leader who happened to be a Kashmiri Muslim. The coup was carried out even
while the constitution of Jammu and Kashmir was being drafted by a committee propped up by
India and the terms of the promised plebiscite were still being negotiated between rival domin-
ions of India and Pakistan, both claiming the entire region under the auspices of the United
Nations.
The subsequent governments of Bakshi, Shamsuddin, Sadiq, and Qasim installed by the
center, understandably after extensive repression in the state,8 did its unquestioned bidding.
In the process the terms on which the temporary and conditional accession to India had been
made by the erstwhile princely ruler, Maharaja Hari Singh, were incrementally diluted. Assent-
ing to successive presidential orders, they enabled India to chip away at the “special status” until
it remained so only in name. Once again, this undermining of the interim federal arrangement
put in place until the August 5 “final solution”9 of the “Kashmir problem,” was carried out
by the supposedly secular-liberal-democratic-progressive formation that remained dominant
in India for most part of the last century. It is this regime, and not the communal-fascistic
formation that has now come to power, that institutionalized mass repression in Kashmir, and
prevented a dignified and democratic resolution of the problem. This raises the question as to
whether there is any substantive difference between the avowedly liberal and the apparently
communal regimes in India when it comes to the question of Kashmir. Such disregard for
democratic principles and disrespect for the will of the people, immediately after decolonization
and ever since, also brings into question the ethical foundations of the nationalist movement in
India and its entire leadership.
For long, Indian leadership touted J&K as the litmus test for its commitment to secularism
and principles of federalism (see, e.g., Gandhi’s hope in Pyarelal 1958: 499–500). Repeated
assurances to honor the will of the people were made by Indian leadership at the various stages
of the struggle only to be rescinded at a later date. This included Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and,
more recently, Narsimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and various other stalwarts of Indian lead-
ership. Yet India projects itself to the world as a secular democracy committed to rule of law,
social justice, freedom of expression and various other political rights. What enables Indian elite
to live at peace with such radical dissonance between the self-image, the “Idea of India,” and its
objective reality?
In the context of Kashmir, as mentioned, Nehru managed to retain his liberal, secular
credentials despite having betrayed his long-standing personal friendship and political alli-
ance with Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah in Kashmir as early as 1953, and having betrayed the
people of Kashmir on the right to decide on the question of accession after making repeated
promises in public while privately not intending to fulfil them.10 These were not the sole
illiberal acts that stand out in Nehru’s wider Kashmir policy. On the contrary, the practice of
rewarding the collaborators and punishing people with independent political opinion through
incarceration, torture, and exile continued until he died of a stroke in 1964. On his death bed,
perhaps in a rare moment of conscience, he ordered Abdullah’s release, withdrew charges of
sedition against him, and sent him to Pakistan to broker a political settlement. Nehru died
even while Abdullah was in Pakistan. Destiny did not allow him to redeem himself through
this last gesture.
The subsequent governments in India did not pursue the process. In fact, Abdullah and his
colleagues were once again incarcerated, and his organization, the Plebiscite Front, was once
again banned. Abdullah was eventually released and rehabilitated as the Chief Minister of Kash-
mir in 1974 only after he agreed to abandon the demand for plebiscite and fell in line with India
under the changed geo-strategic circumstances.
282
A.G. Noorani (1999) provides a damning insight into divergence between Nehru’s words in
public and words in private, particularly on the question of Kashmir’s accession and autonomy.
The malleability of ethics observed in Nehru, the foremost Indian leader, immediately after
decolonization must not be seen merely as his personal failing. Instead, it stands for the wider
lack of commitment to ethics in Indian leadership more widely, including the intellectuals who
continue to hold such leadership in high esteem.
In the section that follows, I observe a continuity between the upper caste leadership of the
nationalist movement in India and the contemporary liberal intellectuals in their lack of com-
mitment to ethics. I begin with their reactions to the events of August 5, 2019 in Kashmir.
Feeble Outrage of the Indian Liberal Class

Critical reflection in India on the deed of August 5 has been rather sparse. A few contemplative
pieces that stood out in the immediate aftermath include The Economist editorial under the title
“Modi’s Bad Move” (emphasis added),11 Pratab Bhanu Mehta’s rather awkward and insensitive
description of what followed the change as “Kashmirization of India”12 and Partha Chatterjee’s
analysis of it as the “new model of internal colonialism” (emphasis added).13 Three months after
the event, Rodenbeck, South Asia Bureau Chief of The Economist, described the “autonomy”
that Kashmir never actually enjoyed as a “useful fiction”14 that had allowed India and the world
to ignore the political situation in Kashmir, framing its replacement with naked hard reality
of brute force an unnecessary and unmitigated political disaster. Each of these analyses betrays
primary concern with the consequences of the move for India and its image abroad, and only
secondarily, if at all, the vacuousness of Indian values and the brazenness of its occupation of
Kashmir. Mehta externalizes the problem by blaming it on BJP and its recourse to “raw power”
as though it were being used in Kashmir for the first time. His focus is on the implications of the
move on the minorities in India and implicitly on the liberal elite and not the unresolved ques-
tion of national self determination in Kashmir. Mehta does seem to notice something deeper
that plagues Indian society but stops short of developing the idea: “There is a kind of cruel aes-
theticism in our politics where audacious evil will be celebrated for its audacity, and mundane
goods will invite contempt because they are mundane.” This suggests that something is deeply
wrong with the Indian civilization, though for Mehta in essence it still remains “great”: “What
is playing out in Kashmir is the warped psyche of a great civilisation at its insecure worst.” His
parting shot, though poetic in resonance, is deeply troubling in the order of priority it sets
and its condescension toward Kashmir: “The BJP thinks it is going to Indianise Kashmir. But,
instead, what we will see is potentially the Kashmirisation of India.”
Chatterjee concedes that though India may have managed to occupy much of the territory
in J&K, its policies in the region have turned Kashmir into a colony. However, like Mehta his
focus is on the implications of the move for “Indian people” portending their “catastrophic”
outcome. The “political consequences” that concern Chatterjee largely pertain to the federal
arrangement in India and not in principle the unacceptability of the occupation in Kashmir that
has only become more brazen now. His chief worry is about “India becoming the laboratory
for developing the constitutional rules of internal colonialism” while he broods over the fact that
“those who may be its next victims” like linguistic, regional and cultural entities in India do not
seem to be too concerned.
The Indian elite largely from the upper castes routinely make public gestures of sympathy
and support in favor of the communities of people effectively disenfranchised by the Indian
state, including the people of Kashmir. Yet there is no point at which they are individually or
collectively willing to take a stand against the state, forego their privileges in protest and say,
283
Gowhar Fazili
“thus far and no further.” Public outrage in India, like Gandhian morality, is often high on
rhetoric but low on substance. This is not to say that there are no exceptions to the rule. For
instance, a previously little-known South Indian Civil Servant, Kanan Gopinathan, became the
lone Indian to resign from his position as a mark of protest against the unconstitutional, unethi-
cal move in Kashmir. One must not doubt his motivation, unless time proves otherwise. But
as a rule, token gestures notwithstanding, for Indian liberals there is no value so sacrosanct for
which they are willing to stake everything, or anything at all. What is to be defended from the
creeping majoritarianism is always a receding line. There is no value that is non-negotiable. This
is unlike their counterparts in democracies like the United States, much of Europe, and Asia
Pacific, non-democracies like the much of the Middle East and Africa, and even occupations
run by countries like Israel where individuals or groups of people with social capital and/or
conscience keep on putting their lives and careers at stake through their opposition to injustices
carried out by the state in their name. Historically, such conscientious objectors have refused to
fight wars on behalf of communities and establishments to which they belong and face serious
personal consequences. A few spokespersons of the Left and liberal formations in India have
registered a token opposition to the dismantling and dismembering of J&K. But the baffling
rapidity and ease with which Indian elite adjusts to new normals introduced by the state is not
unlike what their predecessors did under similar circumstances in the past, with regards to the
undermining of the mandate in various state governments, the minorities in India, the labor
rights in collusion with corporate houses, the oppressed castes, the indigenous people, and, of
course, the occupation of Kashmir.
Indian establishment consistently underplays the significance of the process that is unfold-
ing in Kashmir. Indian liberals continue to act as though the Indian state is still legitimate
and retain faith in the inherent virtuousness of India, attributing it to its ancient heritage
of “tolerance and compassion,” despite steady dismantling of the foundational principles in
which postcolonial India was supposed to have been grounded. The trope of development
continues to be used by well-meaning Indians who entertain the hope that the constitutional
changes in Kashmir will bring about progress and prosperity to its people, even if it comes at
the cost of ethical principles, and the people’s dignity and their lives.15 Rather than confront-
ing the inherent violence at the heart of the “idea of India,” the liberal classes continue to
retain the latter as an inherently noble idea, which they imagine can eventually be recovered
from the morass of current politics. This in my view is not merely a disingenuous advocacy of
self-interest, but indicative of a deeper phenomenon particular to the subcontinent: a peculiar
malleability of ethics that has deeper cultural roots. It is to these roots that I turn in the next
section.
The Exceptional Malleability of Ethics

Why did postcolonial India fail to make a transition from a deeply hierarchical, oppressive and
unjust society that it had historically been to an egalitarian one? Why was such transition dif-
ficult for India despite the apparent promise, the substantial resources at hand, and the interna-
tional goodwill and opportunity at its disposal? Why, even after formally committing itself to
social justice, equality, and democracy in letter, did India fail to adhere to these principles in
spirit?
It is of critical importance to understand how the upper caste leadership involved in the
anti-colonial nationalist struggle managed to maintain a progressive façade and yet at critical
moments impede, if not outrightly oppose, substantive progressive political changes in favor of
the dispossessed.16
284
During the nationalist struggle, the Indian elite deployed liberal values like liberty, equal-
ity, justice, and secularism which they borrowed from the imperial West and indigenized by
forging their local genealogies. But as soon as India became independent, they failed to live
up to them in substance.17 Dragging their feet on political commitments to various vulnerable
constituencies that had come under their sway, they consolidated their power at the cost of the
ethical principles they claimed to uphold. And yet this betrayal did not alter their self-image or
their public image.
B.R. Ambedkar in his last speech to the constituent assembly on November 25, 1949, while
India was on the verge of declaring itself a people’s republic, was prescient. He expressed his
apprehension as to why India may not be able to sustain itself as an independent, constitutional
democracy in the long run. To avoid this fait-accompli Indian society, in his view, would have to
undergo a fundamental transformation from being loyal to castes and creeds to being a com-
munity sworn to three codependent values: liberty, equality, and fraternity. Ambedkar (1949)
held the view that Indian society is inherently inimical to these values, particularly, those of
equality and fraternity.18
For Ambedkar, India is not and cannot become a nation since it lacks a sense of fraternity
(fellow-feeling not derived from sectional interest), and hence also lacks a sense of equality and
liberty. In his view, no constitution, however perfect, would safeguard India from losing its
political liberty unless it worked toward ensuring economic, social, and political justice to all.
For India to become a nation, the transition from a “political democracy (formal democracy)
to a social democracy (substantive democracy),” was indispensable. After inheriting it from
the British, it is precisely such transfer of power to the people that the elite refused to make.
Thus despite granting formal rights to people, India failed to transition from a state and society
maintained through hierarchy, domination, hatred, condescension, humiliation and exclusion of
significant sections of the society, to an egalitarian one. It is this failure that enables us to under-
stand why the liberal leadership in India refused proportional representation to Muslims and
Dalits and how it is able to come to terms with its occupation in Kashmir minus fundamental
political rights in perpetuity. India is willing to accept inclusion of people within the existing
hierarchies of power but not fraternity among equals.
Ambedkar claims that the essence of the dominant political culture in India, particularly the
Hindu values that undergird that culture, is creation and maintenance of hierarchy (1949). This
idea in his view is sustained through a perpetuation of “false beliefs in the sanity, superiority
and sanctity of Hindu Civilization.” Ambedkar reflects on why the so-called Indian “civiliza-
tion,” which for him is essentially a Brahmanical project, has failed to produce thinkers like
Voltaire who would assert intellectual independence from their respective castes and question
religious orthodoxies of their times. He argues that Indian scholarship, largely dominated by
upper castes, is invested in the maintenance of the status-quo and hence does not challenge
the existing orthodoxies but instead aims to master ideas and use that mastery to maintain and
restrict privilege. It is in this characteristic that he locates the paucity of “honesty and integrity”
of Indian intellectuals (ibid.). The dominant intellectual culture in India is not only opposed to
iconoclasm and change in the status quo, but also geared toward preventing anyone else from
undertaking the task (see Ambedkar 1948).
Gandhi remained secular and progressive in his own eyes and in the eyes of his admirers
despite having resisted “annihilation of caste” and prevented communal award in favor of the
Dalits using emotional blackmail while in alignment with the Hindu Mahasabha.19 He wanted
the untouchables and minorities to repose their trust in the generosity and good will of the
upper caste Hindus rather than secure political autonomy and self-representation for themselves
through separate electorates.
285
Gowhar Fazili
Blatant contradictions in the words and deeds of Indian leadership do not trouble their
admirers or alter how such leadership is represented in much of the scholarly writing in India.20
Large swathes of Indian scholarship are invested in building icons without blemish. The com-
plex philosophical tomes that have thus been generated are structures to be reckoned with,
structures that obscure facts rather than elucidate them. Much of Indian scholarship is uncon-
cerned with the moral failings of Indian leadership, the political culture they generated and its
consequences for the vulnerable communities of people in the sub-continent.
While we often assume that the idea of justice and commitment to principles to be an innate
human tendency, the idea may well be historical and culturally contingent. To illustrate this,
J.P.S. Uberoi’s (2011) exploration of the idea of martyrdom in relation to truth and nonviolence
is useful. Uberoi traces the deep tradition of martyrdom and its intertwinement with the idea of
truth and justice in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism, with the noticeable exception of
Hinduism proper.21 Uberoi makes an astute observation with regards to Gandhi and his attempts
to appropriate ideas of “tragedy” and “martyrdom” in their relation to “bearing witness to
truth” from the Sikhs. Gandhi in his view wanted to put the idea of sacrificing one’s life for an
idea or a principle, a concept hyper present in the Sikh tradition, to the service of the Indian
nationhood (ibid.). Uberoi implicitly suggests that the wider Indian society, and Hinduism in
particular, lacked such a tradition hence the need to somehow fill in for it.
Despite his overt adherence to Hinduism, Gandhi’s Hindu opponents described him as a
“Christian in disguise” precisely for such flirtations with traditions other than Savarna (Upper
Caste Hindu). His eclectic approach to values drawn from multiple traditions, while strug-
gling to hold on to the core beliefs that undergrid the Brahmanical order, including the Varna
system, perhaps well-meaning and intended to keep everyone together at all costs, was deeply
problematic. It generated irreconcilable ethical conundrums for which Ambedkar (1937) called
him out in mutual correspondence that followed the cancelling of his speech on the Annihila-
tion of Caste.
I claim that the remarkable malleability of ethics in India has to do with the values derived
from the dominant cultural regime, which happens to be Brahmanical, for the regime the ideas
of truth, justice, ethics and compassion do not carry the same meaning as they do in many other
traditions. The source of this peculiar relationship to values can be traced back to deep cultural
history. D.D. Kosambi (1961), a Left historian of great originality, reflects on the Gita, the
religious text that surprisingly served as an inspiration to a whole range of upper-caste activists
and political formations sworn to opposing ideological visions during the nationalists struggle
in India. This included the advocates of terror as a strategy for liberation, the exclusivist Hindu
supremacists inspired by Italian and German fascism, the secularists, the traditionalists, as well as
the modernists and atheists.22 Kosambi examines the eclectic nature of the text and attributes it
to the novel Brahmanical strategy of appropriating and hegemonizing a whole range of paral-
lel moral conceptions that prevailed in the sub-continent during the time of its development.
The text in his view provides us access to how this hegemony was forged without any serious
engagement with the ethical import of these competing conceptions or working through the
fundamental contradictions that exist between them. They are simply woven together and pre-
sented as different manifestations of the same divine reality. The moral pluralism thus established
enabled the class parasitical on the existing mode of production, in tandem with the ruling
class, to assimilate whole communities into the hierarchical Hindu order, while simultaneously
stymieing the emergence of critical faculty that undergirds all ethics. In his view, anyone intent
on doing so could make the text mean practically anything he wished.
Much academic writing on the subject that has followed is conservative (see for exam-
ple Hindery 1976; Lele 1988; Sreekumar 2012; Davis 2015), in that it attempts to soften the
286
implications of Kosambi’s and Ambedkar’s earlier radical claims on the Gita and tries to recover
some form of ethical value from the ancient Hindu text. Rather than wrestling with the idea
frontally, we are enjoined to keep the justifications that the texts have to offer in favor of the
maintenance of caste and gender hierarchy aside, and then appreciate its aesthetic value. Regard-
less of whether one buys Kosambi’s materialist understanding of the Gita entirely or not, we are
forced to appreciate his ability to cut through wooly nonsense and ask questions that have rel-
evance to the social situation we face – the remarkable persistence of the structures of inequality
and injustice in India and the willingness of the Indian elite to live with the situation, even while
claiming superiority of their ethics. Kosambi attempts to trace the antecedents of this ability to
the past. Rather than engage in nostalgia or aestheticization of the civilizational past which in
the ultimate analysis serves to maintain the status quo – a tendency that plagues much of pre-and
postcolonial nationalist historiography in India in its engagement with antiquity – he arrives at
the questions that matter to those on the wrong side of the history and tries to answer them.
This is not to suggest that the subcontinent has not at various moments in its past come face-
to-face with alternative ethical imaginings, or that India is not inhabited by a diversity of people
who derive their values from multiple moral regimes other than Brahmanism. For historical
reasons, however, neo-Brahmanism is the moral regime that has been ascendant in colonial and
postcolonial India (to explore reasons for this, see Cohn 1996; Chatterjee 1993a). This regime
infects not just a particular community (Hindus) or a nation-state (India) in the subcontinent,
but is more ubiquitous, leaving its differential impact on the classes and communities of people
effectively in power as well as the people contesting it, including figures like Shaikh Abdullah
in Kashmir and those who have followed his example.
In Western contexts, liberal values of equality, liberty, and justice are products of major
revolutionary upheavals that drew upon deeper ethical traditions, even as they tore down
old orders and unleashed new ethical imaginings. For this reason, despite profound failings
of these societies, certain democratic values are engrained in public consciousness and in the
intellectual traditions that follow. Even while Western societies continue to struggle with
problems of race, immigration, and cultural difference, and white supremacist formations seek
to legitimize racism and inequality by drawing upon certain interpretations of religion, pseu-
doscience or other forms of moral authority, given a genuine legacy of egalitarian struggles
that inspire significant sections of these societies, including many whites, such claims face stiff
resistance from within. Similarly the idea of martyrdom, bearing witness to truth against the
will of the powerful at the risk of losing one’s life, the rejuvenation of community and ethical
orders through acts of moral courage, are deep legacies in various cultural and religious tradi-
tions across the world, a feature that the Brahmanical order that prevails in India summarily
lacks and has always lacked.
With the rise of the Hindutva regime, “baptism by blood” as in the Christian tradition, is
achieved not through self-sacrifice, but by ritually spilling the blood of others who are sought
to be excluded (see Gatade 2003). In Gujarat and elsewhere in India, the lower castes and tribal
populations were brought into the Hindutva fold through their active participation in pogroms
against the minorities. In Kashmir and other political struggles that contest Indian sovereignty
such baptism is achieved through conscription of the co-opted into the armed forces and as
counterinsurgents. These are then unleashed on undesirable populations (on Salwa Judum,
see Guha et al. 2006). It is always the other who is made to pay the price for the nation. It
involves sacrifice by proxy – bali-dān – the sacrificial killing of the other, a scapegoat to appease
the demonic god, or the bloodthirsty spirit of the nation, and not as in the case of the idea of
shaheed or a conscientious objector, the act of speaking truth to power, if need be, at the cost
of one’s life. The deaths of people in uniform for the “nation” are used as a form of blackmail
287
Gowhar Fazili
once again to suppress demands for justice and freedom made by the marginalized, and not to
further such claims.
Remarkably, despite rampant injustice and dehumanization of people through history, much
of Hindu India has a limited legacy of transformative social upheavals from the below. The rise
of Buddhism, the medieval Bhakti Movement that challenged unjust religious orthodoxies,
certain variants of Sufism and Sikhism in India can perhaps be seen as exceptions that involved
attempts to generate alternative egalitarian social orders within their respective contexts. The
modern Dalit assertion, tribal and peasant uprisings, working class struggles, and women’s
movements possess the emancipatory potential but have largely remained sectional. They have
also to some extent been co-opted into the Brahmanical order through concessions they have
made and by succumbing to the lure of majoritarian nationalism, thus failing to provide an
effective consolidated front to challenge the moral hegemony of the upper-caste-class formation
that has for long masqueraded as the liberal left in India. This has ensured that the wider socio-
political structures and value systems in India remain largely intact.
Conclusion
What continues to make India’s impunity possible vis-à-vis the political rights of various mar-
ginalized communities under its control, particularly those who inhabit internationally disputed
regions like J&K? While “national interests” that dictate foreign policy collide with liberal eth-
ics, how are unethical actions against whole populations legitimized by nations that proclaim
to be grounded in ethics? How do associated individuals and political formations that claim to
represent a particular ethical order come to terms with these contradictions?
The idea of sovereignty is central to the modern nation-state. This effectively means that
the state is subject to no law, but instead is the source of all law. It is the “State of Exception,”
the power to defy all law including the one that the state establishes, which makes it sovereign.
Modern states however assume this right in the name of public good. Liberal thinkers have at
various stages of the development of the modern state attempted to introduce moral regimes
like individual rights, federal principles, separation of powers, community rights and to enshrine
values of justice, equality, and liberty in law so as to tame the state and regulate unbridled power
it tends to often assume. Even as such rights make citizens stakeholders in the sovereign power
of the state, by becoming the guarantor of such rights, the state in effect not only furthers its
legitimacy but also its legal power over the citizens (Brown 1992). States guard their sovereignty
jealously in ordinary circumstances, but more so when their legitimacy is challenged internally
or externally. It is this impulse that drives India to claim that how it treats communities of peo-
ple within its perceived boundaries is an “internal matter” and declare all internal and external
calls for justice as a threat to its sovereignty. Evidently, more often than not, national interests
trump over ethics. However, individuals and political formations that claim to uphold ethics are
not bound by the imperatives of the state. Why then do moral regimes within their respective
states fail to challenge the unethical actions of their states?
The upper caste, upper class leadership that inherited power in India had mastered the liberal
language of rights during the nationalist struggle and learnt to deploy it effectively to extract
political concessions from the British. After independence, the leadership that became the new
establishment used this mastery over liberal discourse to market India as a fledgling secular
democracy, a developing nation that seeks to perfect itself over time. Leaving India in the hands
of the upper caste-class elite groomed in Western tradition must have seemed more palatable
to the British than handing it over to the wider masses of people whose democratic inclusion
would have potentially been too disruptive.
288
The upper caste-class elite consolidated their power even while appearing to speak for the
whole subcontinent. The caste-class formation grudgingly accepted the unavoidable token rep-
resentation from other sections of the society, so long as such representation did not threaten its
interests and its unequivocal political and moral leadership. The co-option or marginalization
of the representatives of other sections of society left much of the caste-class hierarchy in the
society intact. While apparently over the last two decades there has been a change of regime
from the Indian National Congress to the Bhartiya Janata Party, not much has actually changed
in principle in India except for the rhetoric and increase in the suffering of people at the mar-
gins. It is the same castes and classes that are in power albeit more brazenly under the banner of
Hindutva, an idea that has replaced progressive-secularism as the hegemonic political discourse.
I have argued in this chapter how both the liberal and majoritarian regimes in postcolonial
India and the wider Indian society have been consistent in denying the possibility of political
freedom and rights in Kashmir. I have suggested that this does not have to do with the weakness
or failure of institutions or external factors that could be mitigated, but with the shakiness of
the ethical foundations of the Brahmanical intellectual tradition that passes off as Indian culture.
The malleability of ethics sourced in the Brahmanical tradition and its peculiar relationship to
the idea of truth and ethics has pervaded Indian political culture all along, including the ideolo-
gies and political behavior of its foremost leaders. It is this malleability which enables India to
systematically oppress the vulnerable, and yet believe so completely in the greatness of its civili-
zation; to be enchanted with the powerful, to yield ethical ground before the regimes of power
and yet simultaneously produce tomes to claim superior ethics and morality.
Though there are alternative egalitarian traditions that possess a better conception of justice
in the subcontinent, unfortunately, it is the Brahmanical tradition and value system that has
emerged victorious. This has produced a profoundly deranged society that thrives on the mis-
ery of the vulnerable, which never tires of consuming the specter of death and misery and yet
believes absolutely in its own goodness.
As suggested, it is not possible to negotiate in the language of justice with a state and a
society that fundamentally lacks a stable notion of ethics and justice and is merely dexterous in
deploying these values instrumentally. Perhaps the way out for the oppressed is to undermine
the legitimacy of the oppressive states and societies by calling out their vacuity to the wider
world. It might be helpful for movements to withdraw from such states as far as possible and
strengthen themselves from within by attempting to establish an alternative ethical order among
the oppressed. They must somehow make it costly for the oppressive order to continue to per-
petuate injustice, even while drawing inspiration from and seeking ethical alliances with com-
munities of people who subscribe to better conceptions of ethics elsewhere.
Notes
1 For example, public show of solidarity with the protests around Rohit Vemula’s suicide, lynching of
Muslims and Dalits over alleged transportation or consumption of cow meat, introduction of citizens
amendment acts like CAA and NRC, attack on Bhima Koregaon commemoration by Dalits and so on.
2 This includes the ones by Pratab Bhanu Mehta, Partha Chatterjee, and a few others cited and discussed
later in the chapter.
3 See Sunil Khilnani’s paeans to the inherent strengths of Indian Civilization in his The Idea of India
(1997). Amartya Sen, who has endorsed the book, has written one of his own along similar lines: The
Argumentative Indian (2005).
4 Noorani A G. August 5, 2019. Interview with Akshay Deshmane, “Kashmir: Scrapping Arti-
cle 370 ‘Unconstitutional’, ‘Deceitful’ Says Legal Expert A.G. Noorani,” Huffington Post, www.
huffingtonpost.in/entry/kashmir-article-370-scrapping-constitutional-expert-reacts-noorani_
in_5d47e58de4b0aca341206135; Gautam Bhatia, “The Article 370 Amendments: Key Legal Issues,”
289
Gowhar Fazili
Personal Blog, August 5, 2019, https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2019/08/05/the-article-

370-amendments-key-legal-issues/; Faizan Mustafa, “Article 370, Federalism and the Basic Struc-
ture of the Constitution,” The India Forum, September 27, 2019, www.theindiaforum.in/article/
article-370-federalism-and-basic-structure-constitution; Faizan Mustafa and Karan Thapar, “Neither
Abrogated nor Removed,” The Wire, August 28, 2019, https://thewire.in/rights/neither-abrogated-
nor-removed-the-ploy-behind-centres-article-370-move; Faizan Mustafa, “Murder of Insaniyat,”
Frontline, August 30, 2019, https://frontline.thehindu.com/cover-story/article29049528.ece
5 Prabhash K. Dutta, “Kashmir: Why Centre is Sending Additional 38000 Troops to J&K,” India Today,
August 2, 2019, www.indiatoday.in/news-analysis/story/-if-situation-has-improved-then-why-send-
38-000-troops-to-j-k-1576436–2019–08–02; Manjeet Singh Negi, “8,000 More Troops Deployed
in Jammu and Kashmir after Govt Moves to Revoke Article 370,” India Today, August 5, 2019,
www.indiatoday.in/india/story/8000-troops-deployed-jammu-and-kashmir-govt-revoke-article-
370-1577356–2019–08–05
6 M. Kaunain Sheriff et al, “J&K: Most Habeas Corpus Cases Dragged on as Court Slammed Govt
on Due Process,” Indian Express, August 4, 2020, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/jammu-
kashmir-article-370-habeas-corpus-detention-psa-6538085/#:~:text=JUST%20TEN%20months%20
ago%2C%20the,status%20of%20the%20erstwhile%20state; Kashmir see: Bhasin V. Union of India,
Global Freedom of Expression, 2019, https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/bhasin-v-
union-of-india/; Shruti Mahajan, “Turning the Clock Back: How the Supreme Court Has Dealt with
Cases Arising Out of Last Year’s Abrogation of Article 370,” Bar and Bench, August 4, 2020, www.barand-
bench.com/columns/supreme-court-dealt-with-cases-abrogation-of-article-370-jammu-and-kashmir
7 Sandeep Bhardwaj, “No, Modi’s Kashmir Policy Isn’t New. He’s Only Continuing what Nehru Started
in the 1950s,” The Print, August 8, 2019, https://theprint.in/opinion/no-modis-kashmir-policy-isnt-
new-hes-only-continuing-what-nehru-started-in-the-1950s/273932/
8 Shaikh Abdullah claims in his autobiography that 3000 people were killed in repression that followed
his dislodging (see Amin Tr. 2013).
9 Sounak Mukherjee, “ ‘Final Solution’: How the Right Wing is Unknowingly Comparing PM Modi
with Hitler,” Money Control, August 6, 2019, www.moneycontrol.com/news/politics/article-370-kash
mir-final-solution-how-right-wing-is-unknowingly-comparing-pm-modi-with-hitler-4295321.html
10 Ambedkar experienced similar betrayal over his attempts to introduce reforms in personal laws through
the Hindu Code Bill and resigned from the cabinet in response.
11 Editorial, “Modi’s Revocation of Kashmir’s Autonomy,” The Economist, August 10, 2019, www.econo
mist.com/leaders/2019/08/10/modis-revocation-of-kashmirs-autonomy
12 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “The Story of Indian Democracy Written in Blood and Betrayal,” Indian Express,
August 6, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/jammu-kashmir-article-370-
scrapped-special-status-amit-shah-narendra-modi-bjp-5880797/
13 Partha Chatterjee, “Kashmir is the Test Bed for a New Model of Internal Colonialism,” The Wire,
August 28, 2019, https://thewire.in/government/kashmir-is-the-test-bed-for-a-new-model-of-internal-
colonialism
14 Dr. Happymon Jacob, “Max Rodenbeck (South Asia Bureau Chief of The Economist),” The Wire,
November 2, 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXvKnwo92Dk
15 See Tilak Devasher’s defense of the move in “Kashmir Was Denied the Fruits of Indian Democ-
racy,” Rediff.com, August 6, 2019, www.rediff.com/news/interview/kashmir-was-denied-the-fruits-of-
indian-democracy/20190806.htm
16 For example, on the issue of Dalit representation, see Basu (2000).
17 On the undermining of labour rights in India, see Chibber (2003) particularly his Chapter 5 on the
Demobilization of the Labour Movement (pp. 110–126); on violence against Muslims in India, see
Rauf (2011); on the undermining of the rights of forest dwellers, see Savyasaachi (2011); and on
Women’s movement and its struggle for rights since Independence, see Lateef (1977).
18 See Ambedkar’s final speech to the Constituent Assembly, dated November 25, 1949.
19 See Mohammed Ayoob, “The Turning Point in 1932: on Dalit Representation,” The Hindu, May 3,
2018, www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-turning-point-in-1932/article23752117.ece
20 Notice the extraordinary investment of liberals like Guha 2007; Tharoor 2003; Chatterjee 1993b,
Nandy 1983; Mehta 2014; Bilgrami 2002 and others in the legacy of these leaders.
21 The bravado and masculinity of the Kshatriya caste (warriors) to preserve their inherited fiefdoms and
power over their subjects, though often celebrated by Indian nationalists as acts of bravery, is not the
same thing as refusal to budge from a truth claim against the powerful at the cost of one’s life. Among
290
the people involved in India’s freedom struggle in whom we see a sense of self-sacrifice for public
good are Bhagat Singh (who happened to be a self-professed atheist-Marxist from Sikh lineage) and his
ideological associates.
22 Khudiram Bose was hanged with the Gita in his hand as was Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin. Gan-
dhi, Aurobindo, Tilak, Hegdewar, though ideologically divergent, all drew inspiration from the Gita.
Works Cited
Ambedkar, B. R. 1937. “The Annihilation of Caste.” Accessed August 16, 2020. https://ccnmtl.columbia.
edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/readings/aoc_print_2004.pdf.
———. 1948. The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? New Delhi: Amrit
Book Depot.
———. 1949. “The Last Speech to the Constitutional Assembly.” Constitutional Assembly Debates XI:
972–981; SIXTH REPRINT 2014.
Amin, Mohammad. Tr. 2013. The Blazing Chinar. Shaikh M. Abdullah (ed.). Srinagar: Gulshan Publishers.
Basu, S. 2000. “The Poona Pact and The Issue of Dalit Representation.” Proceedings of the Indian History
Congress 61: 986–998.
Bilgrami, Akeel. 2002. “Gandhi’s Integrity: The Philosophy behind the Politics.” Postcolonial Studies 5(1):
79–93.
Brown, Wendy. 1992. “Finding the Man in the State.” Feminist Studies 18(1): 7–34.
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993a. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton:
———. 1993b. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Chibber, Vivek. 2003. Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. Princeton, NJ:
Cohn, Bernard S. 1996. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Davis, Richard. 2015. The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
314–347.
Gatade, Subhash. 2003. “Inverting Dalit Consciousness: Hindutvaising the Dalits, Communalizing the
Movement.” Mainstream, February 8.
Guha, Ramachandra. 2007. India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. New York:
Ecco Print.
Guha, Ramachandra, Harivansh, Farah Naqvi, E. A. S. Sarma, Nandini Sundar, and B. G. Verghese. 2006.
“Salwa Judum: War in the Heart of India: Excerpts from the Report by the Independent Citizens Ini-
tiative.” Social Scientist 34(7/8): 47–61.
Hindery, Roderick. 1976. “Hindu Ethics in the Rāmāyana.” The Journal of Religious Ethics 4(2): 287–322.
Kak, Sanjay, ed. 2011. Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. New Delhi: Penguin.
Kanth, Idrees. 2018. “The Social and Political Life of a Relic: The Episode of the Moi-e-Muqaddas Theft
in Kashmir, 1963–1964.” Himalaya 38(2).
Khilnani, Sunil. 1997. The Idea of India. London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd.
Korbel, J. 1953. “The Kashmir Dispute After Six Years.” International Organization 7(4): 498–510.
Kosambi, D. D. 1961. “Social and Economic Aspects of the Bhagavad Gītā.” Journal of the Economic and
Social History of the Orient 4(2): 198–224.
Lateef, S. (1977). “Whither the Indian Women’s Movement?” Economic and Political Weekly 12(47):
1948–1951.
Lele, Jayant 1988. “On Regaining the Meaning of the ‘Bhagavad Gita.’ ” Journal of South Asian Literature 23(2):
150–167.
Mehta, Pratap Bhanu. 2014. “Nehru: Why He Still Matters.” http://iksa.in/india-ink/nehru-still-matters-
pratap-bhanu-mehta/1366/.
Nandy, Ashis. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
291
Gowhar Fazili
Noorani, A. G. 1999. “How and Why Nehru and Abdullah Fell Out.” Economic and Political Weekly 34(5):
268–272.
Puri, B. 2003. “Kashmir and Rest of India: First Emotional Rupture.” Economic and Political Weekly 38(49):
5143–5145.
Pyarelal. 1958. Mahatma Gandhi: The Last Phase. Ahmedabad: Navjivan Publishing House.
Rauf, T. A. 2011. “Violence Inflicted on Muslims: Direct, Cultural and Structural.” Economic and Political
Weekly 46(23): 69–76.
Robinson, Cabeiri deBergh. 2013. Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kash-
miri Jihadists. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Savyasaachi, I. 2011. “Forest Rights Act 2006: Undermining the Foundational Position of the Forest.” Eco-
nomic and Political Weekly 46(15): 55–62.
Sen, Amartya. 2005. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture, and Identity. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Snedden, Christopher. 2001. “What Happened to Muslims in Jammu? Local Identity, ‘The Massacre’
of 1947 and the Roots of the ‘Kashmir Problem.’ ” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 24(2):
111–134.
Sreekumar, S. 2012. “An Analysis of Consequentialism and Deontology in the Normative Ethics of the
‘Bhagavadgītā.’ ” Journal of Indian Philosophy 40(3): 277–315.
Tharoor, Shashi. 2003. Nehru: The Invention of India. New York: Arcade Publishing.
———. 2016. An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India. New Delhi: Aleph Book Company.
Uberoi, J. P. S. 2011. “Satyagrah, Truth and Non-Violence: Notes on Martyrdom.” In Taking Text to
Context, edited by George Keerankeri and V. P. Srivastava, 166–172. New Delhi: Indian Society of
Promoting Christian Knowledge.
292
21
TERRITORY, IDENTITY, AND
ISLAMIZATION IN MEDIEVAL
KASHMIR
Rafiq A. Pirzada
Introduction
The scholarly discourse on medieval Islamization of Kashmir has mainly revolved around three
main concerns. The first debates the comparative roles of prominent agents of Islamization,
dominated by either emigrant Sūfi Sayyids or indigenous Rishīs; the second deals with the
nature of Islam that flourished in its so-called “little” and “greater” traditions; and the third
concerns the process of Islamization in terms of its social and political, syncretic and orthodox,
and peaceful and violent forms. Over the last several decades, a new debate has emerged in
Islamization scholarship between the proponents of Sūfi Shaykhs from Central Asia and Persia,
most renowned among them Mīr Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadāni, and those of the indigenous Rishī
order, founded by Shaykh Nūruddīn Rishī. However, scant scholarly attention has been given
to articulations of Islamic space in medieval Kashmir and the Perso-Islamicate territorialization
of pre-Islamic medieval Kashmir from a politico-cultural perspective. Accordingly, this chapter
considers Islamization as a dynamic process of adaption, adoption, and reconfiguration of earlier
traditions and spaces undertaken through a complex yet creative network of relationships and
multiplicities involving emigrant Sūfi Sayyids, their accompanying ‘ulama and other tawā’if, sul-
·
tans, nobles, indigenous rishīs, neo-convert elites, and landed aristocracy of medieval Kashmir.
Inspired by the notions of “territorialization” and “deterritorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari
1987) to explore the interplay of these multiplicities, this chapter steers the scholarly debate
on medieval Islamization of Kashmir away from its focus on the prominent sectarian agents
of Islamization and toward an exploration of heterogeneous multiplicities of Islamization net-
works among diverse socio-religious, socio-political, and religio-political assemblages in Kash-
mir between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the
neo-converts of the early Islamization phase, who were crucial agents of the Islamization pro-
cess for their material practices, and who formed conduits between the Persianate-Islamicate
tradition and the existing Brahmanical order. I begin the chapter by exploring the complex
network of relationships and multiplicities that emerged from the medieval encounter between
the Persianate-Islamicate milieu and the pre-Islamic Brahmanical-Buddhist milieu of Kashmir.
I discuss the religio-political and socio-political dimensions of Islamization of medieval Kashmir
along with its territorializing agencies. In the next section, I delineate the deterritorializing
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-26 293

Rafiq A. Pirzada
formations of the indigenous Brahmanical order, highlighting how breakaway agents from
within the Brahmanical order were instrumental in the Islamization of medieval Kashmir.
The “Nightingale’s” Song From the Běhat River Banks1

Since the Protestant Reformation that splintered Catholic Europe, the dominant conception of
religion in general has been that of “essences unconditioned by history” (Ernst 2005: 15) – that
is, considering a religious tradition as a “pure” and unchanging homogeneous whole, “original”
in its composition. Such an approach to religious studies, as Ernst (2005: 15) so astutely argues,
“tends to make religions rather than people into agents,” thereby excluding or marginalizing
the role of a preacher, an author or a practitioner. Historiographically problematic terminolo-
gies like diffusion, influence, indigenous, foreign, and syncretic have come to function as major
categories of analysis in religious studies. Much disparagingly applied to “Oriental” religions,
syncretism has assumed a dangerous dichotomy with respect to the analysis of Islamization of
medieval Kashmir. The underlying assumptions which have proliferated the Islamization stud-
ies of medieval Kashmir treat Islam either as a foreign religion, irrevocably inassimilable in the
indigenous Brahmanical tradition. Or, conversely, conceived in its ascetic Sūfi or “folk” tradi-
tion it is seen as much closer to (and influenced by) the indigenous Rishī tradition, resistant to
the intellectualist greater tradition, and thus easily assimilated (and assimilable) as an inalienable
component of the so-called composite culture of Kashmir (Khan 2005; Rafiqi 2003).
As an effort out of this impasse I propose to highlight in my analysis of the Islamization of
medieval Kashmir one of its substantive characterizations as a network of “assemblages” (agence-
ment) and multiplicities, constituting an open, non-hierarchical, anti-genealogical system, in
which multiple circumstances combined to create “a fabric of intense states” (Massumi 2013,
xiii). An assemblage or a multiplicity may be perceived as made in simultaneous acts of articula-
tion and segmentation, stratification and destratification, and movements of flight or escape,
and reorganization of many heterogeneous sets of components, which establish open relations
of liaisons and uniquely alliances between them. What aligns my own articulation of the Islami-
zation process in medieval Kashmir with the formulations of assemblage and multiplicities is
how remarkably the proliferation of a multiplicity or an assemblage stems from their capacity
to emerge from events that splinter or splatter a particular strand of a milieu by grafting onto
vestiges of its historical weave, or by advancing through entirely new strands into other milieus.
The early fourteenth-century Kashmir was marked by rampant economic decline and politi-
cal fragmentation between morally base sovereigns, scheming feudatory chiefs (like Dāmarās
and Lāvanyās) and armed hordes from the adjoining hill tribes of Rājapurī (Khaśa or Khakhas),
which had set in early during the reign of the second Lohāra dynasty with the reigns of Uccalla
(r.1101–1111) and Sussala (r.1112–1128). Moreover, the military encounters between Kashmīr
and the Mongol Empire between 1235 and 1320 not only highlight the series of invasions
that took place during this period, but also indicate that Kashmir at various intervals became
a tributary state of the Mongol Empire, and on at least two occasions local Buddhist monks
were appointed as Darughauchi on the patron-saint model (Wink 1991). Again, in 1320, when
Suhādeva (r.1301–1320) failed to ward off another Mongol invasion by heavily taxing his sub-
jects, including Brahmins, to pay tributes to the Chaghatayid khanate, Noyōn Dulaca (or D · alaca
or Zulchu) invaded Kashmir through Zojī La Pass. This invasion, in the words of Jonarāja,
reduced Kashmir to “a region before the creation, a vast field with few men, without food and
full of grass” ( Jonarāja: 141, quoted in Ahmad 1979: 5). The large-scale devastations caused by
Mongol invasions shattered the power-structure of the Hindu Kingdom and caused great dis-
order and power-vacuums among the established native feudatory factions, paving way for new
294
Medieval Kashmir
factions to gain a foothold (Ahmad 1979: 5). It was in this social, political, and moral vacuum
of the early fourteenth-century Kashmir that Sufis and Sultans would intervene, ally, and ulti-
mately establish themselves as the new assemblage of Islamization.
Each assemblage or multiplicity forms a weave. A Sufi silsilā, a Rishī order, and a Sultan’s
royal court, all formed multiplicities. A khānqāh (hospice) along with its Shaykh and disciples,
khādims (servants) and lan·gar (community kitchen), the connected mosque, the madrasā, the
graveyard, artisan’s workshop, and the local market together formed a multiplicity. Similarly,
a formation of landed nobles (like Dāmarās, Māgrays, and Chăks) in early Kashmir formed a
historically significant multiplicity. An agglomeration of courtly elites was another multiplicity.
Thus, in the context of medieval Kashmir, there were multiplicities of Sufi Silsilās, shaykhs,
rishīs, sultans, literary elites, nobles, artisans, and courtiers, all of which converged on the plane
of Islamization, which acted as a plane of consistency. The convergence of all the castes in Hindu
system, and all Sanskrit literary forms along with the regimes and networks of their patronage,
production, and circulation, the conglomeration of agrahåras2 assigned to individual brahmins,
purohitas-corporations (pārişadya), resident purohitas (thānapatis), temples, and dharmaśālās in
early medieval Kashmir converged in the Brahmanical order (Stein RT II.132).
More importantly though, there was the other side to each multiplicity, which exposed it to
the dismantling of its organization, destratifying it through forces of flight – rupture, segmenta-
tion, escape, leaking, disappearance – that became the forces of its deterritorialization in their
collaborative connections with other multiplicities. In the medieval encounter between the
Persianate-Islamicate milieu and the Sanskrit-Brahmanical-Buddhist milieu there emerged lines
of flight from both which facilitated connection, communication and gradual flattening of all
multiplicities on a single plane of consistency – the plane of Islamization. Sultan Shams ud-Dīn
Shāh Mīr, Rin-c‘en (Rinchana Shāh), Mīr Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadāni, Mīr Sayyid Mahmūd Baihaqi,
and Mīr Shams ud-Dīn Irāqi offer some interesting examples of the lines of flight, which facili-
tated the territorialization of Persianate-Islamicate milieu upon the pre-Islamic space of medi-
eval Kashmir, through a deterritorialization of its ethos.
Sultān Shams ud-Dīn Shāh Mīr (r.1339–1342), the founder of the Kashmir Sultanate, who
embodied a shaykhly spirituality in his political ambitions, was led by the firāsat (physiognomy) of
his ancestor Shaykh Waqūr Shah to leave Swādgīr (Swat) for Kashmir (Baloch and Rafiqi 1998;
Schimmel 1980; Wink 2004). In spite of ‘Ali Hamadāni’s adherence to the Shāfiʿī school, he
encouraged the newly converted Kashmiri Muslims to follow the Hanafī school, pertinently for
its relatively flexible doctrine (Khan 2005: 4) which would be appropriate in a frontier territory
such as Medieval Kashmir. In the same manner, being aware of the existing pre-Islamic tradi-
tions of medieval Kashmir, ‘Ali Hamadāni’s introduction of Awrād-i-Fathiyyah, a selective sacred
formula of Qura’nic invocatory prayers compiled and collected by him from 400 Mashāi’kh and
sanctioned by the Prophet himself in ‘Ali Hamadāni’s dream (Badakhshī, cited in Sofi 2017:
57–58) among Kashmir’s neo-Muslim population constituted a line of flight from his Shāfiʿī
lifeworld.
‘Ali Hamadāni’s extraordinarily perceptive decision to introduce loud choral recitation of
the Awrād-i-Fathiyyah in Kashmir’s mosques and shrines, a practice unique to Kashmir, and
which was markedly reminiscent of the daily Brahmanical ritual of chanting stotra, or Sanskrit
hymns of praise, in temples and at tīrthas, was an act of segmentation, destratification, and a
strategic departure from the Islamic tradition, consciously undertaken by ‘Ali Hamadāni to
plunge into Kashmir’s indigenous pre-Islamic milieu. My own ethnographic observations at
Mela Khīr Bhawāni3 in this connection were quite revelatory. During an early morning visit to
the pilgrimage site, on the eve of the annual festival, in 2014, I heard the much familiar reci-
tation of the Awrād, which forms the daily morning ambience of a Kashmiri neighborhood,
295
Rafiq A. Pirzada
which I initially attributed to a nearby local mosque in the surrounding Muslim neighborhood
of the pilgrimage site. Not quite sure from where exactly the loud recitations were coming,
I curiously asked the local shopkeeper about it. To my utter disbelief he informed me that the
recitations were the hymn chants from the Kashmiri Brahmin priests who were praying inside
the temple in the premises of the pilgrimage site. The rhythm and the refrain of a recitation
of the Awrād from a Kashmiri mosque and that of a stotra hymn chant from a Kashmiri Hindu
temple, as I discovered, were indistinguishable, in spite of the fact that the former was recited in
Arabic and the latter in Sanskrit.
More importantly, though, this daily practice of reciting the Awrād aloud in chorus after the
Fajr and the Maghrib prayers, in its double deterritorializing refrain, was simultaneously a sub-
stantive reterritorializing act of Islamization. In its loud choral recitation of the Awrād, which
concluded in a standing homage to the Prophet with folded hands,4 the Islamic prayer fled its
traditional Persianate-Islamicate ethos in a creative act of deterritorialization. In its strategic
escape from the Persianate-Islamicate “plateau” as it spilled into the distinctly Kashmirian “kin-
esthetic melody” of reciting a predominantly Tawhīdic (asserting oneness of God) prayer in Ara-
bic, it deterritorialized the Sanskrit hymn chant – an overwhelmingly familiar religious ritual in
pre-Islamic Kashmir – by dislocating its refrain through an asignifying replacement of its content,
while continuing with the same repetitive rhythm – of a Sanskrit hymn chant. A breakaway
tune from the Iranian plateau thus launched forth in the Valley of Kashmir by plunging in the
existing melodic formula of temple bells and hymn chants, characteristic of temporality and spa-
tiality of the medieval Kashmir, thereby transforming both the being of the participant and the
landscape. This plunging in, or spilling over, turned into the loud act of marking the recently
inhabited territorial landscape of Kashmir as Islamic. In the call for azān, and the asignifying
chants of Awrād-i-Fathiyyah, the pre-Islamic territory of Kashmir found a new owner in the
“nightingale” (Bulbul Shah),5 as much as the “nightingale” found a new territory – Kashmir.
For, in the absence of such deterritorializing ecstasies, it might not have been possible for a
Persianate-Islamicate tradition to move out of its Persianate lieu and anchor itself in a frontier
territory of the Sanskrit-Brahmanical-Buddhist Kashmir. On the other hand, however, Sayyid
‘Ali Hamadāni was also acutely aware of establishing among the neo-converts the distinct ide-
als of the Islamic tradition, without losing touch with the kernel of what constituted Islamic
practices. Accordingly, therefore, Sultan Qutub ud-Dīn (r.1373–1389) was readily instructed by
the Shaykh to divorce the eldest of the two sisters he had taken as spouses, his marriage with
the other sister was renewed (tajdīd-i nikāh), and he was also advised to discard his non-Muslim
dress (Anonymous/Pandit 1614/1991: 35). It is, therefore, instructive to understand how ‘Ali
Hamadāni, in person and through practices, acted simultaneously as an exemplary agent of
deterritorialization, territorialization and the consequent reterritorialization of Perso-Islamicate
milieu upon the pre-Islamic milieu of medieval Kashmir.
It is noteworthy, however, that much of the deterritorialization of the early Kashmir’s Brah-
manical order, and also of its socio-political order, had actually started much earlier with the fall
of the Second Lohāra dynasty, followed by three centuries of Sanskrit literary culture’s decline
and sudden “death” (Pollock 2001) from the thirteenth century, and the devastating Mongol
invasion of the early fourteenth century. The arrival of Sūfi Shaykhs and the establishment of
Muslim rule in Kashmir in 1320, when Rinchana converted to Islam at the hands of Bulbul
Shah, however, triggered an unprecedented movement of segmentarity, destratification and
disintegration in the pre-Islamic religio-social order. As a result of these movements of rupture
in the pre-Islamic milieu of Kashmir, an increasing number of Hindus from the general popula-
tion and high-caste socio-political elites converted to Islam and joined the territorializing forces
of Islamization. The foremost among the chief agents of this movement, who can be called
296
Medieval Kashmir
the agents of rupture were the king Suhādeva; Rāvan Chand during Rinchana’s (1320–1323)
reign; Chandsardevā and Ujani Raina during Sultan Shahābud-Dīn’s (1354–1373) rule; Ladī
Magray during Sultan Qutub ud-Dīn’s (1373–1389) rule; and Suha Bhatta during Sultan
Sikandar Shāhmīrī’s (1389–1413) reign.
Besides, matrimonial alliances between Sayyids and Sultans, Sultans and Hindu noble fami-
lies, and Sayyids and Hindu chieftains broke open the boundaries of both, the Sayyids’ genea-
logical hierarchy, and the indigenous socio-political order of Kashmir’s Brahmanical order to
Islamization. At the same time, however, the eccentric alliances and movements out of the indig-
enous Brahmanical order, which established fresh connections with the Islamicate multiplicities
of the emigrant Muslim milieu, also constituted the potential sites of the Brahmanical re-emer-
gence at a later stage in Kashmir’s historical process. It is these potential sites of re-emergence
which would later facilitate the reconstitution and restratification of a certain sort of Brahmani-
cal assemblages, thereby restoring power to resurgent formations of the order in the form of
the Dogra Hindu State (1846–1947). Here, however, it must suffice to say that the organizing
vision of Kashmiri’s pre-Islamic order was the maintenance of a closed socio-religious hierar-
chical structure shaped around rigid caste-hierarchy and the “purity” of rituals which included
purity of spirit, land, rites, language, social and religious conduct, as well as purity of scriptural
knowledge and mantras (Chakravarti 1993: 579).6
In medieval re-appropriations of the Purānic worldview, the physico-sacred geography of
early medieval Kashmir exemplified, in its embodied and literary forms, a closed “highly loca-
tive world view” (Kaul S. 2018: 74) which largely remained closed off and inimical to an
egalitarian worldview, marked off and safeguarded as it was against the latter by its innumerable
tīrthas along the surrounding Himalayan mountain ranges enclosing the valley of Kashmir7 in
its “raised arms.”8 On the contrary, however, rupture, reencounter and reconstitution remained
the opus operatum of Islamization, more specifically the Islamization of medieval Kashmir. In its
strategic movement of desire away from the intellectual dichotomy of shari’a and tarīqa, esoteric
and exoteric, high tradition and little tradition, doctrinal and folk, Sūfi and Rishī, the Perso-
Islamicate assemblages of Kubrawī order stepped into and subverted the closed Brahmanical
order of early medieval Kashmir, nibbling at the core of latter’s lifeworld, and disarming it by
binding together with its traditional lines, without connecting with its structure; thereby creat-
ing a meshwork with its ritual leitmotif, but never fully integrating within its order and world-
view. In other words, the Islamization lines of flight, which ruptured out of their Persianate
ritual-intellectual moorings, sniped at the locative lifeworld of the Brahmanical order in order
to subvert it, and then stepped back out to reconnect with and keep its own milieu and worldview
at an arm’s length distance from it all, in a “rhizomatic” formation:
You make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reen-
counter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a
signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject.
(Deleuze and Guattari 2013/1987: 8–9, emphasis mine)
The “rupture” and the “danger” were, I may argue, not only originary but more substantively
creative as well as reconstitutive to the medieval Islamization processes, without being at the
same time stratifying or hegemonic in an essentialist way.
In the context of Islamization of medieval Kashmir, the life of Shaykh Nūruddīn Rishī
(1377–1440), also known as Nund Rishī or Shaykh al-Ālam, exemplified one of the greatest
achievements of the rupture-snipe-reencounter-reconstitution dynamic of Islamization in its
Persianate-Islamicate tradition. Following Shaykh Nūruddīn Rishī’s life one is led to believe as
297
Rafiq A. Pirzada
if the chief agents of the Kubrawī Sufi Order intently and persistently worked through Nund
Rishī to step into the Śaivite ascetic counterculture of indigenous rishīs, who had practically
fled from the social space and left it open for the hegemonic householder ethos of Kashmir’s
Brahmanical ascendancy. Following in the escapist dispositions of extreme asceticism of the
most legendary Buddhist and Hindu sanyāsīs (renouncers), such as Palās Rishi, Zulka Rishī,
and, more pronouncedly, Lalleśvarī (Lal Děd,), Nund Rishī was at the forefront of the counter-
culture of renouncers, braving the trials and humiliations of the prevalent Brahmanical house-
holder tradition. In his insightful analysis of the socio-religious order of the time T.N. Madan
(1988: 41–42) remarks:
Why is it that the Pandits distrust and ridicule self-styled renouncers? [It has to do
with] their commitment to the ideology of the householder. Apparently they are cyni-
cal about those who leave home . . . he [the renouncer] not only seeks release from the
web of kinship and other worldly ties but also denigrates these as a trap and an illusion.
Stepping into the counterculture of renouncers, which nevertheless lived scattered on the
fringes, the Kubrawī masters of the Persianate-Islamicate milieu weaned Nund Rishī away
from extremely escapist dispositions of the Buddhist-Śaivite ascetic tradition, while nurturing
his ascetic “habitus” with Persianate-Islamicate spirit and etiquette. His earlier escape to the
nearby mountain cave where he stayed for twelve long years, surviving on wild leafy vegetables
like vopalhākh (utpalaśāka), which was the common diet of ancient sanyāsīs and poor village
folks, was the most material negation of worldly life (Khan 2005: 101). This phase of his life
is steeped in Śaivite consciousness which he expressed in his Sanskritized Kashmiri poeti-
cal hymns, the shrŭki.9 His first formative encounter with Persianate-Islamicate milieu occurs
through his father’s conversion to Islam at the hands of a Kubrawī master Sayyid Mohammad
Hussayn Simnānī. The son would soon accompany his neo-Muslim father, Salar Sanz to the
Khānqāh.
It was about fourteen years prior to his own visit to Kashmir that the great Kubrawī master
Mīr Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadānī had deputed his cousin Sayyid Mohammad Hussayn Simnānī on a
mission to Kashmir in 1359 during Sultan Shahābud-Dīn’s reign (1354–1373). Soon after his
arrival a khānqāh was established in the rural hinterlands of Kashmir at Kulgām, 42 miles south of
Srinagar. The sultan granted endowments for the maintenance of its lan·gar, which soon attracted
the local population for its egalitarian practices. Quite significantly, the family name “Saņz” had
been retained by the Shaykh as he gave his neo-convert his new Muslim name. Nund Rishī was
twelve years old when the Shaykh passed away. It is instructive to note yet another remarkable
snipe at Kashmir’s Buddhist-Saivite religio-spiritual worldview from the Persianate-Islamicate
movement which came in 1393. This was the year when Mīr Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadāni’s illustrious
son Mīr Mohammad Hamadānī arrived from Khatalān along with 600 Sufi shaykhs and attend-
ants to continue the ongoing Islamization process in Kashmir after Hussayn Simnānī’s death in
1390 (Diddamari 1746/2019,72). Sayyid Mohammad Hamadāni personally called upon Nund
Rishī (Khan 2005: 83), departing from his aristocratic-shaykhly Persianate comportment, for a
historical meeting that would prove a deterritorialization par excellence of the pre-Islamic medieval
Kashmir. At the time of their meeting Nund Rishī had spent twelve long years in the Shahmār
Tang cave, descended into extreme austerities and body mortification, renounced his house-
holder way of life, and abandoned his mother, wife, and children.10
The encounter became for Nund Rishī the site of his line of flight away from the Buddhist-
Śaivite spiritualism toward the Persianate-Islamicate one. Nund Rishī, who celebrated his
298
Medieval Kashmir
spiritual inheritance from the Saivite ascetic Lal Děd, was now keen to initiate into the fold of
the Kubrawī Sufi order at the hands of its one of the most prolific Shaykhs, Mīr Mohammad
Hamadāni. An exemplary ris·hī11 who embodied the centuries-old Puranic vision of Kaśyapa,
the legendary “originator” of Kashmir, Nund Rishī would soon denounce his renunciatory
seclusion, leave the cave, and join the deterritorializing network of Islamization as its perfected
walīy12 – “a protégé of Allah” – and shaykh. The Kubrawī order of the Persianate-Islamicate
milieu thus assembled a new multiplicity as it extended into the centuries-old Purānic Rishī
consciousness of Kashmir and deterritorialized its extreme austere practices through Nuruddin
Rishi’s transformation from a Śaivite renouncer to a Kubrawī walīy. The Letter of Initiation
(Khat-ī Irshād), written by Mīr Muhammad Hamadāni in 814AH/1411CE and addressed to
Nuruddin Rishī, which is preserved at the Khānqah-i Muʿallā in Srinagar, formally received
him into the exalted Kubrawī-Hamadānī line, and granted him permission to preach Islam,
take disciples, train initiates, and practice Islamic pieties in the exalted path of the Sufi Shaykhs
(Khan 2005: 256–257). The anti-genealogical alliances thus formed the organizing principle of
the Sufi orders in their Islamization movements across the frontier territories such as medieval
Kashmir.
Two main causes can be given for the Islamization of Perso-Indica in general and of medieval
Kashmir in particular. The first cause was the doctrinal cause of Islam, its missionary aspect,
organized around the techniques of da’wa (inviting), tablīgh (preaching) and isha’at (announcing)
which were woven into the fabric of Islamic tradition. Closely linked to this doctrinal cause
was the historicity of its hijrat (migration) and hajj (pilgrimage), which, while retaining in its
traditional milieu a certain trace of nomadism, imparted to its organizational weave a missionary
eccentricity of “leaving its home” for the “other lands” “for the cause of Allah” (Bulliet 1994:
67). The second cause was the direct consequence of the rise of “the high-tide of the Mongol
Age” in Western Asia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which not only led to the
sacking of Baghdad and the execution of the Abbasid caliph in 1258, by Mongol armies under
Hulegu Khan, but also threatened the future of the Delhi Sultanate. But this cause has been
studied rather simplistically, disregarding the complexity of relationship between Sufi Shaykhs
and Mongol political elite who remained intimately intertwined.
Keenly aware of the “firestorm” of Mongol destruction unleashed at “the heart of the
Islamic world,” Eaton (2000: 166–167) notes that the Delhi Sultanate in particular and the
Muslims of the later thirteenth century in general, “had come to see India as destined to play a
very special role for Islam in the post-Mongol world.” The establishment of Islam and Muslim
rule on the Deccan plateau, and the establishment of the Bhamani Sultanate, were directly
informed by both the causes mentioned earlier. In the context of medieval Kashmir, the eccen-
tric and segmentary character of the Persianate-Islamicate tradition, the persecution of Sufis
in Central Asia and Persia under Mongols, as well as the intimate liaisons between Mongol
ruling elite and Kubrawī Sūfi Shaykhs, all contributed to the emigration of Sufi Shaykhs and
the establishment of Persianate-Islamicate socio-polity. It was for this multiplicitous morphol-
ogy constituted as the cause, hijrat, hajj and nomadism in the Islamic tradition that drove both
Muslim rulers and Muslim Shaykhs to other lands where new lines of territorialization, stratifi-
cation, and re-organization emerged. These lines of reterritorialization and reconstitution tied
back to old lines across ruptures and frontiers, thereby, forming translocal multiplicities, locally
global “terrains of exchange” between Persianate-Islamicate worldview and the pre-Islamic
Hindu-Buddhist milieu of Kashmir, which, unlike Nile Green’s (2014: 7) conception of verti-
cal structuration of the “cross-fertilizations of culture,” were transversal, anti-structural, as well
as anti-genealogical.
299
Rafiq A. Pirzada
The Map of the Terrain: The Khānqāh, the Mosque,

the Graveyard, and the Market
Rian Thum, in his ethnographic study of Uyghur history, highlights a material connection
between the shrines in Altishahr and the tazkirāhs written about them, arguing that the shrine,
like the text, “was a fulcrum of historical meaning, in the sense that texts about the past were
attracted to the shrine, circulated there, and . . . disputed there” (2014: 96–97). According
to Thum, by viewing shrines themselves as the material manifestations of the past, they thus
become both “the context of historical practice and the very stuff of history” (2014: 96–97).
Thum is particularly referring to the role of these sites (shrines) in the daily life and rituals (such
as pilgrimages and festivals) of the communities tied to them, and how texts – about these sites
and the lives of their Shaykhs – are firmly tied to particular points on the landscape:
Shrines provided pilgrims a physical and geographical link to the past, which further
drew history into the realm of personal experience, much like the museum and monu-
ments of certain other societies.
(2014: 96–97)
The shrine, or the khānqāh, as an intense concretion of Islamization and an important site of
daily life, stood on the local terrain, not as a lonely local institution, but as the central landmark
in the heart of an integrated network of the connected mosque, the local graveyard, and the
connected market. At the dawn of the medieval Islamization of Kashmir in the early fourteenth
century, which was coeval with the establishment of the Muslim rule in the region, the first
khānqāh that was built by the disciple ruler Rinchana Shāh for Bulbul Shāh stood together with
a grand mosque, and the palace of the ruler. The grand mosque of Rinchana extended to the
early medieval Buddhist quarter of Bodhgīr. Later, the tomb of the ruler and the graveyard of
the prominent companions of the Shaykh and the ‘ulama of the time were built in the prem-
ises of the Shaykh’s tomb and Khānqāh-i Bulbul Lankar. Interestingly, it was the same locality
where, long before the fourteenth-century Islamization wave, the first Muslim city quarter of
the earliest emigrant Muslim traders, artists and butchers might have lived, and which is pres-
ently known as Malchamār, the modern variant of its reference to the early medieval derogatory
designation for Muslims as Mlecchas – the “impure outsiders.”
Conceived within a Persianate literary tradition, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Persian narratives of Kashmir’s transition to Islam, which also included besides tazkirāhs and
tārīkhs various Rishīnāmās and Nūrnāmās, recreated in continuum a discursive landscape of
Islamization by mapping the narrative meshwork of Kashmir’s encounter with Islam through
the activities of Muslim Shaykhs, Sultans, and Rishīs upon Kashmir’s pre-Islamic landscape. In
this sense, therefore, as the heterogeneous assemblages of Islamization worked upon the ter-
rains of pre-Islamic medieval Kashmir through concrete acts of religious, social, political and
economic interventions, the narratives of these activities and the consequent transformation of
Kashmir’s pre-Islamic terrain, were not conceived in any imaginary space, but remained tied
to the concrete activities and the sites of Islamization. Thus the popular conversion-debate
between Shaykh Nūruddīn Rishī and the great Brahman Priest Bam Sād (Bhīma Sādhi) at
the latter’s Bamzu cave-temple in southern Kashmir, as it appeared in the sixteenth-century
Rishīnāmā of Baba Khalīl, is significant for the fact that not only did the great priest convert,
but he retained the famous cave temple as his new reconfigured Muslim shrine (Digby 1970:
14). Remarkably, the first name “Bām” in his new Muslim name, Baba Bām al-Dīn, adopted by
the priest is an onomatopoeic imitation of his Brahman first name “Bam.”
300
Medieval Kashmir
Furthermore, tied up with the material reconfiguration of the sacred place is the conversion
narrative, enunciated in an idiom and cultural imaginary that appealed to the religious economy
of Bam Sād’s Śaivite worldview. Bam Sād, apparently seeking to know how to worship the
Shaykh’s God, inquired:
Kusū Pŏş te Kusū Pās·ān·ai [Which animal to which Idol Shall I Sacrifice]
Kumū Kosam Lāgas Pūzāi [Which flowers in Worship shall I Offer]
Kavei Karîth Tīrath Zăl Čha:vizeys [In Water of Which Tīratha Shall I bathe Him]
Kavei Mantare Īşar Nindri Vŭzey [With what Hymns Shall Īśvara Wake]
Shayk al-Ālam replied:
Yatshi Pŏş te Patshi Pās·ān·ay [Devotion as Animal, Faith as the Idol]

Bhāviki Kosam Lagizeys Pūzāy [Flowers of Character, do Offer in Worship]
Shash GagneiTīrath Zăl Čhāvizeys [Water of the Six Skies of Consciousness to
Bathe in]
Tshvapi Mantare Īşar Nindri Vŭzey [With Hymns of Silence Shall Īśvara Wake]
(Quoted in Basheer 2014: 49–50; translation mine)
Notwithstanding the prevalent credulous nature of the dialogue, the authors of Rishīnāmās used
the “formulaic elements” (Behl 2012: 23) of Kashmiri Śaivite language and rituals to articulate
a Persiante-Islamicate Sufi Sulūk (path), thereby dislocating the Śaivite ideology by steering its
symbolic vocabulary away from its outward observances of fetishized austerity, animal sacrifice
and idolatry into visualization of Sufi Sulūk stations. At the social level, the historical reality that
the conversion anecdotes of Rishīnāmās were being recited, circulated, and reproduced in oral
accounts by storytellers, bards (bhānds), and dervish dancers (Dhambael Dāstān) across Kashmir “at
social gatherings” (Khan 2005: 181), events like weddings and ‘Urs anniversaries of local saints,
had not been lost on the compilers who were themselves devout adherents of the new faith
which they were consciously propagating among Kashmiri masses.
In the material culture realm, the reconfiguration of old Buddhist and Hindu sacred sites like
vihārās, tīrthas, and temple sites into Islamic sacred sites such as mosques, shrines, and graveyards
were perhaps the most expressive acts of what might be called creative reconciliation with the
past, which facilitated not only the deterritorialization of pre-Islamic heritage into Islamicate
heritage but also led to the Islamization of Kashmiri landscape through a reconfiguration and re-
articulation of its sacred space within a Persianate-Islamicate language and imagery. The typical
architecture of the Buddhist vihārā was imitated in the khānqāh design (Andersen 2012). We find
many parallels to the “continuity of sacredness” in the eighth-century Islamization of Buddhist
Afghanistan after Umayyad conquest of Bactra (Balkh) in 708–709 (Azad 2017). In her study on
the Islamization in Afghanistan, Arezou Azad (2017: 53) argues that while the Buddhist mean-
ing of many prominent Buddhist sites of the medieval city of Balkh was lost in their multiple
reconfigurations, first as Zoroastrian and later as Islamic sacred sites, their sacredness was retained.
The most prominent Buddhist monastery of Balkh, Nava vihāra or “New Monastery” was
transmitted through Sasanian origin myths as the very site where the prophet Zoroaster died
and where his patron, Gushtasp, had built the city thus assuming the name Gushtasp’s Mound.
And later, in the twelfth century, Shaykh al-Islam al-Wa‘iz, the author of the Faza’il-i Balkh,
rearticulated the Navavihāra as the final resting place (Persianized to Naw Bahār) of the Prophet
Ayyūb, Job the Forbearer in Biblical tradition (Azad 2017: 53). Similarly, the capital city of
the newly established Kashmir Sultanate in medieval Kashmir was built around the same site
301
Rafiq A. Pirzada
where the ancient city of Pravarapurā stood. The ancient city is said to have been founded by
the Gonanda king Pravarasena II (r.530–590) during the early sixth century on the banks of
the Vitasta River ( Jhelum) around the foothills of the Hariparvat Hill (Stein, RT, III-337–363).
During his visit to Kashmir in 631 CE, the Chinese traveller Hiuen-Tsiang identified this city
as “the new capital” and located it as “situated on the eastern bank of a great river, two and a
half miles long from north to south” (Stein, RT. II.339–349).
During the Kashmir Sultanate period, the Khānqāh-i Bulbul Lankar, Rinchan Masjid, the
Jāmi‘a Masjid, Khānqāh-i Mu‘alā, Mazār-i Salātīn, the shrines of Shaykh Hamza Makhdūmi and
Shaykh Bahauddin Ganj Bakhsh, and the earliest Muslim graveyard in the premises of the shrine
of Baha ud-din Ganj Bakhsh, all of them were built around the foothills of the Hariparvat on the
right bank, the site of the ancient Pravarapurā. Not surprisingly thus, it is also the same site of
Pravarapurā, Hiuen-Tsiang’s “the new capital,” where the central core of the old city of “the down-
town” Srinagar is presently located. While the old sites of Pravarapurā lost their old meanings in
their acculturation induced by Islamization, these sites retained their sacred character, thus becom-
ing, at the same time, sites of creative reconciliation with their pre-Islamic past for the overwhelm-
ing majority of Kashmiri Hindus and Buddhists who converted to Islam. The pre-Islamic past
was therefore not suppressed but recast in shaping a different present. Creative reconciliation with
the past among Kashmiris during their transition to Islam involved acts of forging new identities
without disowning or forgetting their past, for entirely renouncing their centuries-old traditions
by rejecting or disrespecting them would have made their transition to Islam very traumatic. Since
these transitions were meant to instill a better and peaceful future, they had to be gradual, creative,
and reconciliatory. Shaykh Nūruddīn’s life and his founding of the Rishi Order were exemplary
practices of creative reconciliation with the past within a Persianate-Islamicate milieu of Kashmir.
Shaykh al-Ālam’s own life and poetry offer a deep understanding of both the ontological
crisis that the indigenous rishīs had to go through during the Islamization process, and how
he overcame this crisis through creative reconciliation. Both – the crisis and its overcoming –
were apparently at work in the process of transition. Shaykh al-Ālam initially declared during
his dialogue with Mīr Mohammad Hamadāni that he was Uwaysī in spiritual lineage – named
after Uways al-Qaranīy; Uwaysis are those sūfīs who claim their direct chain of authority and
transmission of spiritual guidance to the Prophet Mohammad, with no intermediate Sūfī links
in between (Kāmil 1965: 33; Khan 2005: 46). Here, a rishī who was obviously not linked to any
Sūfī silsilā, and therefore in order to legitimize his position of authority as a Muslim saint in a
transitory Islamic space, claimed both sūfīhood and allegiance to a silsilā. The event and the act
reveal the ontological crisis of integrating into the Persianate-Islamicate tradition that was taking
shape and shaping Kashmir into a new world system. In one of the most popularly remembered
shrukis attributed to him, Shaykh al-Ālam announces his silsilā, establishing his unbroken lineage
with the Prophet (Kāmil 1965: 135):
Awwal Rishī Ahmad Rishī, Do’yim Hazrat Owais Āw

Tri’yim Rishī Zalkar Rishi, Tchorim Hazrat Palās Āw
Pontchim Rishī Rumei Rishī, Shi’yim Hazrat Mirān Āw
Sati’mis Korham Hash Nādashī, Bei Kus Rishī Mei Kya Nāw
Here a new lineage, which is anti-genealogical, is established by Shaykh al-Ālam, linking him
to the Prophet Mohammad through an unbroken chain of intermediaries who include earlier
ascetics from pre-Islamic Kashmir through renowned Sūfīs from the Prophet’s own time. This
unique silsilā and its spiritual authority, which emanated from the Prophet himself, extended
forward to the Shaykh’s own time; furthermore, it advanced outwards in space along new
302
Medieval Kashmir
lines from Arab to Ajam in Kashmir, where it took on a particularized territorial form and
character in its cosmological juxtaposition of the Arabian spacetime in Kashmir’s legendary
one. The nature of territoriality which was constituted through this complex movement of
the Islamic tradition in space and time cannot be captured in the notions of indigenous, emi-
grant, or syncretic. This territoriality is simultaneously deterritorializing, as it is constituted in
dynamic networks, which are not genealogical, nor static, but cosmographic, yet located in
particular geographical spaces as constellations, stabilized around sites of Islamicate milieu, such
as mosque, khānqāh, tomb, graveyard, madrasā, garden, fort, canal, as well as the tied-up texts
and so on. In fact, the individual life of a Sūfī in itself is not bound up in a particular territorial
spacetime. The Sūfī life and the Sūfī identity – and by extension Muslim identity – is not nec-
essarily rooted, but routed in a territorial spacetime which can only be mapped, but not traced.
Conclusion
Aural Stein (1900 RT.II, 367), while paying great attention to the “Topographia sacra” of the
Kashmir Valley in his translation of Kalhanā’s Rājataran·gin·ī, presciently notes that
there is scarcely a village which has not its sacred spring or grove for the Hindu and
its Ziārat for the Mohammadan. Established as the latter shrines almost invariably are,
by the side of the Hindu places of worship and often with the very stones taken from
them, they plainly attest the abiding nature of local worship in Kaśmīr.
Notwithstanding the suggestive “syncretic” undertone of the “abiding nature of local worship,”
Stein was nevertheless witnessing and recording, at the same time, the apotheosis of a great
transformation of the early cultural geography of Kashmir in its turn toward Islamization. The
mass conversion of the pre-Islamic Kashmir “happened,” and by the late nineteenth century
was “complete” in its historical rupture from the ancient pre-Islamic past which had so vividly
echoed in Kalhanā’s reverent statement: “In that [land, Kashmir] which Keśava (Vişņu) and Īśāna
(Śiva) adorn as Cakrabhŗt and Vijayeśa, as well as in other, there is not a space as large as a grain
of sesamum without a Tīrtha” (Stein RT 1900, I.38).
Rather than engaging in a sterile debate of the nature of this mass conversion – whether
“violent” or “syncretic,” or else “light” or “fundamental” – this study highlighted the value in
exploring the processes and the agents of Islamization. By analyzing the networks and practices
of the multiplicities of Islamization, this chapter demonstrated how Islamization networks of
Sūfi Orders, particularly the Kubrawīs, forged open, anti-genealogical affiliations and alliances
with other social, religious, and political formations through strategies of deterritorialization
and reterritorialization. Returning to the much-ignored intimate relations between Mongol
elite and Sufi Shaykhs, the antecedents to these intimate heterogeneous alliances existed in
the most proliferous formations, which Kubrawīs formed with the Mongol political elites in
thirteenth-century Eurasia, also the most turbulent period in the Islamic history. To recount
Hamid Algar’s (1982) piercing description, it was against the calamitous background of barbar-
ian invasion of Mongols from the east and Crusaders from the west that numerous channels of
development were established by Kubrawī Sufis
to produce one of the richest and most brilliant epochs in the history of Sufism, almost
as if all that had gone before constituted a preparation for what has been termed “a
fresh flowering or second youth” of Islam.
(Algar 1982: 1; Lings 1971: 11–12)
303
Rafiq A. Pirzada
No suppression or persecution, whatsoever, seemed to stop these supreme Sūfi masters, from
Najmal-Din Kubrā (b.1145/46), the founder of the Kubrawī order, and his various disciples to
a host of other Sūfis from the Kubrawī line, as well as other Sufi orders, to snipe at and dislo-
cate Mongol Yasa, the secret cultural-legal code by which Mongols lived (McChesney 1996,
2000), as “Shari‘a-consciousness” spilled over into Genghisid lifeworld and spread through it
like Zamzam water seeping through grasslands of Inner Asian Steppe. Soon after the execu-
tion of Najm al-Dīn Kubra during the Mongol conquest of Khwārzam in 1221, his disciple
Seyf al-Dīn Bākarzī (d. 1260) established a well-endowed khānqāh in Bukhāra, and it was here
that Berke Khān, the fifth ruler of the Golden Horde, came to accept Islam. Again after the
establishment of the khānqāh at Bahrābād in Khurāsāņ, by his father, the Kubrawī master Sa’d
al-Dīn Hamūya, Sadr al-Dīn Ebrāhīm presided over the conversion of the Ilkhanīd ruler Gāzān
Khān in 1295 (Algar 1982: 5). For a holistic understanding of Islamization in medieval Kash-
mir it is therefore important that alongside the Mongol sacking of the Abbasid Baghdad and
the persecution of many Muslim Shaykhs and Sūfī masters we also consider the close alliances
and intimate bonds between Mongol and Muslim religious-aristocratic circles which facilitated
Islamization movements into the Mongol Empire.
While we enrich the rather simplistic accounts ascribing Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadāni’ and his disci-
ples’ arrival in Kashmir to Timur’s expulsion of the Sayyids of Hamadān with the knowledge of
the intimate Kubrawī-Mongol alliances, we may also pay particular attention to the deep anxi-
eties that the “hydro-consciousness”13 of the Persianate-Islamicate Sufi orders of Islamization
caused within the Brahmanical elite of the pre-Islamic milieu of medieval Kashmir. For it were
these anxieties too that shaped the newly embraced Kashmiri Muslim subjectivity of the “con-
verted” Kashmiri masses of the medieval Kashmir into an Otherness that continues to haunt
their present. Two Sanskrit historians, Jonarāja and Śrīvara, under the patronage of Sultan Zayn
al-‘Ābidīn (r.1420–1470) and Sultan Muhammad Shāh (r.1484–1537), in their efforts to revive
Kalhanā’s historical project, struggled to accommodate Persianate-Islamicate ethos in Kalhanā’s
totalizing Sanskrit worldview, deeply imbricated in a Kashmiri Śaivite Brahmanical order.
Clearly identifying themselves as Brahmins (dvija), the works of both echo the elite interests of
Kalhana’s Rājataran·gin·ī, so that a concern with Śaivite hegemony lurks in “svadeśa-consciousness,”
which they try to re-articulate in an Islamicate court milieu. As expected, therefore, Jonarāja, in
a nostalgic return to the twelfth-century Kashmir, transports back to the fifteen-century milieu
of Kashmir Sultanate, the specter of the Ghūrid Muslim warrior of Jayanaka’s Pr· thvīrājavijaya
(Obrock 2015).
Thus, in spite of being accepted by Jonarāja as a comprehensible subjectivity in fifteenth-
century Kashmir, which carried with it a concomitant “land,” own “rites,” and a “belief,” the
Muslim could also become “the impeccable dangerous other,” an unpredictable determination –
“the enemy of the land, the cow, and refined speech; and the enemy with a weapon” ( Jonarāja,
quoted in Obrock 2015: 82–83). However, these constructions of Kashmiri Muslim Other-
ness must not divert our attention from the historical-social reality that mass conversion of the
indigenous medieval Kashmiri society happened, and that these masses in their adherence to
the new religion, connected with it, related to it, talked about it, and recounted the innumer-
able tales of their conversion in the most engaging, intimate ways through oral, literary and
ritual venues, from medieval era down to the present. Combining the hermeneutics of desire
and the phenomenology of supplication in their new religious practices the Persianate-Sufi eth-
ics offered its new Kashmiri adherents novel venues for a collective catharsis. As Śrīvara was
adapting Abdur Rah·mān Jāmī’s Persian narrative poem (mathnavī) the Yūsuf wa Zulaykhā into
Sanskrit Ślokakathā, the Kathākautuka, the latter’s Sufi supplications (munājāt) reverberated from
Kashmiri Muslim venues as the “secret cries” of catharsis in melodic chorus. Two of Jāmī’s
304
Medieval Kashmir
ecstatic supplications, both in Persian as well as Kashmiri renderings, became the daily collective
“private talk” (Arabic, najwā-kum) during the ritual prayers of Muslim devotees in khānqāhs,
mosques and ziārats across Kashmir:
Ya Ilāh al-Ālamīn Bāri Gunāh Āwardah Am

Bar Darat Aīņ Bār Bā Pusht-i Dūna Āwardah Am
(quoted in Sayyid-Kāmli undated, 36)
The nineteenth-century popular na‘atiya poet of Kashmiri language, Sayyid Sanāullāh Krīrī
(1813–1875) reverentially adapted the two most exquisite supplications, Imām Ali ibn Husayn
Zayn al-Ābidīn’s qasīda (ode), introduced by Sayyid ‘Ali Hamadānī (in Arabic), and Jāmī’s
munājāt (in Persian), into Kashmiri idiom, consciousness and melody. All three versions – Ara-
bic, Persian, and Kashmiri – are recited in Kashmiri mosques and khānqāhs with ecstatic fervor
as part of the pre-dawn supplication, Du‘ā-i Subah (S‘adī1979: 21; Sayyid-Kāmlī, undated, 333):
Imām Zayn al-Ābidīn’s Arabic qasīda:

In Nilta Yā Rī Hassabā Yăwman Ilāh h-Ărdil Haram
Balligh Salāmi Rawzatan Fī-han Nabīyyŭl Mohtaram
Jāmī’s Persian munājāt:
Nasīmā Jānib-e Bat‘hā Guzar Kun,
Zi Ahwālam Muhammad Rā Khabar Kun
Sanāullāh Krīrī’s Kashmiri:
Hā Wāve Wātakh Nā Totuyi, Yeti Dāf Trā:vīth Mustafā
Ahwāl Myēnī Tas Wanǣkh, Suy Hō Karyem Dādyen Dawā
The munājāt, nā‘at, mawlūd, and khatm-khawāni thus became the most intimate rituals of col-
lective supplications in which the narrative world of hermeneutic enunciation tied up with the
phenomenological world of collective supplications of the desirous masses. It was primarily at
these loud venues, from khānqāhs and mosques to village festivals and urs, that the adherents
of a new faith were shaped into a distinct community of Kashmiri Muslims, and from where
Persianate-Islamicate ethos seeped into and flowed through the Kashmiri soil.
Notes
1 Běhat is the name given by the medieval Persian hagiographers and historians to the Jhelum River.
2 Agrahåras in Kalhanā’s Rājataran·gin·ī, as noted by Stein, referred to “jāgirs, villages, or piece of land,
revenue of which was assigned to an individual, corporation or religious institution.” For example,
Kalhanā first described king Lava’s bestowing of the Agrahåras of Levāra and Kuruhāra to the commu-
nity of Brahmins in Livar village on the right bank of the Liddar, and Kular village respectively (RT I.
87–88).
3 It is a religious festival celebrated by Kashmiri Hindus to this day at the ancient tīrtha of Tulamul village,
close to the confluence of Jhelum and Sindhu rivers, 14 miles east of Srinagar.
4 See for example, Ishaq Khan (2005: X, 70) and Advaitavadini Kaul (2018: 15) who have noted a much
familiar practice of Hindu prayer among Kashmiri Hindus since early medieval times, of loudly chant-
ing Vedic/tantric hymns of praise to invoke gods while “standing with folded hands.”
5 The first known Muslim missionary to arrive in Kashmir with his 1000 followers, and on whose hands
Rinchana embraced Islam, was Sayyid Sharaf ud-din (a Sufi Shaykh of the Suharwardī order), popu-
larly known as Bulbul (nightingale) Shah.
305
Rafiq A. Pirzada
6 The fourteenth-century Kashmiri Śaivite ascetic Lal Děd openly protested in her vākhs against the
exploitative ritual practices of the Saivite Brahmanism, for its embedded caste-ridden social inequali-
ties, fetishized austerity, and animal sacrifice. For example, in one of her subversive utterances, “she
confronts the priest with the brutal exaction demanded by his idolatry” (Lal Ded 2011: 15):
“It covers your shame, keeps you from shivering,
Grass and water are all the food it asks.
Who taught you, priest-man,
to feed this breathing thing to your thing of stone?”
7 Bhedagiri (Gan·gobheda), Nandikshetra (Haramukh) in the north, ShāradaPīth, Neel Kunda (Verināga),
·
and Amarnāth are some of the prominent tīrthas bordering Kashmir valley.
8 Kalhanā refers to the personified Kashmir in the Rājataran·gin·ī, RT I, 31 (Stein 1900).
9 Nirguna Tsèh Royate Ditam [Parmeśvarā, manifest thyself unto me]
Chus Beh Choney Nāv Sarān [Thy name alone do I contemplate]
Băgěh, Kailāś Kha¯rith · Nitam [Lord, lift me to the Mount Kailash]
Chuham Tsy·etas Tseh’Meharbān [I’m conscious of thy kindness] (Kāmil 1965, 62; translation mine)
10 During one of his mother’s many visits to the cave, as she untiringly tried to persuade Nund Rishī to
return home, the latter argued his conviction to his mother in a shruk (Azād 1962: 164):
Ăn·d Văn Nyērith Tăpt Sarhā, [Far off in the forests would I meditate]
Ăhar Karhā Vopăl Hākas te Hăn·dī [Survive on wild teasels and dandelions]
11 The term refers to the “ ‘great yogis’ or ‘sages’ who after intense meditation (tapas) realized the supreme
truth and eternal knowledge, which they composed into hymns” (Scharfe 2002: 13–15).
12 The term refers to an exalted group of holy people in traditional Islamic piety who included, “Surely
God’s friends (awliyā Allāhi): no fear shall be on them, neither shall they sorrow,” (Qur’an, 5:54).
13 I reformulate here Annette Balkema’s (2001: 55) notion of “hydro-consciousness” to describe the
eccentricities within Persianate-Islamicate Sufi orders of breaking off, branching out, seeping in, spill-
ing over, and spreading through plough-lines of flight, which at the same time imparted to their flow
and practices the power of penetration and organization.
Works Cited
Ahmad, Aziz. 1979. “Conversions to Islam in the Valley of Kashmir.” Central Asiatic Journal 23(1/2): 3–18.
Algar, Hamid. 1982. “Introduction.” In The Path of God’s Bondsmen from Origin to Return: A Sufi Com-
pendium by NajmaI-Din Rāzī, known as Dāya (Translation from Persian), 1–22. Delmar, NY: Caravan
Books.
Andersen, Angela. 2012. “The Buddhist Monastery, Art and Teachings as a Factor in the Development of
North Indian and Central Asian Islamic Practice and Architecture.” Illumine 11(1): 83–99.
Anonymous. 1991/1614. Bahāristān-i Shāhī. Translated by Kashi Nath Pandit. Calcutta: Firma KLM Pri-
vate Limited.
Azād, Abdul Ahad. 1962. Kashmīrī Zabān Aūr Shāyrī, Jald Dūm. Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Academy
of Art, Culture and Languages.
Azad, Arezou. 2017. “The Beginnings of Islam in Afghanistan: Conquest, Acculturation, and Islamiza-
tion. “In Afghanistan’s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban, edited by Nile Green, 41–55. Oakland:
Balkema, Annette. 2001. “Five Scoops.” In Exploding Aesthetics, edited by Annette W. Balkema and Henk
Slager, 48–58. Amsterdam: Brill.
Baloch, N. A. and Abdul Qayoom Rafiqi. 1998. “The Regions of Sind, Baluchistan, Multan and Kash-
mir.” In History of Civilizations of Central Asia, Vol. IV, Part 1, edited by M. S. Asimov and C. E. Bos-
worth, 297–322. Paris, France: UNESCO.
Basheer, Bashar. 2014. “Hazrat Bābā Bām Dīn Saebun Manzūm Tarz-i Izhār: Manzar te Pas-i Manzar.”
Alamdār: A Journal of Kashmiri Society and Culture 8: 9–53.
Behl, Aditya. 2012. Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bulliet, Richard. 1994. Islam: The View from the Edges. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chakravarti, Uma. 1993. “Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class
and State.” Economic and Political Weekly (April): 579–585.
Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 1987. Dialogues. New York: Columbia University Press.
306
Medieval Kashmir
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2013/1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi.
London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Diddamari, Khwāja Muhammad Āzam. 1746/2019. Wāq-i‘āti Kashmir. Translated by Shams ud-Dīn
Ahmad. Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Research Centre.
Digby, Simon. 1970. “Encounters with Jogīs in Indian Sūfī Hagiography.” In Seminar on Aspects of Religion
in South Asia. London: School of Oriental and African Studies. University of London.
Eaton, Richard. 2000. Essays on Islam and Indian History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Ernst, Carl W. 2005. “Situating Sufism and Yoga.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series: 15–43.
Green, Nile. 2014. Terrains of Exchange: Religious Economies of Global Islam. London: C. Hurst & Co. (Pub-
lishers) Ltd.
Kāmil, Muhammad Amīn. 1965. Nūrnāmeh: Hazrat Nūruddin Wali Sind Shrŭki. Srinagar: Jammu and Kash-
mir Academy of Arts, Culture and Languages.
Kaul, Advaitavadini. 2018. “Tradition of Sun Worship in Kashmir.” Proceedings of the 17th World Sanskrit
Conference, July 9–13, Section 6: Tantra Studies. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada,
1–20.
Kaul, Shonalika. 2018. The Making of Early Kashmir: Landscape and Identity in the Rājataran·gin·ī. New Delhi:
Khan, Ishaq Mohammad. 2005. Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of Muslim Rishis. Srinagar: Gulshan
Books.
Khuihami, Ghulam Hasan Pir. 1954. Tarīkh-i Hassan. Translated by P. N. Pushp. Srinagar: Research &
Publ. Dpt., Jammu & Kashmir Government.
Lal Ded. 2011. I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded, translated by Ranjit Hoskote. New Delhi: Penguin.
Lings, Martin. 1971. “Introduction.” In Ebn ‘Arabī, Sufis of Andalusia: The Ruh Al-Quds’ and ‘Al-Durrat
al-Fakhirah, translated by R. W. J. Austin, 11–12. London: Allen and Unwin.
Madan, Triloki Nath. 1988. Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture. New Delhi:
Massumi, Brian. 2013/1987. “Translator’s Forewords: Pleasures of Philosophy.” In A Thousand Plateaus by
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, vii–xviii. Bloomsbury Academic.
McChesney, R. D. 1996. Central Asia: Foundations of Change. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press.
———. 2000. “Zamzam Water on a White Felt Carpet: Adapting Mongol Ways in Muslim Central Asia,
1550–1650.” In Religion, Customary Law, and Nomadic Technology, edited by M. Gervers and W. Schlepp,
63–80. Toronto: Joint Center for Pacific Asia Studies.
Obrock, Luther. 2015. “Translation and History: The Development of a Kashmiri Textual Tradition from
ca. 1000–1500.” PhD Thesis. Berkeley: University of California.
Pollock, Sheldon. 2001. “The Death of Sanskrit.” Comparative Studies in Society and History: International
Quarterly 43(2) (April): 392–426.
Rafiqi, Abdul Qayoom. 2003. Sufism in Kashmir: Fourteenth to Sixteenth Century. Revised edition. Srinagar:
Al-Rafiq Publishing House.
S‘adī, S‘ad Ud-din. 1979. Kulyāt-i Sanāullāh Krīrī. Srinagar: Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture
and Languages.
Sayyid-Kāmlī, Nuruddin. [undated]. NālaHāy Khasta Dilāņ. Srinagar: Ghulām Muhammad Nūr Moham-
mad Tājrān-i Kutub.
Scharfe, Hartmut. 2002. Handbook of Oriental Studies. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic.
Schimmel, Annemarie. 1980. Islam in the Indian Subcontinent. Leiden: Brill.
Sofi, Sartaj Ahmad. 2017. “Awrad-i-Fathiyyah – The Compendium of Tawhid.” Australian Journal of
Humanities and Islamic Studies Research 1(3): 51–66.
Stein, Aurel, ed. and trans. 1960 [1892, 1900]. Kalhana’s Rājataran·gin·ī: Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir.
2 vols. (RT). New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal.
Thum, Rian. 2014. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Wink André. 1991. Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World. Vol. II. Leiden and New York: Brill.
———. 2004. Indo-Islamic Society: 14th-15th Centuries. Leiden: Brill.
307
22
EXAMINING SACRED
NECROPOLITICS AS POPULAR
RESISTANCE IN INDIA-
CONTROLLED KASHMIR
Umer Jan
Introduction
The armed rebellion in India-controlled Kashmir has acquired deeply symbolic characteristics
in recent times. With the advent of digital media and, consequently, an information battles-
pace, images and representations have taken a critical, if not primal, role within the armed
resistance against India’s military occupation in Kashmir. During the past decade or so, while
Kashmir’s armed rebellion rages on with renewed vigor and, as usual, overwhelming popular
support, the extent of its military success remains debatable. The sheer magnitude of the Indian
state’s counterinsurgency operation in Kashmir makes pure military gains hard to come by
which, in turn, makes the armed rebellion more a battle of perceptions rather than exercise in
kinetic operations with hardcore military objectives. This, in no way, is meant to undermine or
question either the intensity of a particular military operation or the commitment of rebels that
fill the militant ranks in Kashmir. In fact, the practical effort that is needed to keep an armed
insurgency running, with meagre resources and under existential pressures from India’s bloated
counterinsurgency mechanisms, needs broader attention from a military-strategic standpoint.
Nevertheless, in the absence of regular military gains, the notion and objective of Shahadat or
martyrdom is central to the recruitment and functioning of the insurgency in Kashmir, all of
whose recruits are Muslim men from either India/Pakistan controlled Kashmir or mainland
Pakistan.
In this chapter, I first explore the modalities of Shahadat or martyrdom within the discourse
of Islam and other Abrahamic religions, in addition to explaining how Kashmiri rebels within
the mostly indigenous armed rebellion and the population in general have adopted this as a
paradigm of anti-India resistance. I do this in order to elucidate the continuity of insurgent
praxis and position Kashmiri reliance on martyrdom within a historical continuum, rather than
upholding it as an instance of exceptional, terroristic expression, as it is often presented within
the dominant discourse of the states. Expanding on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics
(2019), I contend how his thesis does not take into account the agency of subjects upon whom
this biopolitical sovereignty of death is enacted. Through this exposition, I establish how Kash-
miris, particularly armed rebels, have appropriated necropolitics and imbued it with religious
characteristics to resist the necropolitics of Indian state. By wresting away the sovereign right
308 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-27

Examining Sacred Necropolitics
of the allocation of death from the structures of India’s military occupation, Kashmir’s sacred
necropolitics has become a dominant mode of popular political resistance.
I introduce the term “sacred necropolitics” to refer to an entire field of collective resistance,
encompassing diverse performative acts, in India-controlled Kashmir. This collective resistance
is almost always directed toward the Indian state, which is derided by most of the Kashmiri
population as a foreign, occupying power. Kashmir’s sacred necropolitics, the source of which
is its insurgent people, appropriates the rituals associated with dying, death and afterlife to chal-
lenge India’s brutal military occupation of the region. As the Indian state continues to crack
down on all expressions of public protest in Kashmir, the people have found out a conduit for
collective action in, and around, death. This collective appropriation of death as popular politi-
cal resistance, by imbuing death with characteristics of the sacred, is what, in this chapter, I call
sacred necropolitics.
Armed Insurgency in Kashmir: A Context

The armed resistance against Indian rule in Kashmir intensified in the late 1980s and early
1990s. Having exhausted all other means to persuade the Indian state toward fulfilling Kash-
miris’ inherent, and internationally guaranteed, right to self-determination, Kashmiri people
embraced armed rebellion for ending the Indian rule by force. Kashmiri men began to travel to
the Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir, where the Pakistani state trained, armed, and funded
them. Simultaneously, Kashmiri women also began to play a central role in the functioning
of armed rebellion through acting as weapon couriers or, according to Inshah Malik (2019),
actively assisting in collective political mobilization. Broadly, the rebel groups enjoyed wide-
spread social popularity and support, regardless of their ideological affiliations, whether it be the
Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front ( JKLF) that espoused a Kashmiri nationalist cause or Hizb‑ul-
Mujahideen (Hizb) that remains in support of Kashmir’s merger with Pakistan. Paul Staniland
(2014: 72) notes that preexisting social ties – both “horizontal” and “vertical” – enabled the
rebel groups to create “wartime organizations” swiftly. The nature of these ties, Staniland pro-
poses, had an impact on the sustainability of these rebel groups in future. Under pressure from
India’s brutal counterinsurgency measures that included widespread human rights abuses against
rebels and civilian population as well as intra and inter-group rivalries, the JKLF declared a
unilateral ceasefire in 1994.
Consequently, the pro-Pakistan Hizb has since dominated the armed rebellion. Owing to its
strong horizontal social ties, as Staniland mentions, and deeply entrenched religious, social and
political grassroots networks as well as notable sponsorship by the Pakistani state, Hizb was able
to consolidate its position more effectively than other rebel factions. The group declared a uni-
lateral ceasefire in July 2000 but rescinded it later that year and, at present, remains engaged in
military hostilities against the Indian military forces. Other, relatively new, militant groups such
as Lashkar-e-Taiba (Lashkar) and Jaish-e-Muhammad ( Jaish) also remain active within the Kash-
miri insurgent movement. Both these groups recruit locally but are led from Pakistan and have
consistently organized high-profile attacks against military and civilian targets inside Kashmir
and India. Although Lashkar has maintained limited effectiveness within the Afghan theatre, it
is considered close to the Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) (Tankel 2010). Conversely,
Jaish’s relationship with the Pakistani security establishment has been much more complex and,
in some instances, antagonistic (Zahid 2019). Other than the central aim of ending India’s mili-
tary occupation over Kashmir, to varying extents, all of these groups are driven by the ideals
of militant Islam or, more specifically, Jihad, whose interpretation varies from establishing an
309
Umer Jan
Islamic state through violent struggle to personal spiritual reformation. The importance of Jihad
within the insurgency in Kashmir can be gauged from the speeches and writings of the leaders
and recruits of these groups as well as their charters, websites, and press releases. A central tenet
of this notion of Jihad is the embrace of martyrdom or Shahadat.
Indian State’s Necropolitics in Kashmir

Achille Mbembe, very rightfully, points out the ways in which necropower or necropolitics cre-
ates “death-worlds, that is, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations
are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead” (2019:
92). The Indian state’s exercise of territorial sovereignty in Kashmir through necropolitics con-
stitutes acts of systematic human rights abuses against the local population, who deeply resent
Indian rule, and militarized control of public spaces (Hassan 2018; Osuri 2018). Also, with the
modification of domicile and property rights, as India has now begun to accelerate the appro-
priation of land in Kashmir for both military use as well as initiating foreign settlement, India’s
relationship to Kashmir fits what Mbembe calls a splintering colonial occupation (2018: 79–81).
This colonial occupation, Mbembe writes, consists of
writing of new spatial relations (territorialisation) ultimately amounted to the pro-

duction of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing
property arrangements; the differential classification of people; resource extraction;
and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries.
(Ibid.: 79)
In India-controlled Kashmir, this splintering colonial occupation can be observed in multiple

forms. Mohamad Junaid, in his ethnographic exposition of how the initiation of Indian rule
redefined relations of Kashmiris with public spaces, writes that
Kashmir was continuously divided and re-divided into military sectors, operational
zones, and special police ranges. A totalizing counterinsurgency grid, underpinned by
a logic of “security” and “control,” was laid over the region which not only prevented
protests but also created elaborate restrictions on everyday life.
( Junaid 2020: 206)
Also, a system of virtual apartheid has been set up by the Indian state that grants privileges
of movement and access to public spaces to Indian military personnel, tourists, and religious/
nationalist pilgrims against the native population (Hassan 2019; Misgar 2019). Recently, in Feb-
ruary 2020, mineral mining rights have been entirely transferred to the non-indigenous com-
mercial groups (Observer News Service). This has been augmented by changes in the Control
of Building Operations Act, 1988, and the J&K Development Act, 1970, the laws that regulate
construction of buildings and other public infrastructure in India-controlled Kashmir ( Javaid
2020). According to the new regulations, the Indian state- at its volition- can now notify a
certain are as strategic to enable the Indian military to carry out unhindered construction within
it. Also, construction of hundreds of thousands of new housing units have been approved. Con-
sidering that Jammu and Kashmir (the official designation for India-controlled Kashmir) has
one of the lowest rates of homeless people in comparison to India’s other states (Singh, Koiri
and Shukla 2018), a sudden interest in house constructions by the Indian government has to
be viewed within the framework of ongoing settler colonialism and consequent demographic
310
engineering. This becomes especially stark considering that India’s decision to scrap the region’s
nominal political autonomy, and amendment in property rights, has often been compared to the
Israeli colonization of the West Bank (Bhasin 2020; Parker 2019; Beilin 2019; Osuri and Zia
2020; Mushtaq and Amin 2020).
Martyrdom in Abrahamic Faiths

Martyrdom has always had a distinctive position within the Abrahamic religions, of which Islam
is a part. In fact, according to Meir Hatina (2014: 19), the enactment of martyrdom was a con-
sistent feature within settled societies of the Mediterranean basin. Hatina writes,
The practice (within these areas) per se began with the coalescence of various ancient
philosophical streams, especially stoicism. The philosopher manifested the superiority
of wisdom over feeling, and his own superiority over a corrupt and corrupting world,
by putting an end to his life or assisting others to do so. Exemplars were philosophers
and holy men toward the end of the Roman Empire who chose this dramatic practice
as a symbol of opposition to unjust authority.
During Greek and Roman empires, the persecution of Jews enforced the role of martyrdom in
Jewish life and theology (ibid.: 20). This passive attitude of self-sacrifice was appropriated into
an active approach for territorial annexation by the Zionist movement, that demanded “sac-
rifice” for consolidation of national sovereignty. Taking this forward, it has been consistently
observed, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) operate within a theocratic framework of sacrifice
that “helps maintain the war spirit” within the organization (Levy 2012). Additionally, this
theocratization, Levy Writes, increases the potential “arsenal” of symbolic rewards within the
IDF while simultaneously decreasing a need for material rewards (ibid.: 24). It is imperative to
mention here that the Zionism, and IDF, do not singlehandedly encompass either the Jewish
theological doctrines or evolution of Jewish militancy and culture of martyrdom.
Conferring the category of martyrdom over Jewish victims of the First Crusade (1096 A.D.)
persists among religious and secular Jews, according to Jeremy Cohen (2004: 159). The mar-
tyrdom culture is also heavily evidenced in the literature pertaining to numerous instances of
collective and individual Jewish resistance during the Holocaust, including uprisings in the
Ghettos and concentration camps (Henry 2014; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
2000). Although Shira Lander (2003) suggests that multiple Jewish traditions problematize the
notion of martyrdom within Holocaust because of the fact that, during these atrocities, death,
in no way, was a matter of choice. Shira writes, “With the exception of some early post-Shoah
orthodox rabbinic responses to the Holocaust maintained today by ultra-orthodox groups, most
Jews find that the concept of martyrdom as divine judgment is blasphemous when applied to
the Shoah.”
Coming to the Christian tradition of martyrdom, it evidently began with the crucifixion
of Jesus that continues to be one of the foundational facets of Christian theology and belief.
Signifying a redemptive act in service of people, Christian theology maintains that Jesus was
crucified to atone for the humanity’s sins. While many Christian scholarly traditions present
the crucifixion as a passive act of sacrifice, the simple fact that it continues to resonate within
contemporary Christian culture makes it anything but unassertive. The representation of self-
sacrifice as passive rather than an act of active resistance needs to be challenged because, in
many ways, these acts mostly require tremendous initiative on the part of the actor, especially
when carried out for communal motivations. In the apostolic age, the veneration of martyrdom
311
Umer Jan
increased because of the significant addition in the number of martyrs (Ayoub 1987: 68). Ayoub
maintains that a rich and elaborate cult of martyrdom evolved within the early Christian cul-
ture so much so that when Polycarp (AD 69–155), a bishop who is now venerated as a saint
within multiple denominations, was immolated by the Romans, Christians had to be forcefully
prevented from gathering his remains for any future veneration. This culture continued with
renewed vigor during the Crusades. During the Middle Ages, those who were believed to have
been martyred in the cause of faith were held in renown by the Christians (Smith 2002: 189). In
his influential Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas (AD 1225–1274), one of the most magiste-
rial theologians within the Catholic church, elaborates on the question of martyrdom. Reply-
ing to various contemporary objections on the virtue of martyrdom, Aquinas presents it as an
act of “virtue,” “fortitude,” and “most perfect of human acts” (1981: 2292). Aquinas challenges
these objections by deploying sources from the Bible. In one of the replies to the exigency of
death in martyrdom, Aquinas writes that “the perfect notion of martyrdom requires that a man
suffer death for Christ’s sake” (ibid.). The presence of differing opinions also based on Biblical
sources, however, makes it clear that the notion of martyrdom remained contested within the
medieval Christian societies. According to Hatina, certain proponents within early Christian
theology argued that true martyrdom must result from the will of God, not of the man, and
therefore, belief and obedience in God’s will were also seen as a certain kind of martyrdom
(2014: 29). Although, visible acts of self-sacrifice – especially at public spaces in large urban
centers – elicited widespread popular discussion of Christian values, thereby aiding the cause
of the nascent Christian church (Bowersock 1995: 42). While Roman Catholicism developed
biographical documents on martyrs, “a martyrological lexicon,” the tombs of martyrs became a
focus of community rituals and were seen as public property and literature commemorating the
martyrs (acta martyrum) assumed huge popularity during Christianity’s formative years (Brown
1981: 10–11; Hatina 2014: 30). In a collected version of the acts of martyrs, Herbert Musurillo
(1972: xi) writes that study of Christian church is incomplete without the discussion of early
martyrs, thereby attesting the importance of the phenomenon of martyrdom within the religion
and its believers.
In the Islamic tradition, the origins of the notion of martyrdom can be traced to its foun-
dational text, the Quran. The concept of martyrdom in Quran is closely tied with the struggle
for the cause of the faith and the martyrs remain a deeply venerated category. Multiple verses
in the text attest to this, the oft repeated ones being from chapters Al-Baqarah and Al-Imran,
“But do not think of those that have been slain in God’s cause dead. Nay, they are alive! With
their Sustainer, have they, their sustenance” and “And say not of those who are slain in God’s
cause, ‘They are dead’: nay, they are alive, but you perceive it not.” Other verses that refer to
the status of martyrdom in the Quran also accord the martyrs with an exalted status as well as
a guarantee for a secure afterlife. The Arabic term for martyrdom which also appears in the
Quran, the Shahid, also, literally, refers to the act of witnessing. Etymologically, this is close to
the English, Greek and Syriac words of martyr, martus and sahda, respectively, that also, liter-
ally, mean witnessing. The idea of witnessing in the broader theme of martyrdom appears in the
Christian tradition, which could refer to anything from witnessing the crucifixion and resurrec-
tion of Christ to confession of faith to God (Ayoub 1987: 67).
Coming back to the Islamic traditions, the word Shahid is repeated more than 50 times in the
Quran and can hold diverse meanings, from someone who bears witness to the oneness of God
and prophethood of Muhammad, which is the foundational principle of the religion, to anyone
who dies in the “way of Allah” (cause of faith). The act and metaphor of witnessing, therefore,
holds a distinctive place within Abrahamic religions and, in many ways, signifies an ultimate
authenticity of the belief, especially when a person is willing to expend their life as a witness – a
312
martyr or a Shahid. According to Mahmoud M. Ayoub (1987), within some branches of Islamic
theology and jurisprudence, while legitimization of martyrdom is contingent upon advancing
the aims of the faith, holding secondary motives such as fighting for booty, a display of bravery
and in defense of wealth, family, or land does not dilute the status of martyrdom in any way until
faith is the primary motive. Quoting a prominent medieval scholar of the science of Hadith
(traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), Ayoub translates: “So long as the main purpose remains
that the word of God be uppermost (which is here defined as defending the cause of Islam),
it matters not what other reasons may exist as secondary causes” (al-Asqalani, in Ayoub 1987:
70). Although this interpretation is contested by other Islamic traditions, the hierarchal approval
of other motives within Islam represents a pragmatic departure from both Judaic and Christian
definitions of martyrdom. Nevertheless, the history of the formative years of Islam contains an
abundance of evidence wherein- during wars-Muslim military commanders often felt “frus-
trated by the presence, under their command, of heaven-seeking volunteers (muttawwiaa)” and
therefore had to rely more on the troops who displayed “greater prudence and . . . reluctance
to die” (Bonner 2006: 76).
The performative culture of martyrdom has also been a consistent feature within Muslim
societies. Apart from an extensive written and oral recollections in praise of martyrs who died
for the Muslim cause, when a Muslim is deemed to be a martyr, their family members and
acquaintances are discouraged from mourning their death. Rather, they must express gratitude
(ibid.). Moreover, in contrast to the dead Muslims who are washed and wrapped in a shroud
before burial, Muslim martyrs are displayed on an open casket in the attire that they wore while
dying and do not require the otherwise mandatory Ghusl (washing). This is because, according
to the Islamic tradition, they have been already purified of all sins by their selfless act in service
of the faith.
The burial spaces of martyrs are often separated from the regular graveyards and the former
spaces often hold reverential status within Muslim societies. Also, special rituals and occasions
are often associated with the remembrance of the martyrs’ sacrifice, especially those slain dur-
ing the formative years of Islam. This links back to the Quranic verses of the martyrs being not
dead. In a temporal sense, the continued rituals of remembrance around martyrdom do keep
them alive through performativity, and memory. Although, when it comes to the actual theo-
logical interpretations, there exists a vivid detail on how martyrs are alive under the protection
of God. According to one Hadees (word of Prophet Muhammad),
The souls of martyrs are alive in the bodies of green birds who have their nests in
chandeliers hanging from the Throne of the Almighty. They eat the fruits of Paradise
from wherever they wish, and they nestle among these chandeliers. Once their Lord
cast a glance at them and he said: Do you want anything? They said: What more could
we desire? We eat the fruit of Paradise from wherever we wish. Their Lord asked them
the same question three times. When they saw that they will continue to be asked,
they said: O’ Lord, we wish that you could return our souls to our bodies so that we
could be martyred in your way once again. When Allah saw that they had no needs,
he left them to enjoy.
(Elias 2012)
Martyrdom in India-Controlled Kashmir

As the popular resistance against India’s necropolitical occupation continue in Kashmir, the pop-
ular tradition of venerating the martyrs (Shahids) has been a consistent feature of anti-occupation
313
Umer Jan
politics. The martyrs, who sacrifice their lives in the fight against India’s military occupation,
and their families receive increased social recognition within the community, regardless of their
position in the socio-economic hierarchy. Martyrdom, especially in the past 30 years of armed
insurgency, has become a politically and socially loaded category, around which the perfor-
mance of anti-occupation politics and discourse convalesces.
When one participates in the funerals of armed rebels or civilians killed by Indian forces,
as I have done on multiple occasions across Kashmir, this veneration becomes really apparent.
Take the instance of the funeral of Ishfaq Ahmad Malik, who was killed by the Indian forces in
April 2018. In one of the pictures of his large funeral procession in Kashmir Valley’s Shupian
district, mourners can be seen touching Ishfaq’s shoes in admiration (Syed 2018). In Muslim
societies, touching the feet of a person is generally considered to be similar to idolatry – which
is strictly forbidden in Islam. Although, within some Islamic sects that also exist in Kashmir,
people touch the feet of someone who is believed to be excessively pious such as a peer (saint),
it is generally frowned upon. However, in case of armed rebels who are believed to have sac-
rificed their life in the cause of Islam and Kashmir’s Azaedi (freedom), mourners assemble in
massive numbers and try to get as near to the body as possible. This is followed by touching the
beard, feet, or other body parts of the martyr’s corpse and then, in an act of reverence, touching
one’s own body as if one is trying to expropriate piousness, and attain salvation. During these
funerals, the family members of the martyrs apply Henna on the hands and feet of the fallen
rebel, in addition to showering him with sweets and confectionaries. This is done in imitation
of the rituals that are generally carried out during elaborate marriage ceremonies in Kashmir.
The mixing of celebratory and mourning rituals happens under the belief that the martyr has
attained the highest level of spiritual salvation, Jannah (paradise), that can be accorded to a Mus-
lim. The participants in these funeral processions see the bodies of rebels as “assets” (Gettleman
2018) that bolster the struggle against Indian occupation, while the processions represent a
certain symbolic victory of recapturing public spaces from Indian military control.
The commemoration and veneration of martyrdom also has a spatial aspect in India-con-
trolled Kashmir. Martyrs are mostly buried in designated graveyards which, due to the brutal
intensity of Indian counterinsurgency operations since the late 1980s and 1990s, have cropped
up in almost every village and town. These martyrs’ graveyards or Shaheed Mordguzars, as they
are known in Kashmiri, are attached with insurgent symbolism while also serving as repositories
of insurgent memory. According to Mohamad Junaid (2018: 251), martyrs graveyards form a
vital element within Kashmir’s counternarratives against the attempted erasure of Indian state’s
history of violence in the region. The sense of permanence that these graveyards exhibit, as
Junaid writes, makes them an instrument of “spatial resistance” against military occupation in
Kashmir. Also, endurance of these sites of resistance has become crucial in the wake of intensi-
fication of India’s settler colonial designs in the region. In December 2020, on a sunny winter
afternoon, I visited a martyr’s graveyard in Machpuna village in Kashmir’s Pulwama district. The
martyrs’ graveyard, which has been created by appropriating land from the village’s common
graveyard, is separated from the latter by a chain fence and iron bars. It contains a single grave,
of Firdous Ahmad Mir, a rebel commander who was killed during a gunfight with the Indian
military in November 2018. Machpuna’s martyrs’ graveyard emanates a sense of symmetrical
neatness thereby heightening its permanent character, and its emptiness, except for one grave,
signifies Kashmiris’ morbid foreboding. It is as if the graveyard remains forever prepared to inter
more martyrs.
Since the Pakistani state watered down its support for armed rebellion in Kashmir by clos-
ing training camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir and India put up a three-tier surveillance
mechanism along the Line-of-Control, armed rebels in India-controlled Kashmir remain poorly
314
trained and equipped (Dixon 2003; Uppsala Conflict Data Program 2020; Ali 2019). While
they have occasionally been able to carry out high-profile military operations, like the 2019
Pulwama bomb attack that killed 40 Indian paramilitaries and brought India and Pakistan to
the brink of an all-out military conflict, the rebels in Kashmir heavily rely on performative
non-kinetic symbolism to amplify their cause and within this symbolism, relaying the intent
of sacred martyrdom becomes crucial. Take the instance of multiple videos and pictures that
the rebels upload over different social media websites, in the immediate aftermath of joining
the armed rebellion and subsequently. These pictures and videos mostly show the person, the
rebel, touting a gun and pointing the index finger of his right hand to the sky, latter signifying
the Shahada or witnessing the oneness of God which, as pointed out earlier, is etymologically
close to Shahid (martyr or witness) and Shahadat (act of martyrdom). In these videos or audio
clips, whose circulation through encrypted chat applications such as Telegram, WhatsApp and
Signal has almost mandated the creation of a digital culture of subversion, the rebel recruits
recurrently focus on two themes: first, the Zulm, oppression, that the Indian military occupa-
tion has unleashed in Kashmir in the form of extensive human rights abuses; and second, their
choice of taking up arms in an attempt to end this occupation by fighting in Khodai sinz watth,
the sacred path of God.
Moreover, in recent times, the armed rebels and their families have also recurrently recorded
what are known as last or final calls. In these phone calls, a rebel who is caught in a gunfight
with the Indian military and has no hope to escape alive calls back home for a final farewell.
These deeply personal and intense phone calls, which are recorded and then circulated within
social media channels, give a riveting insight into the dynamics of armed rebellion in Kashmir,
particularly throwing some light on the motivations that drive the rebels despite facing over-
whelming odds against India’s enormous counterinsurgency grid. In the calls, rebels emphasize
their proximate Shahadat (martyrdom) and urge the listeners to carry forward the mission, a
euphemism for armed struggle against the Indian occupation. Parents often ask their sons to
remain steadfast and discourage the young rebels from surrendering, which is seen as an act of
weakness or betrayal and can condemn the rebel to a lifetime of penal humiliation. Farewells
and promises of meeting in the afterlife with the extended family are also exchanged in these
calls, and the rebel is requested to pray for the salvation of everyone. Uzma Falak (2018) aptly
describes these phone calls as “artefacts of resistance” in which “textures of loss, stoicism, and
resistance are magnified in the quotidian details.”
Meanwhile, as the rebels are engaged in gunfights in a certain village or town, young women
and men from and around the place gather in protest, throwing rocks at Indian military and
paramilitaries in an attempt to rescue the rebels (Bhat 2017). These fearless acts often come at
a deadly or debilitating cost for the protestors. This entire matrix of resistance, which I term
sacred necropolitics, of elaborate funeral processions and correlated rituals, martyrs’ graveyards,
rescue attempts, final phone calls and digital propaganda associated with the rebel groups, is
bound by the common thread of sacred death or martyrdom. Also, the voluntary confrontation
with death cannot be simply termed as nihilistic but, as Hegel (1977: 19) says, forms an essential
element of subject-formation.
Conclusions
As Indian state’s necropolitics becomes more forceful and insidious in Kashmir, what I am
interested in, and what I have tried to indicate in this chapter, is how Kashmiris have appro-
priated death to resist this necropower. Appropriating death through the performative rituals
and discourse of the sacred – Islamic religion in the case of Kashmir – enables the people, who
315
Umer Jan
live under the regime of necropower and colonial occupation, to forcefully resist their erasure
and colonization as well as, according to Dar (2018), the state’s power to dictate the terms of
their life. This sacred necropolitics of resistance, however, as I have laid out, is not exclusive to
Kashmir but is/has formed an important strategy of the assertion of agency by the people at
the receiving end of systematic necropower – from early Christian converts to Jews during the
Holocaust, and elsewhere. Continuing from that, the notion of Shahadat (martyrdom) forms a
central feature of popular resistance against the Indian military occupation in India-controlled
Kashmir not just in a finite, ontological sense but also as a dispersed political field entailing
the popular. Thus, following Foucault’s (1978) assertion of how power defines the contours of
resistance, I imagine necropolitics as not just an expression of structural power that disseminates
social “death” but as a form of resistance, appropriated by the agents – in this case the insurgent
Kashmiris – on whom necropolitics is being enacted.
Works Cited
Ali, Basharat. 2019. “What Message Does the Latest India-Pakistan Crisis Send to Militants in Kashmir.”
March 14. https://southasianvoices.org/what-message-does-the-latest-india-pakistan-crisis-send-to-
militants-in-kashmir/.
Aquinas, Thomas. 1981. Summa Theologica. Wetminster, MD: Christian Classics.
Ayoub, Mahmoud M. 1987. “Martyrdom in Christianity and Islam.” In Religious Resurgence: Contemporary
Cases in Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, edited by Richard T. Antoun and Mary Elaine Hegland. New
York: Syracuse University Press.
Beilin, Yossi. 2019. “West Bank Status Quo Shares Eerie Similarities with Kashmir.” August 12. www.
al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/08/israel-palestinians-india-simla-agreement-un-resolution-
242.html.
Bhasin, Anuradha. 2020. “Bringing the Israeli Model to Kashmir.” June 20. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/
opinion/bringing-israeli-model-kashmir-200614173626456.html.
Bhat, Adnan. 2017. “Why Kashmir’s Millennials Are Risking Their Lives to Save Militants.” June 15.
https://thewire.in/politics/kashmir-youth-militant-encounter.
Bonner, Micheal. 2006. Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bowersock, G. W. 1995. Martyrdom and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Peter. 1981. The Cult of the Saints. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Cohen, Jeremy. 2004. Sanctifying the Name of God Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Dar, Rouf. 2018. “In Choosing Death, Kashmiri Youth Defy India’s Power over their Life.” June 5.
https://thepolisproject.com/in-choosing-death-kashmiri-youth-defy-indias-power-over-their-life/#.
XxQ8lC2ZNQI.
Dixon, Robyn. 2003. “Camp David Trip Is a Milestone for Musharraf.” June 24. www.latimes.com/
archives/la-xpm-2003-jun-24-fg-uspak24-story.html.
Elias, Abu Amina. 2012. “Hadith on Shuhada: Those Killed in the Way of Allah Alive in Paradise.” Sep-
tember 21. https://abuaminaelias.com/dailyhadithonline/2012/09/21/martyrs-alive-in-jannah/.
Falak, Uzma. 2018. “The Last Call: Audio Postcards from Kashmir.” July 6. http://www.warscapes.com/
poetry/last-call-audio-postcards-kashmir.
Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley.
New York: Pantheon Books.
Gettleman, Jeffrey. 2018. “In Kashmir, Blood and Grief in an Intimate War: ‘These Bodies Are Our
Assets.” ’ August 1. www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/world/asia/kashmir-war-india-pakistan.html.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Hassan, Aakash. 2019. “ ‘Held Hostage for Pilgrim Convoy’: Curbs on Civilian Traffic During Amarnath
Yatra Irk Kashmir Locals.” July 4. www.news18.com/news/india/held-hostage-for-pilgrim-convoy-
curbs-on-civilian-traffic-during-amarnath-yatra-irk-kashmir-locals-2215941.html.
Hassan, Khalid Wasim. 2018. “From Administration to Occupation: The Re-production and Subversion
of Public Spaces in Kashmir.” Third World Thematics 3(2): 212–227.
316
Hatina, Meir. 2014. Martyrdom in Modern Islam Piety, Power, and Politics. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Henry, Patrick. 2014. Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press.
Javaid, Azaan. 2020. “J&K Govt Changes Laws to Aid Construction of Armed Forces Facilities Outside
Cantonments.” The Print, July 17. https://theprint.in/india/jk-govt-changes-laws-to-aid-construction-
of-armed-forces-facilities-outside-cantonments/463195/.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2018. “Epitaphs as Counterhistories: Martyrdom, Commemoration and the Work of
Graveyards in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan,
Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2020. “Counter-Maps of the Ordinary: Occupation, Subjectivity, and Walking Under Curfew in
Kashmir.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power: 302–320.
Lander, Shira. 2003. “Martyrdom in Jewish Traditions.” Boston College, December 11. www.bc.edu/
content/dam/files/research_sites/cjl/texts/cjrelations/resources/articles/Lander_martyrdom/index.
html#_ftnref74.
Levy, Yagil. 2012. Is the IDF Becoming Theocratic? Raanana: Research Institute for Policy, Political Economy
and Society, The Open University of Israel.
Malik, Inshah. 2019. Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: A Case of Kashmir. Switzerland: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press.
Misgar, Umar Lateef. 2019. “Highway Ban in Kashmir Sparks Outrage, Comparisons with Israel.” The
Wire, April 8. https://thewire.in/rights/kashmir-highway-ban.
Mushtaq, Samreen and Mudasir Amin. 2020. “India’s Settler Colonialism in Kashmir is Not Starting Now,
Eliminating the Natives is a Process Long Underway.” The Polis Project, June 27. www.thepolisproject.
com/indias-settler-colonialism-in-kashmir-is-not-starting-now-eliminating-the-natives-is-a-process-
long-underway/#.XxRFhC2ZNQJ.
Musurillo, Herbert. 1972. The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Observer News Service. 2020. “In A First, Outside Companies Earn 100 Percent Mining Rights In
Kashmir.” February 10. https://kashmirobserver.net/2020/02/10/in-a-first-outside-companies-earn-
100-percent-mining-rights-in-kashmir/.
Osuri, Goldie. 2018. “Sovereignty, Vulnerability, and a Gendered Resistance in Indian-Occupied Kash-
mir.” Third World Thematics: 228–243.
Osuri, Goldie and Ather Zia. 2020. “Kashmir and Palestine: Archives of Coloniality and Solidarity.” Identi-
ties: Global Studies in Culture and Power 27(3): 249–266.
Parker, Claire. 2019. “Kashmir’s New Status Could Bring Demographic Change, Drawing Comparisons
to West Bank.” August 8. https://t.co/GDcJPx3oPA?.
Singh, Nishikant, Priyanka Koiri, and Sudheer Kumar Shukla. 2018. “Signposting Invisibles: A Study of
the Homeless Population in India.” Chinese Sociological Dialogue 3(3): 1–18.
Smith, Caroline. 2002. “Martyrdom and Crusading in the Thirteenth Century: Remembering the Dead
of Louis IX’s Crusades.” Al-Masāq 15(2): 189–196.
Staniland, Paul. 2014. Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Syed, Vikar. 2018. “Another Season of Mourning has Begun in India-administered Kashmir.” TRT World,
April 4. www.trtworld.com/magazine/another-season-of-mourning-has-begun-in-india-adminis-
tered-kashmir-16466.
Tankel, Stephen. 2010. Lashkar-e-Taiba in Perspective: An Evolving Threat. Washington, DC: New America
Foundation.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 2000. “Resistance During the Holocaust.” United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum, May 16. www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20000831-resistance-bklt.pdf.
Uppsala Conflict Data Program. 2020. “India: Kashmir.” July 12. https://ucdp.uu.se/additionalinfo/
364/1#2002.
Zahid, Farhan. 2019. “Profile of Jaish-e-Muhammad and Leader Masood Azhar.” Counter Terrorist Trends
and Analyses: 1–5.
317
SECTION V
Armed Conflict, Global War,

Transnational Solidarities
Haley Duschinski
The chapters in this section view Kashmiri occupation and resistance through a global frame-
work, analyzing the ways in which European colonialism and its legacies have shaped the legal
and political structures of India’s settler colonial project in Kashmir as well as the possibilities
and limitations of solidarity movements among Indian liberal left networks and Kashmiri dias-
pora mobilizations. The first two chapters critically examine India’s legal and political project
in Kashmir across time, highlighting how the legacies of European colonialism have shaped the
complexities of sovereignty and self-determination in the (post)colonial global order. Drawing
on Third World Approaches to International Law, Haley Duschinski and Mona Bhan demon-
strate how international legal frameworks of sovereignty and self-determination have paradoxi-
cally perpetuated India’s settler colonial domination of Kashmir across time. The long-standing
power imbalances in international law have produced a contemporary dynamic through which
formerly colonized nations may “assert their sovereign status through vociferous proclamations
of territorial integrity and violent enactments of military might,” with devastating consequences
for stateless peoples aspiring for sovereignty and self-determination. This condition of what
Duschinski and Bhan call “third world imperialism” presents a “sovereignty trap” for indigenous
peoples who are subjected to settler colonial violence and domination by (post)colonial powers.
The authors trace the simultaneous expansion and foreclosure of possibilities of Kashmiri self-
determination across a series of historical juridical and quasi-juridical moments. In their conclu-
sion, they consider the role of scholars, lawyers, and activists in pursuing alternative approaches
to international law “from the bottom up.”
Tracing India’s occupation of Kashmir across this (post)colonial period, Goldie Osuri con-
siders how India’s violent domination of Kashmir has endured, reminding us that the current
right-wing Hindu nationalist terror campaign in Kashmir is not an exception but rather a par-
ticularly virulent version of the necropolitical norm. Osuri problematizes the idea of India as a
postcolonial nation by examining the ways in which India’s domination of Kashmir has played
out through distinctive and overlapping formations of colonialism, imperialism, occupation,
and settler colonialism – from the instantiation of particular forms of sovereignty with establish-
ment of the Princely State of Jammu & Kashmir in 1846 through the most recent expansion of
India’s settler colonial project with the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A on August 5, 2019.
Through attention to the political, material, and epistemological legacies of European colo-
nialism, Osuri develops a conceptual framework that reads classical definitions of colonialism
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-28
Haley Duschinski
through the lens of poststructuralist conceptualizations of sovereignty, biopolitics, and necropo-

litics. Her analysis demonstrates that “every Indian government has engaged in colonial tactics
in Kashmir.” It also shows how these shifting and overlapping conditions of domination and
dispossession have shaped formations of rebellion and resistance. Taken together, the chapters
by Duschinski and Bhan and Osuri establish the ways in which India’s militarized settler colo-
nial occupation of Kashmir has become entrenched through India’s effective domestication of
the international dispute in a global legal order that centers state sovereignty over its “internal
affairs” even as it opens (and closes) space for indigenous freedom struggles.
The next three chapters analyze the possibilities and limitations of transnational solidarity.
Ather Zia and Nitasha Kaul both examine the long-standing limitations of solidarity of the
Indian left, including liberal, feminist, and progressive activist movements, for and with Kash-
mir. In “Sanctioned Ignorance Impedes Solidarity for Indian Occupied Kashmir,” Zia analyzes
the Indian left’s refusal to acknowledge the realities of India’s neocolonial military occupa-
tion and settler colonial project in Kashmir through the lens of Spivak’s notion of “sanctioned
ignorance,” a constitutive disavowal that operates through a “dismissing of a particular context
as being irrelevant.” Attending to the institutional and ideological ways in which these silences
have been produced and maintained across time, she considers hegemonic national narratives
that have been imposed on Kashmir’s history – for example, the trope of Kashmir as an atoot ang,
or inseparable part, of India, and the overly simplistic notion of Kashmiriyat as religious syncre-
tism between Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits. Zia argues that these long-standing practices of
erasure through negation and appropriation of Kashmiri resistance across time have substantively
reproduced “the barbarity of India’s own policies and military occupation right from 1947.” As
Kaul points out, newly emergent Indian solidarity networks among university students, Dalit
laborers, farmers, and religious minorities – which have strengthened since 2014 in response
to the Modi regime’s policies of violence and terror – have not fully incorporated support for
the Kashmiri right to self-determination. She critiques Indian feminists as well as Indian Mus-
lims for silence on India’s military settler occupation of Kashmir during the Jawaharlal Nehru
University sedition row of 2016 and the Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019–2020 as well as the
“constitutional coup” of August 5, 2019.
Both Zia and Kaul consider the ways in which the Indian left’s silence and erasure of Kash-
miri resistance have further limited possibilities of transnational feminist, decolonial, and anti-
occupation solidarities with Kashmir – and they offer visions on how such global solidarities
might be achieved. Kaul emphasizes that Kashmiri women are speaking, but their voices are not
being heard. She writes that “critical feminist consciousness, if it is to be in any way meaning-
ful, intersectional, and decolonial, must engage simultaneously with multiply situated sites of
oppressive nation-statist power to draw insights from and extend solidarities to the oppressed.”
Zia calls for a movement from sanctioned ignorance to dissident knowledge. “Full contextual
understanding,” she writes, “is a stepping-stone toward forging solidarity. This process requires
an amalgam of situated knowledge, genuine acknowledgment, recognition of one’s own posi-
tionality; all focused to alter the status quo and push a just resolution.”
Hafsa Kanjwal’s chapter examines the complexities of US-based, Indian-occupied Kashmiri
Muslim diaspora mobilizations that have emerged in the aftermath of the abrogation of Arti-
cles 370 and 35(a) on August 5, 2019. “How,” she asks, “does a small, less-resourced diaspora
facilitate and amplify a longstanding resistance movement against an occupying power with
significant material resources and global economic and political influence?” Her chapter draws
on oral history interviews to tell the history of Kashmiri American diaspora advocacy efforts,
especially since the 1990s, and then focuses on the post-2019 present, examining how the
diaspora’s location in the context of US empire shapes possibilities of “(mis)representation of
320
Armed Conflict, Global War, Transnational Solidarities
the situation in Kashmir, people’s aspirations, and the nuances of the sustained political strug-
gle.” Carefully considering charged contestations over the boundaries of belonging in Kashmiri
political communities, she emphasizes the need for Kashmiri Americans to pursue “serious and
sustained engagement with questions of privilege, positionality, and representation.” For exam-
ple, she ethnographically analyzes how contestations over US flag waving at pro-Kashmir rallies
in major US cities since 2019 have revealed political and generational divides within the dias-
pora community over race, class, and respectability in the context of US imperialism. In closing,
she asks how the Kashmiri American diaspora might “pursue a model of transnational solidarity
activism” that “refuse(s) an articulation in relation to competing identities, authenticities, or
victimhood, while also maintaining cognizance of different forms of privilege and positionality.”
321
23
THIRD WORLD IMPERIALISM
AND KASHMIR’S
SOVEREIGNTY TRAP
Introduction
Kashmir – which, along with Palestine, is the longest unresolved agenda item of the United
Nations (UN) Security Council – was established as an international dispute between two
newly sovereign (post)colonial nation-states at the onset of the era of decolonization in the years
immediately following the Second World War and the creation of the UN. This chapter exam-
ines how the question of Kashmir’s sovereignty has been shaped in and through international
law since that time. We consider this question through the lens of Third World Approaches to
International Law (TWAIL) scholarship, which foregrounds the multifaceted ways in which
imperialism has shaped the formation and development of international law as a “predatory
system that legitimizes, reproduces, and sustains the plunder and subordination of the Third
World by the West” (Mutua 2000: 31). The TWAIL approach exposes the limits of foundational
international law concepts of sovereignty, statehood, and self-determination (see, for example,
Anghie et al. 2003; Chimni 2006). As Anghie (2014: 130) argues,
many of the most important doctrines of international law, including most promi-
nently sovereignty doctrine, were created through the colonial encounter; and they
were created in such a manner as to render the non-European entity inferior, and
therefore a suitable object of conquest and dispossession.
Across the postwar period, capitalism, imperialism, and racialized dynamics of difference have
continued to shape hierarchies of domination and exclusion in international law (Anghie 2004;
Saito 2020).
These global power dynamics have led some formerly colonized nations to assert their sov-
ereign status through vociferous proclamations of territorial integrity and violent enactments
of military might, with implications for indigenous and stateless peoples within their borders
whose struggles for self-determination are framed as immoral and illegitimate (Anghie 2014:
140) – a dynamic that we call “third world imperialism.” The tendencies of formerly colonized
nations to themselves become settler colonies by disempowering, dispossessing, and disenfran-
chising indigenous peoples call into question easy distinctions between “colonial” and “postco-
lonial” designations (Reynolds 2017: 18–19; see also Osuri 2017; Reynolds and Xaiver 2016).
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-29 323

Third world imperialism produces a trap for stateless peoples aspiring for sovereignty and self-
determination in a system that is built to exclude them.
This chapter marks an initial effort to interrogate the ways in which the international legal
order has trapped Kashmiri people’s aspirations and movements across time. Since the inception
of the Kashmir dispute, Kashmiris have been silenced, suppressed, and denied opportunities
to determine their own political futures. As the political fate of the princely state of Jammu &
Kashmir remained undecided in 1947, both India and Pakistan claimed the region in its entirety,
and Kashmir’s Hindu Dogra maharaja, an unpopular and unrepresentative head of state, signed
an instrument of accession with India. The maharaja signed it under specific political condi-
tions, and India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru treated it as a provisional accession to remain
in effect until Kashmiris could decide their political fate through a plebiscite. But across decades,
successive Indian administrations have failed to fulfill this promise, promoting a dominant narra-
tive that the accession was full and final, and that it secured Kashmir as an integral part of India.
Although shaped in the legal and political context of the post–World War II global order,
the Kashmiri movement for self-determination must be understood as an extension of the
long-standing Kashmiri freedom struggle that predates Kashmir’s classification as an inter-
national dispute in 1948 (Taseer 1973). In popular historical imagination, Kashmir’s forced
annexation has spanned centuries of rule by outsiders, starting with the Mughals in AD 1589
and continuing through periods of Afghan, Sikh, and Dogra rulers. The Kashmiri labor rebel-
lion against the unjust practices of the Dogra kings in the 1930s constituted a key historic
event that informed long-standing practices of resistance and rebellion in the region. Despite
the long history of the freedom movement, Kashmir’s recognized status as an internation-
ally disputed territory has shaped how Kashmiris have deployed legally legible concepts of
self-determination, statehood, and sovereignty to demand their political rights since 1947.
The movement for Kashmiri self-determination has encompassed demands for merger with
Pakistan as well as independence for a sovereign state that includes territories currently admin-
istered by India and Pakistan. The movement coheres around several fundamental recognitions:
recognition of the provisionality of the princely state’s accession to India; recognition of the
illegal nature of India’s occupation and annexation of Kashmiri territory; recognition of the
impossibility of resolving the Kashmir dispute within the ambit of the Indian constitution;
recognition of the primacy of Kashmiri voices in any efforts to resolve the political dispute;
and recognition of the legally and politically binding nature of the plebiscite plan written into
the UN Security Council resolutions. These principles are reflected in various articulations of
the freedom struggle over time. For instance, Kashmiri resistance leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani
consistently articulated his vision for self-determination by centering Kashmiris as the princi-
pal party in the trilateral dispute while also expressing strong political affinity for Pakistan on
the basis of religiosity and ideology.
International law paradigms of sovereignty and self-determination produce a complicated
paradox for stateless peoples who are subjected to settler colonial occupation and domina-
tion by (post)colonial powers. On the one hand, international law provides globally recog-
nized frameworks for channeling the emancipatory and liberatory aspirations of oppressed and
occupied peoples, such that their movements are recognized and deemed legitimate by liberal
actors in international legal communities. On the other hand, such aspirations, once codified
as movements for self-determination, may be blocked from realization by (post)colonial sov-
ereign states that are themselves maneuvering for power within the global international order.
Western observers may identify such movements as “intractable conflicts” that defy solutions.
Conceptions of self-determination often conflict with norms of state territorial integrity since
international legal regimes fail to think beyond principles of territorial integrity and principles
324
Third World Imperialism
of non-interference (Westcott 2020: 129). “When the people in question occupy a territory
that is contested between two sovereign states, as is the case in Kashmir,” international legal
institutions “defer to the norm of state sovereignty” instead of championing people’s right of
self-determination (ibid.: 127, 134). This chapter outlines how these paradoxes of international
law have both defined and limited Kashmir’s freedom struggle.
We examine how Kashmir’s forced annexation to India since 1947 has proceeded through
legal, political and economic interventions across time. We consider a series of historical
moments that demonstrate the codification and solidification of the Kashmiri freedom struggle
in accordance with international legal concepts, categories, and norms. We explore how the
work of international law has both expanded and foreclosed possibilities of self-determination,
perpetuating violence and injustice in the process. In the conclusion, we briefly reflect on
what it might mean to center Kashmir in the pursuit of alternative approaches to international
law, and the role of human rights activists, legal practitioners, and scholars in that process. As
Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh (2019) writes, the long-standing Kashmiri struggle for freedom and
justice “is a provocation to unsettle the amnesias and alibis of empire, and truly address questions
of international law from below.” This chapter is a preliminary exploration of how liberation
struggles, once caught up in the sovereignty trap, must negotiate claims for self-determination
through the international legal order differently – in other words, how they might seek freedom
and justice, not through the enduring mechanisms provided by the system that has been built
to exclude them, but rather through historically produced and context-specific emancipatory
pathways forged through the work of “international law from below.”
The Accession
The United Nations established its role as a critically important institutional actor in the Kash-
mir dispute in the months and years following decolonization and partition on the subconti-
nent, when the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir
following the princely state’s provisional accession to India on October 26, 1947. India formally
referred the Kashmir dispute to the UN Security Council on January 1, 1948, following the
escalation of hostilities between both countries in Kashmir. India’s initial complaint to the UN
claimed that the invasion of Kashmir had involved the participation of Pakistani nationals, and
that Pakistan had actively assisted the invaders; it called on the Security Council to prevent Paki-
stani nationals from participating in the invasion and rendering assistance to the invaders (Eco-
nomic & Political Weekly 1965). Two weeks later, Pakistan responded with a counter-complaint
claiming that India had obtained the accession “by fraud and violence” and that
large scale massacre and looting and atrocities of the Muslims of Jammu & Kashmir
State have been perpetrated by the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian
Union and by the non-Muslims subjects of the Maharaja and of the Indian Union.
Because these initial complaints were lodged under Article 35 of the UN charter, the Security
Council from the outset based its deliberations on Chapter VI dealing with Peaceful Settlement
of Disputes, which limits the Council to recommendations short of determining the existence
of an act of aggression and implementing sanctions (Korbel 1953: 500). Rather than addressing
this fundamental legal conflict between the two nations, the Security Council from the outset
approached intervention through the lens of political expediency and mediation rather than
legal interpretation and adjudication. This approach played an important role in shaping the
nature of UN interventions moving forward.
325
As outlined in these initial and subsequent submissions, the international dispute over Kash-
mir was, and continues to be, founded on a fundamental legal conflict between the two nations
over the validity of the J&K maharaja’s provisional accession to India. India’s position was that
the maharaja legally executed the Instrument of Accession on October 26, 1947; that Pakistani
nationals participated in the tribal invasion of Kashmir; that Pakistan aided the tribal invasion;
that these actions constituted acts of aggression against India; and that therefore Pakistan had no
right to engage in any discussion or negotiation about a plebiscite to determine the future of
the region – which India was committed to holding. Pakistan’s position was that the maharaja’s
accession was illegally executed; that any tribal uprising constituted not an invasion but rather
a response to India’s “intensified campaign of persecution and oppression” against Kashmiri
Muslims; and that a plebiscite could only be held “when peaceful conditions have been restored
under a responsible, representative, and impartial administration.” As Korbel pointed out in his
article published just six years after the initial complaints, the Security Council moved forward
without examining the legal validity of the accession, approaching the International Court of
Justice for an advisory opinion on juridical issues, or invoking any provisions of Chapter VII of
the Charter dealing with acts of aggression (Korbel 1953: 507; see also Brecher 1953: 205–207).
Legal experts at the time examined the question of the legal validity of the execution of
the Instrument of Accession. British Foreign Office Legal Advisor Gerald Fitzmaurice issued a
legal opinion in 1947 questioning the validity of Kashmir’s accession to India, and the US State
Department Legal Advisor agreed with this opinion, holding that the
execution of an Instrument of Accession by the Maharajah in October 1947, could

not finally accomplish the accession of Kashmir to either Dominion, in view of the
circumstances prevailing at that time; the question of the future of Kashmir remained
to be settled in some orderly fashion under relatively stable conditions; this question is
an important element in the dispute; and, in proceedings before the Security Council,
neither party is entitled to assert that rights were finally determined by the Maharajah’s
execution of an instrument of Accession.
(quoted in Noorani 2002; see also Lone 2018: 208)
These findings resonated with Pakistan’s position before the UN Security Council. But the
Council sidestepped these fundamental legal questions and instead adopted the role of a media-
tor by issuing Resolutions 38 and 39 in January 1948 that accepted the legality of the Instru-
ment of Accession at face value and sought to secure agreement from both parties for a path
forward through a plebiscite process. In this way, Kashmir came under the ambit of UN juris-
diction through a paradox, as a stateless entity without legal recourse to challenge India’s claims
of accession through international statutes and institutions.
UN Security Council Resolutions

Kashmir’s future was very much unresolved at this moment of decolonization, war, and upheaval
on the subcontinent. Jammu & Kashmir was one of approximately 140 “fully empowered”
princely states that “enjoyed full legislative and jurisdictional powers despite having accepted the
Paramountcy of the British crown” (Lamb 1991: 4). With India’s independence from the Brit-
ish and the lapse of British Paramountcy, all the princely states, including those that were fully
empowered as well as those with more pronounced British control, were, as Lamb argues, for
“all intents and purposes independent” (ibid.: 5). And in principle, independence remained an
option for more than 500 princely states that had enjoyed internal autonomy under the British
326
(for a detailed historical account of these negotiations, see Menon 1956). In the case of the
princely state of Jammu & Kashmir, it was clear to many British and Indian officials, including
Lord Mountbatten, that the state might choose to remain independent after partition, although
the prospect of an independent Kashmir did not align with British or Indian political interests
(Lamb 1991: 107, 110). Key Indian officials recognized and even acknowledged the possibility
of Kashmiri independence at this time. On January 15, 1948, Gopalswami Ayyangar, India’s
representative to the UN Security Council, stated in his speech before the Security Council
during their deliberations on Kashmir that “on the 15th of August, when the Indian Independ-
ence Act came into force, Jammu and Kashmir, like other States, become free to decide whether
she would accede to the one or other of the two Dominions, or remain independent” (UN
Security Council 1948: 13).
In accepting the accession [the Government of India] refused to take advantage of the
immediate peril in which the State found itself and informed the Ruler that the acces-
sion should finally be settled by plebiscite as soon as peace had been restored. . . . On
the question of accession, the Government of India has always enunciated the policy
that in all cases of dispute the people of the State concerned should make the decision.
(ibid.: 20)
He continued:
The question of the future status of Kashmir vis-à-vis her neighbours and the world at
large, and a further question, namely, whether she should withdraw from her accession
to India, and either accede to Pakistan or remain independent, with a right to claim
admission as a Member of the United Nations – all this we have recognized to be a
matter for unfettered decision by the people of Kashmir, after normal life is restored
to them.
(ibid.: 29)
Even though the instrument of accession did not include a clear reference to ascertain the will
of the people, Mountbatten’s personal letter to the Maharaja, which is “an agreement relating
to the accession which was made between the parties in connection with the conclusion of the
Accession Agreement,” outlines unequivocally the primacy accorded to people’s will in deciding
Kashmir’s political fate (Howley 1991: 95). In his letter, Mountbatten states that “it is my gov-
ernment’s wish that as soon as law and order have been restored in Kashmir and her soil cleared
of the invader, the question of the state’s accession should be settled by a reference to the peo-
ple” (ibid.). As Howley further argues, it was clear that the provisionality of the accession and
the stated commitment to ascertain the will of the people by multiple Indian politicians includ-
ing Jawaharlal Nehru “gave rise to the whole issue of a Kashmir plebiscite,” which “carried with
it the possibility that the people might opt for independence or union with Pakistan” (ibid.).
The UN resolutions also reflected this commitment to people’s will by requiring a plebiscite
to ascertain the political fate of Kashmir. Starting in the midst of the war with Resolution 47
on April 21, 1948, the Security Council issued a series of resolutions outlining the conditions
for a plebiscite to resolve the divergent claims on Kashmir. Resolution 47 stated that “India and
Pakistan should do their utmost to bring about a cessation of all fighting” in Kashmir and with-
draw their armed forces to a point of minimum strength “to create proper conditions for a free
and impartial plebiscite to decide whether the State of Jammu and Kashmir is to accede to India
or Pakistan.” In an effort to address concerns that a plebiscite outcome might be influenced in
327
India’s favor by Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah, who had been appointed during the war on
March 5, 1948 as prime minister of the J&K Administration, and by the presence of Indian
troops including those supposedly meant to maintain law and order during the plebiscite, Reso-
lution 47 also called for the UN Secretary General to appoint a Plebiscite Administrator, and for
India to follow certain measures to ensure the impartiality and freedom of the plebiscite. Shortly
after, the UN dispatched the United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan (UNCIP),
established in Resolution 39 on January 20, 1948, to investigate and mediate the dispute and
oversee the implementation of Resolution 47.
These resolutions not only acknowledged the inalienable right of the people to self-deter-
mination but also recognized their stakes in any decision-making process regarding the future of
Jammu and Kashmir. UN Security Council Resolution 47 was clearly intended to foreground
the principle of self-determination. However, its language limits the terms of the plebiscite to
India and Pakistan and fails to include independence as a potential option for Kashmiris. In
his analysis of UN involvement in Kashmir, Westcott (2020) argues that the UN’s interven-
tions from the very beginning prioritized the norm of state sovereignty over the principle of
Kashmiri self-determination. Given the ongoing war, the UN’s “concerns about international
peace” assumed center stage as it focused on “brokering a truce between India and Pakistan”
rather than establishing “the groundwork for a plebiscite” (ibid.: 133–134). Westcott further
traces the UN’s prioritization of state sovereignty through the UNCIP’s failure to meaning-
fully engage with local political representatives, other than a single brief meeting with Sheikh
Abdullah from September 1 to 9, 1948, and through its approach to the conflict as a territorial
dispute rather than a nationalist political movement with its own history, meaning, and context
(ibid.: 134). Sheikh Abdullah had envisioned Kashmir as an independent nation in his 1944
Naya Kashmir proposal, and he advocated strongly for Kashmiri independence in meetings with
foreign dignitaries around this time (Lamb 1991: 189). “In choosing to recognise India and
Pakistan as the only parties to the dispute,” Westcott (2020: 135) writes, “UNCIP was defer-
ring to the norm of state sovereignty rather than [engaging] in a genuine effort to advance the
principle of self-determination.”
The UN resolutions erased Kashmir’s sovereignty and privileged India and Pakistan’s com-
peting claims over the region. This erasure demonstrates the systematic silencing of Kashmiri
voices across time. And yet the UN resolutions are a key part of people’s “political consciousness
and cultural memory” since these acknowledge and “endorse their existence as a people” and
affirm their right of self-determination ( Junaid 2016). For Kashmiris, the UN resolutions – spe-
cifically, Part III of the UNCIP Resolution on August 13, 1948 stating that “The Government
of India and the Government of Pakistan reaffirm their wish that the future status of the State
of Jammu and Kashmir shall be determined in accordance with the will of the people,” and UN
Security Council Resolution 91 stating that the “the final disposition of the State of Jammu and
Kashmir will be made in accordance with the will of the people” – are fundamental to Kashmiri
aspirations for an alternative political future in which there will be determined through a UN-
pledged free, fair, and impartial plebiscite.
After reviewing the situation across several trips to the subcontinent in 1948–1949, UNCIP
adopted a three-part resolution on August 13, 1948, that included proposals for a ceasefire
order and truce agreement and reaffirmed the desire for a plebiscite. Both countries accepted
this resolution. UNCIP then sent its final recommendations for a detailed plebiscite process to
India and Pakistan in December 1948. Both India and Pakistan accepted the UNCIP propos-
als, which were subsequently adopted in a UNCIP resolution on January 5, 1949, that stated
“the question of the accession of the State of Jammu and Kashmir to India or Pakistan will be
decided through the democratic method of free and impartial plebiscite.” In alignment with UN
328
Security Council’s Resolution 47, UNCIP’s proposed plebiscite process included the appoint-
ment by the UN Secretary General of a Plebiscite Administrator with sweeping powers. This
major UNCIP resolution was accepted by both countries but never implemented. During the
period of its existence from 1948–1950, UNCIP negotiated an end to the first India-Pakistan
war by securing agreement on the terms of a plebiscite, arranging a ceasefire that came into
effect on January 1, 1949, and supervising the signing of the Karachi Agreement on July 27,
1949, that demarcated the ceasefire line, to be monitored by UN military observers. After the
termination of UNCIP through UN Security Council Resolution 80 on March 14, 1950, the
Security Council passed Resolution 91 on March 30, 1951, establishing the United Nations
Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to observe and report ceasefire
violations. UNMOGIP continues its mission to monitor, investigate, and report complaints of
ceasefire violations through 44 installations stationed in the region overseeing the LOC.
With Resolution 80, the UN Security Council appointed Sir Owen Dixon, a prominent
Australian jurist and member of the High Court of Justice, to assume the responsibilities of
UNCIP as the UN Representative for India and Pakistan. During his six months in the posi-
tion, Dixon sought to secure agreements from both prime ministers Liaquat Ali Khan and
Jawaharlal Nehru for Kashmir’s partition with limited plebiscite, or plebiscite in selected areas.
Dixon’s proposal assigned Ladakh to India and the Northern Areas and Azad Kashmir to Paki-
stan, split Jammu between the two countries, and called for a plebiscite in the Kashmir Valley.
The Dixon plan for “partition plus plebiscite” ultimately fell apart over the question of whether
or not a free and fair plebiscite could be held under Sheikh Abdullah’s repressive administration,
or whether there would need to be coalition government, a neutral third-party administration,
or an executive body constituted of United Nations representatives – proposals that seemed to
Nehru to entail the displacement of Abdullah’s administration (see Korbel 1954a: 170–174).
Nehru rejected these suggestions that Sheikh Abdullah’s government would be held “in com-
mission,” or in abeyance, while the plebiscite was held (Noorani 2002, 2017a). Dixon left office
on August 23, 1950. On the day that he issued his report to the UN, Dixon described his
attempt to secure Nehru’s agreement in The Statesman:
In the end, I became convinced that India’s agreement would never be obtained to
demilitarization in any such form, or to provisions governing the period of the plebi-
scite of any such character, as would in my opinion permit the plebiscite being con-
ducted in conditions sufficiently guarding against intimidation and other forms of
influence and abuse by which the freedom and fairness of the plebiscite might be
imperiled.
(quoted in Korbel 1954a: 172)
The UN continued to exercise direct engagement through Security Council-sponsored media-

tion efforts throughout the 1950s.
The Judicial Domestication of the Kashmir Dispute

Throughout the 1950s, India’s political rhetoric on Kashmir became increasingly rigid as Kash-
mir’s accession was no longer seen as a provisional arrangement that required ratification by the
people of the state. Despite the UN resolutions and broader mediation efforts, India proceeded
to domesticate the international dispute over time through the application of executive as well as
judicial power that constitutionally consolidated Indian jurisdiction over the portion of the for-
mer princely state temporarily under its administrative control (Duschinski and Ghosh 2017).
329
This constitutional consolidation began with the constitutional drafting processes that took
place in India (1946–1949) and in the State of J&K (1951–1956). Because of the provisional
nature of J&K’s accession to India pending a UN-monitored plebiscite, J&K was the only state
in the Indian federation to form a constituent assembly to draft a distinct and separate constitu-
tion. The J&K constituent assembly elections took place in September–October 1951, and the
J&K constitution was adopted on November 17, 1956 (for discussion of how these develop-
ments played out at the UN, see Brecher 1953; Qadri 2019). In his speech to the J&K con-
stituent assembly on November 5, 1951, Sheikh Abdullah called it the “repository” of Jammu
and Kashmir’s “sovereign authority,” an institution that, he proclaimed, would safeguard “the
democratic rights of all the citizens of the State.” And yet, legal historians have argued that the
formation of the J&K constituent assembly was India’s attempt to legalize Kashmir’s provisional
and contested accession to India though a rigged constituent assembly election (Noorani 2011).
Only National Conference candidates were allowed to contest the elections. Those whose
perspectives on Kashmir’s accession with India diverged from the Indian point of view were
prevented from contesting, and their nomination papers were stolen (Lone 2020: 7).
The Indian position was that the constituent assembly elections were free and impartial, thus
reflecting the will of the people. Kashmiris could therefore no longer exercise their right of self-
determination (Mumtaz 2012). The UN Security Council, however, expressed unequivocally
its stance on the formation of the J&K constituent assembly in Resolution 91, which stated
that the “resolution adopted by the All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference” to convene
a constituent assembly “for the purposes of determining the future shape and affiliations of the
state of Jammu and Kashmir” would violate the fundamental principles outlined in Security
Council Resolutions 49, 51, and 80 and UNCIP Resolutions from 1948 and 1949 that outline
that the
final disposition of the State of Jammu and Kashmir will be made in accordance with
the will of the people expressed through the free and democratic of a free and an
impartial plebiscite conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.
To allay the fears of the Security Council, India’s Security Council representative, Benegal
Rau, assured the UN on March 29, 1951, that “nothing would be done to prejudice the settle-
ment on the future accession of Kashmir” (quoted in Chaudhri 1954: 82). He stated that
some members of the Council appear to fear that in the process the Kashmir Constitu-
ent Assembly might express its opinion on the question of accession. The Constituent
Assembly cannot be physically prevented from expressing its opinion on this question
if it chooses. But the opinion will not bind my Government or prejudice the position
of this Council.
(ibid.)
Despite Rau’s public proclamations that “the Constituent Assembly is not intended to prejudice
the issues before the Security Council, or come in in its way” (quoted in Hasan 1956: 27), India
now holds the constituent assembly’s ratification of the accession in 1956 and its declaration
that Kashmir was an integral part of India as proof of Kashmir’s legitimate incorporation into
the Indian Union.
Coming into effect on January 26, 1950, the Indian constitution included Article 370 in Part
XXI titled “Temporary, Transitional and Special Provisions” to legally inscribe the special con-
stitutional relationship between India and J&K, founded on Kashmir’s sovereign status. Article
330
370 was designed to temporarily manage the constitutional relationship between J&K and India
until the political will of the people could be established and a final settlement could be reached
through the state’s own constitutional drafting process. It contained provisions that limited the
jurisdiction of the Indian constitution over J&K except in areas outlined in the Instrument of
Accession. Article 370 clearly established that the J&K constituent assembly had the popular
democratic authority to determine the nature of J&K’s constitutional relationship to India mov-
ing forward, and it afforded power to the state assembly to abrogate Article 370 altogether, in
which case the Indian constitution in its entirety would apply to the state.
As the J&K constitutional drafting process got underway, J&K prime minister Sheikh Abdul-
lah and Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru negotiated specific points of the constitutional
relationship, on issues such as the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and the application of
the chapter of the Indian constitution on fundamental rights, through the Delhi Agreement
in 1952. In August 1953, Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed as J&K prime minister, accused of
conspiracy against the state, and imprisoned for 11 years in what was known as the Kashmir
Conspiracy Case, until all charges were dropped in 1964. He was replaced as prime minister
by Indian loyalist Ghulam Mohammad Bakshi, who “had a two-fold job of proving loyalty to
New Delhi by not questioning the integration of Jammu and Kashmir into India and gaining
the approval of the Kashmiris by proving to be their true leader” (Hassan 2009: 8). In Febru-
ary 1954, the purged J&K constituent assembly ratified the accession of J&K State to the Union
of India, contradicting the resolutions of the UN Security Council (Korbel 1954b: 291–292.
India gradually eroded the special status of J&K through a series of presidential orders that
extended India’s central power to the sovereign J&K state. The Constitution (Application to
Jammu and Kashmir) Order, 1950 established a framework for the division of powers between
J&K and the central government, while the Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir)
Order, 1954, which superseded the previous order, implemented the stipulations of the Delhi
Agreement and extended various aspects of India’s constitution to J&K, with the approval of the
J&K constituent assembly then in session. It defines “Permanent Residents” as individuals who
were already state subjects on May 14, 1954, or had lived there for at least ten years on that date
with a legally acquired property (see Duschinski and Ghosh 2017; Jagota 1960).
This process of constitutional consolidation was legally managed and sanctioned by the
Supreme Court of India across time. In an important initial ruling Prem Nath Koul vs. State of
Jammu and Kashmir (1959), the Supreme Court recognized the J&K constituent assembly as the
final authority on the constitutional relationship between J&K and India and the provisional
nature of Article 370. However, the court disregarded this precedent in all subsequent decisions,
notably Sampat Prakash vs. State of Jammu and Kashmir (1968), Puranlal Lakhanpal v. President of
India (1961), Mohammad Maqbool Damnoo vs. State of Jammu and Kashmir (1972), and, more
recently, State Bank of India v. Santosh Gupta (2016).
Starting in the 1950s, the Indian Supreme Court actively eroded the special status of J&K
and undermined possibilities for sovereignty and self-determination in Kashmir through deeply
political juridical interpretation and application that constitute special treatment of J&K under
the law. Instead of imposing checks and balances on Indian illegalities in Kashmir, the Supreme
Court has emboldened the state through judicial decision making to deny Kashmiri political
and human rights and to consolidate Kashmiri territory without upholding rule of law and
justice paradigms. The Supreme Court has routinely violated its commitments to fair trial and
due process for Kashmiris, while championing these same rights for people and communities
in India. This has played out through the application of different standards for J&K in cases
involving the death penalty, illegal detention, regulation of state-sponsored militias, and right
to life, among others. The Supreme Court has failed to work “as an institution of legal redress”
331
and has brazenly “violated the neutrality of law and justice frameworks” by working in concert
with India’s majoritarian will ( JKCCS, personal communication). Given this context, Kashmiri
lawyers and civil society groups have repeatedly emphasized that recourse to the Indian judicial
system is futile for an internationally recognized dispute such as Kashmir, as it fails to provide
an “appropriate forum” for legal redress. As international law expert Parvez Imroz has stated,
the judicial battles have and will expose the contradictions of the state, which says we
are a democracy with a robust judiciary but acts as a totalitarian entity. Once you have
exposed the state and its judicial mechanisms, you get the moral and legal right to
reach out to the international community and ask for international humanitarian aid.
(quoted in Rather 2017)
As Imroz suggests, such legal maneuvers demonstrate the ways in which India has pursued the
project of third world imperialism across time by effectively denying Kashmir’s sovereignty
through domestic law.
The Indus Water Treaty

India and Pakistan’s struggles over Kashmir were not limited to its territory alone but also
included their prolonged dispute over Kashmir’s water resources (Bhan 2014, 2021; Dar 2011;
Wirsing 2008). After a series of water conflicts between India and Pakistan in 1948, the World
Bank intervened in 1960 to broker a treaty between the two countries. The partitioning of
India in 1947 had divided the waters of the Indus River system between the two nation-states,
leading to a series of legal disputes, triggered by India’s refusal to release waters from East Punjab
into Pakistan. India and Pakistan’s divergent conceptions of sovereignty over water, with the
former based on “proprietary rights” while the latter based on the principle of prior use, shaped
historic differences between the two rival nation-states and continue to drive their competing
claims over the waters of the Indus River Basin (Haines 2016: 44, 49).
The Indus Water Treaty (IWT) was a bilateral transboundary water-sharing agreement
signed by the prime ministers of India and Pakistan, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ayub
Khan, on September 19, 1960. The treaty divides the six main tributaries of the Indus River
between India and Pakistan, granting India rights over the eastern rivers of the Indus River
Basin (Ravi, Sutlej, and Beas) while allocating to Pakistan the western rivers of the Indus (Indus,
Jhelum, and Chenab).
Although a stated objective of the agreement was to ensure optimal utilization of the riv-
ers in the Indus basin, the treaty remains silent on Kashmir’s politically contentious status and
ignores the Kashmiri right to self-determination over their land and water resources (Bhan
2018; Nazakat and Nengroo 2012; Lone 2020). The erasure of Kashmiri sovereignty through
an internationally mediated bilateral treaty has resulted in legal and financial consequences for
Kashmiris who are unable to harness the waters of the Indus River Basin for local consumption
and remain marginal to ongoing disputes over the river waters between India and Pakistan.
A 2016 Right to Information application revealed that India’s National Hydroelectric Power
Corporation (NHPC) has earned 3 million USD in the last 14 years from electricity sales,
while Jammu and Kashmir alone bought 115,636 million units of power from the NHPC
between 2001 and 2016 in order to fulfill its domestic energy requirements (Nayak 2016; see
also Parvaiz 2016).
The original terms of the IWT, and hence the original application of international law,
secured the rights of India and Pakistan, two sovereign nation-states, over the waters of the
332
Indus River Basin, while negating the rights of Kashmiris as stateless people. The imperial lega-
cies of international law, and specifically the IWT, consider sovereignty as a fundamental basis
for allocating rights over transboundary river waters, thereby disregarding Kashmiri rights over
their rivers, as well as their everyday access and ownership over resources. International law
scholar Fozia Lone (2020) builds a legal case for why the IWT undermines the Kashmiri right
to self-determination by invoking several international legal statutes that the IWT summarily
ignores. She claims that the lack of provisions in the treaty that explicitly protect Kashmir’s
water rights is
in conflict with the principles of nemo dat quod non habet (no one gives what he doesn’t
have) and Article 31 of the VCLT (Vienna Conventions on the Law of Treaties),
which indicates that a treaty must take into account ‘any relevant rules of international
law applicable in the relations between the parties.’
(ibid.: 213)
The IWT also violates Article 1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cul-
tural Rights, which declares the right to self-determination for all people, securing their rights
over their natural wealth and resources (ibid.). No occupying power has the rights to usurp
natural resources of an occupied territory according to the law of occupation, but the IWT
violates international law through legal provisions that ignore Kashmiris as stakeholders and
cement India and Pakistan’s sole ownership over the waters of the Indus River Basin. The Indus
Water Treaty is yet another illustration of how international law has upheld the principle of
sovereignty in relation to resource use thereby undermining people’s access to and control over
key natural resources.
The Shimla Agreement, UNMOGIP, and International Civil Society

In the 1960s and 1970s, UN intervention in Kashmir waned as India actively sought to block
UN influence amidst the backdrop of global cold war politics. After the UN Security Coun-
cil secured the ceasefire line at the end of the second India-Pakistan war of 1965, the Soviet
Union, an Indian ally, stepped in to broker the Tashkent Peace Agreement that ended the war.
After passing 23 resolutions on Kashmir from 1948 to 1971, the Security Council passed its last
resolution on Kashmir following the third India-Pakistan war in 1971, with the Soviet Union
blocking any further resolutions. Following this war, the Simla Agreement between India and
Pakistan in 1972 facilitated the withdrawal of troops and the exchange of prisoners of war while
establishing the bilateral nature of the dispute.
The Simla Agreement states that
pending the final settlement of any of the problems between the two countries, nei-
ther side shall unilaterally alter the situation and both shall prevent the organization,
assistance or encouragement of any acts detrimental to the maintenance of peaceful
and harmonious relations.
It continues:
Both Governments agree that their respective Heads will meet again at a mutu-
ally convenient time in the future and that, in the meanwhile, the representatives of
the two sides will meet to discuss further the modalities and arrangements for the
333
establishment of durable peace and normalization of relations, including the questions

of repatriation of prisoners of war and civilian internees, a final settlement of Jammu
and Kashmir and the resumption of diplomatic relations.
Writing in 1989, Balraj Madhok, a prominent Hindu nationalist political activist, scholar, and
parliamentarian from Jammu, commented on the Simla Agreement:
The words “a final settlement of Jammu and Kashmir” are very significant. By insisting
upon the inclusion of these words in the treaty, Bhutto made Indira Gandhi commit
herself and her country to three things: that there is a dispute about Jammu and Kash-
mir, that Pakistan is a party to this dispute, that a final settlement of this dispute has yet
to be arrived at. . . . By signing the agreement India explicitly accepted that there was
a dispute and that Pakistan was a party to this dispute.
Madhok’s interpretation of the Simla Agreement clearly affirms that it was not intended to
sidestep the lingering question of Kashmir’s “final settlement,” and that it acknowledged the
internationally disputed status of the state. Since the signing, India has consistently maintained
that the Simla Agreement supersedes all prior UN resolutions on Kashmir – although the
Agreement itself does not state that it intends to override them – and that the dispute must be
resolved bilaterally between India and Pakistan. Pakistan maintains that this argument has no
legal basis, that the UN Security Council resolutions continue to be legally binding, and that
the UN has a responsibility to play a proactive role in resolving the dispute. Prior to 1972, the
Chief Military Observer of UNMOGIP “played an important role as mediator and ‘adjudica-
tor’ between both countries’ high commands in many disputes that could not be settled locally”
(Shucksmith and White 2015: 138). Since the Simla Agreement, Pakistan has continued to
submit complaints about ceasefire violations to UNMOGIP, while India has ceased filing com-
plaints and has restricted activities of UN Observers on the Indian-controlled side of the Line
of Control (Shucksmith and White 2015: 138). India maintains that UMMOGIP’s mandate has
lapsed, when in fact it has not (Noorani 2009).
The Security Council has issued no new resolutions on Kashmir or the India-Pakistan situ-
ation since 1971, despite the rise of the armed struggle in 1989, the Kargil War in 1999, the
escalation of troops on both sides of the LoC following the attack on the Indian Parliament
in Delhi in 2001, and India’s unilateral elimination of J&K’s special constitutional status in
2019. In October 2001, the UNMOGIP Chief Military Observer Major General Hermann
Loidolt publicly stated that “all of us are aware of the situation in Kashmir and the games both
parties (India and Pakistan) are playing with this tormented country” (Telegraph 2001). The
Indian External Affairs Minister denounced the statement and threatened action against the
UN observer.
In the 1990s, international civil society organizations including Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, and others offered significant attempts at intervention, prompting
harsh condemnation from India. For example, a mission of the International Commission
of Jurists (ICJ), a Geneva-based NGO with UN consultative status comprised of eminent
jurists, visited both sides of the LOC in 1993 and issued a report two years later examining
human rights within the larger context of the question of the right to self-determination
(International Commission of Jurists 1995). The report concludes that “the people of the
State of Jammu and Kashmir had a right, at the time of partition, to decide whether to accede
to India or Pakistan,” and that “the right of self determination . . . has neither been exercised
334
nor abandoned, and thus remains exercisable today.” The government of India rejected the ICJ
report, writing that the report
comes through as a document of patent and pronounced bias, lacking in objectivity,

historical perspective and accuracy, and one where the preconceived conclusion is
sought to be established through contrived and artificial reasoning and sometimes by
apparently simplistic naivety.
(International Commission of Jurists 1995: Appendix)
Despite the silence from the UN Security Council (based in New York) over the past sev-
eral decades, UN human rights bodies and mechanisms (based in Geneva) have taken note and
expressed concerns about issues relating to human rights, militarization, and impunity in J&K.
The human rights situation in Kashmir has rapidly and drastically deteriorated following the
rise to power in India of Narendra Modi and his Hindu supremacist political apparatus in 2014,
prompting increased attention and condemnation from a wide variety of UN special procedures
mandates – through press statements, public reports, and private communications to India – as
well as the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. In June 2018,
UN High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein released a ground-breaking report on human
rights violations since 2016 in Kashmir (OHCHR 2018). It was the first time that the lead-
ing UN entity on human rights had issued such a report. The report calls for both India and
Pakistan to cease human rights violations and “fully respect the right of self-determination of
the people of Kashmir as protected under international law.” It also calls for the Human Rights
Council to pass a resolution to establish a UN-sponsored Commission of Inquiry into allega-
tions of human rights in Kashmir. The OHCHR issued a follow-up report in June 2019. High
Commissioner Zeid and his successor, Michelle Bachelet, have consistently expressed concern
about the human rights situation in Indian-controlled Kashmir in their public statements and
opening statements at the meetings of the Human Rights Council.
The Abrogation and Beyond

Since 2019, Narendra Modi’s Hindu supremacist government has fulfilled promises to its right-
wing nationalist base by unilaterally orchestrating sweeping constitutional changes to eliminate
Kashmir’s special status – actions that constitute illegal annexation under international law. On
August 5, 2019, the government of India revoked important constitutional provisions – Article
370 granting partial autonomy to the State of Jammu and Kashmir, and Article 35A granting
permanent residency rights to Kashmiris – and announced the creation of two separate federally
administered Union Territories, through a series of convoluted legal and political maneuvers
that “[transformed] the occupation, characterized by the de jure (in law) ‘temporary’ suspen-
sion of Kashmiri sovereignty, into a permanent and irreversible annexation of its territory in
law and fact” (Ghosh 2019). Even though Article 370 had been hollowed out over the years
through presidential orders that had extended India’s constitution to the state (Noorani 2011),
the constitutional article had provided Kashmiris a semblance of “constitutional security under
which they manage[d] their limited autonomy and religious liberty” (Farooq and Javaid 2020:
5). In the absence of a plebiscite, Article 370 had operated as a constitutional marker of the
region’s special semi-autonomous status in the Indian federation due to the prolonged nature
of the unresolved international dispute. The abrogation of Article 35A, also known as the Per-
manent Residents Law, which was introduced through the 1954 presidential order to continue
335
the prior provisions of territorial regulations under Article 370 of the Indian constitution, has
had particularly devastating consequences. Article 35A authorized the J&K legislature to define
permanent residents of the state and to restrict non-permanent residents from buying property,
holding permanent jobs, or receiving educational scholarships in the state. The abrogation of
Article 35A has essentially opened up the region to non-Kashmiri residents.
The constitutionality of the abrogation and reorganization has been challenged before the
Supreme Court by approximately two dozen petitions filed by lawyers, activists, political par-
ties, and private individuals. These petitions argue for the restoration of Article 370 as a key
component of J&K’s accession to and integration into the Indian federation. This position, of
course, ultimately undermines Kashmiri claims regarding the right to self-determination under
international law. In its handling of these matters, the Supreme Court has continued its long
tradition of politicized special treatment of J&K under the law. Judicial decisions regarding these
key constitutional issues are clearly time sensitive. The J&K People’s Conference ( JKPC) led by
Sajjad Lone, which filed a writ petition in 2019 challenging the constitutionality of the presi-
dential orders and the reorganization act, submitted another plea in November 2020 demanding
early hearing of petitions, saying “the petitions ought to be heard and disposed of urgently as
significant changes to the rights of the residents of the erstwhile State of Jammu and Kashmir
have already been brought about by the Centre.” However, the Constitutional Bench has not
acted, and across the past three years, many laws, amendments, and orders have been passed in
the intervening time, effecting significant and irreparable changes in the region that cannot be
easily undone.
India’s unilateral and anti-democratic revocation of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status
through the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35A constitutes a forced annexation of disputed ter-
ritory in contravention of international law and the various UN Security Council resolutions
that guarantee Kashmiris the right to determine their political future based on a free, fair, and
an impartial plebiscite. The abrogation has highlighted a fundamental paradox. India is actively
seeking international recognition as a beacon of democracy and human rights by joining the
UN Human Rights Council and pursuing a seat on the UN Security Council. At the same
time, India has refused to engage with international bodies by rejecting the reports of the UN
High Commissioner and refusing to respond to communications from UN special procedures,
claiming that these interventions constitute infringements of their sovereignty. Although the
international legal community has issued some responses to the abrogation, the lack of concrete
international intervention reflects how international law continues to privilege the principles of
national sovereignty and territorial integrity while refusing to acknowledge the imperialism of
third world powers that violently deny people’s right to self-determination.
Strategic Engagement Toward Liberation

In this chapter, we have outlined a series of historical moments that demonstrate the ways in
which the Kashmiri freedom struggle has been constituted as an international dispute in and
through the structures and institutions of international law in the post–World War II period.
This international legal framework has produced a sovereignty trap for Kashmir by simultane-
ously opening and foreclosing the possibility of Kashmir’s liberation from (post)colonial nation-
states with deep investments in consolidating their own sovereign power. Despite the historical
significance of Kashmir’s freedom struggle, the moment of Kashmir’s designation as an interna-
tional dispute was also the moment of its entrapment as a territorial contestation between two
newly emerging nation-states. India’s domestication of the international dispute across succes-
sive political regimes through highly politicized patterns of legal adjudication and enforcement
336
as well as political, economic, and military maneuvers has obscured the underlying structures
and processes of occupation and annexation. Following the abrogation in 2019, those who sup-
port the Kashmiri freedom struggle have been caught in the paradoxical position of advocating
for the restoration of Article 370, the 1954 presidential order, and J&K statehood – all of which
operated as tools for Kashmir’s co-optation and consolidation in the Indian union at the time of
the temporary accession. As long as Kashmiri histories and futures continue to be determined
and adjudicated within the narrow confines of nation-state sovereignty politics and legal contes-
tations over territories and resources, the emancipatory project of Kashmiri liberation remains
deeply compromised.
International law may be fundamentally shaped by colonial and (post)colonial power imbal-
ances. But recognition of imperialism’s constitutive role in establishing this sovereignty trap does
not necessitate the rejection of international law. Instead, a critical examination of international
law’s imperialist trappings opens possibilities for a fundamental restructuring of international
law through investments in alternative and emancipatory forms of global justice. As Anghie
(2014: 142) reminds us, “international law, after all, is created not only by states, but by the
scholars, practitioners, and judges to articulate the meaning of that law, and give it effect.” The
transformation of international law beyond (post)colonial power relationships requires strategic
engagements among solidarity networks of international lawyers and scholars “committed to
protecting the interests and amplifying the voices of the peoples and movements systematically
excluded from, and by, international law” (Natarajan et al. 2016: 1947–1948). Kashmiri liberation
requires a transformative approach to international law that is driven by people’s long-standing affective
histories, lived practices, and legal and extralegal struggles for power and control over land and resources that
challenge the sovereignty claims of existing nation-states.
Hilary Charlesworth (2002: 391) asks, “What might an international law of everyday life
look like?” International law operates both as a legal and affective force; despite its imperial
histories and erasures, communities who have suffered extreme forms of violence under third
world imperialisms continue to turn to international law and institutions for redress. Legal
scholars argue that a radical re-envisioning of international law should focus on “systematic,
enduring, quotidian, everyday issues” (Hansel 2019) rather than only adjudicating “crisis” sce-
narios. A focus on the everyday processes and implementation of law – or how law comes
to be, rather than simply is – must take into account how law and legal paradigms operate in
specific sociopolitical contexts that shape how laws are interpreted and also how they shape
people’s political lives and aspirations. Legal anthropologists have established how international
law, rather than being a rigid and uniform set of norms, shapes and is shaped by local histories
and memories, specific sociopolitical events and moments, and local, national, and transnational
civil society actors and advocacy networks. The context-based application and reinterpretation
of “globally generated ideas” (Levitt and Merry 2009) by scholars and activists is what enables
the “vernacularization” of international law.
An liberatory approach to international law requires, not a jettison of international frame-
works and institutions, but rather sustained collaborative and deliberative partnerships among
transnational networks of lawyers, scholars, and activists who are committed to the reconstitu-
tion of international law from below. Kashmiri human rights organizations have played a key
role in situating Kashmiri aspirations within larger paradigms of international law through their
labor of documenting structures of violence and impunity; consulting with domestic, regional,
and international human rights organizations; creating space for critical discussions of law and
power in comparative perspectives; and co-producing knowledge with scholars and researchers
in Kashmir and abroad. Through this work, they reiterate and remind the international com-
munity that the Kashmir issue is not – contrary to Indian claims – India’s internal matter, and
337
that it must therefore be resolved according to UN resolutions that guarantee Kashmiris the
right to determine their own political future. As Critical Kashmir Studies scholars, our research,
scholarship, and advocacy are shaped by our theoretical and methodological commitments to
transforming the praxis of international law through the ongoing project of translating, nego-
tiating, and contextualizing Kashmiri priorities and perspectives through our work within the
academy and beyond.
Works Cited
Anghie, Antony. 2004. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
———. 2014. “Towards a Postcolonial International Law.” In Critical International Law: Postrealism, Postco-
lonialism, and Transnationalism, edited by Prabhakar Singh and Benoît Mayer, 123–142. Oxford Scholar-
ship Online.
Anghie, Antony, Bhupinder Chimni, Karin Mickelson, and Obiora Okafor. 2003. The Third World and
International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
Bhan, Mona. 2014. “Morality and Martyrdom: Dams, Dharma, and the Politics of Work in IndiannOc-
cupied Kashmir.” Biographies 37(1): 191–224.
———. 2018. “Jinn, Floods, and Resistant Ecological Imaginaries in Indian Occupied.” Economic and
Political Weekly 53(47): 67–75.
———. 2021. “Infrastructures of Occupation: Mobility, Immobility, and the Politics of Occupation in
Kashmir.” In Kashmir and the Future of South Asia, edited by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, 71–90. Lon-
don and New York: Routledge.
Brecher, Michael 1953. “Kashmir: A Case Study in UN Mediation.” Pacific Affairs 26(3): 195–207.
Charlesworth, Hilary. 2002. “International Law: A Discipline of Crisis.” Modern Law Review 65(3):
377–392.
Chaudri, Mohammed Ahsen. 1954. “Kashmir: The Latest Phase.” Kashmir Horizon 7(2): 79–87.
Chimni, Bhupinder. 2006. “Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto.” International
Community Law Review 8(1): 3–27.
Dar, Zubair Ahmad. 2011–2012. “Power Projects in Jammu & Kashmir: Controversy, Law and Justice.”
LIDS Working Papers, Harvard Law & International Development Society: 1–34.
314–347.
Economic & Political Weekly. 1965. “UN’s Failure in Kashmir: A Factual Survey.” 17(40): 1506–1509.
Farooq, Muhammad and Umbreen Javaid. 2020. “Suspension of Article 370: Assessment of Modi’s Kash-
mir Masterstroke under Hindutva Ideology.” Global Political Review V(I): 1–8.
Ghosh, Shrimoyee. 2019. “Internal? Bilateral? International?” Raiot, September 19.
Haines, Daniel. 2016. Rivers Divided: Indus Basin Waters in the Making of India and Pakistan. New York:
Hansel, Mary. 2019. “Feminist Time and an International Law of the Everyday.” In Research Handbook on
Feminist Engagement with International Law, edited by Susan Harris Rimmer and Kate Ogg, 379–398.
Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.
Hasan, K. Sarwar. 1956. “Plebiscite in Kashmir: Indian Commitments.” Pakistan Horizons 9(1): 24–29.
Hassan, Khalid Wasim. 2009. “History Revisited: Narratives on Political and Constitutional Changes in
Kashmir (1947–1990).” Working Paper 223, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore.
Howley, James D. 1991. “Alive and Kicking: The Kashmir Dispute Forty Years Later.” Dickinson Journal of
International Law 9(1): 87–120.
International Commission of Jurists. 1995. Human Rights in Kashmir: Report of a Mission. Geneva, Switzerland.
www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/1995/01/India-human-righst-in-Kashmir-fact-finding-mission-
report-1995-eng.pdf.
Jagota, S. P. 1960. “Development of Constitutional Relations between Jammu and Kashmir and India,
1950–1960.” Journal of the Indian Law Institute 2(4): 519–538.
Junaid, Mohamad. 2016. “A Kashmiri View of Pakistan: Solidarity without Demands.” Tanqeed:
A Magazine of Politics and Culture, October. www.tanqeed.org/2016/10/a-kashmiri-view-of-pakistan-
solidarity-without-demands/.
338
Korbel, Josef. 1953. “The Kashmir Dispute After Six Years.” International Organization 7(4): 498–510.
———. 1954a. Danger in Kashmir. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1954b. “The National Conference Administration of Kashmir 1949–1954.” Middle East Journal
8(3): 283–294.
Lamb, Alastair. 1991. Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy, 1846–1990. Hertingfordbury, UK: Roxford Books.
Levitt, Peggy and Sally Merry. 2009. “Vernacularization on the Gound: Local Uses of Global Women’s
rights in Peru, China, India and the United States.” Global Networks 9(4): 441–461.
Letter from the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan to the Secretary General ( January 15, 1948), U.N.
Doc. S/646/Corr. 1 (1948).
Letter from the Representative of India to the President of the Security Council ( January 1, 1948), U.N.
Doc. S/628 (1948).
Lone, Fozia Nazir. 2018. Historical Title, Self-Determination and the Kashmir Question: Changing Perspectives
in International Law. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
———. 2020. “Damming the Indus Waters: Thoughts on the Future of the 1960 Indus Water Treaty and
Himalayan Water Security.” Journal of Water Law 26(5, 6): 207–222.
Madhok, Balraj. 1989. “Legacy of the Past: Bleak Indo-Pak Relations!” The Statesman Delhi, February 24.
Menon, V. P. 1956. The Story of the Integration of the Indian States. Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras: Orient
Longmans Ltd.
Mumtaz, Muhammad. 2012. “Right of Self Determination for Kashmiri People: An International Law
Perspective.” International Journal of Business, Economics and Law 1.
Mutua, Makau. 2000. “What Is TWAIL?” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting (American Society of International
Law) 94: 31–40. www.jstor.org/stable/25659346.
Natarajan, Usha, John Reynolds, Amar Bhatia, and Sujith Xavier. 2016. “Introduction: TWAIL – On
Practice and the Intellectual.” Third World Quarterly 37(11): 1946–1956.
Nayak, Venkatesh. 2016. “RTI Reveals NHPC Earned . . .” Comonwealth Human Rights Initiative, April 21.
https://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/blog/rti-reveals-nhpc-earned-rs194-billion-from-hydel-pro-
jects-in-jk-between-20012015-while-mou-requires-working-out-a-method-for-transfer-of-projects-
-back-to-jk.
Nazakat, R. and A. Nengroo. 2012. “Impact of Indus Water Treaty on J&K State: With special reference
to Hydro Power Potential.” Journal of Recent Advances in Agriculture 1(4): 157–163.
Noorani, A. G. 2002. “The Dixon Plan.” Frontline 19(21) (October): 12–25.
———. 2009. “Can’t Disappear This Body.” The Hindu, February 9. Accessed December 31, 2018. www.
thehindu.com/opinion/lead/cant-disappear-this-body/article4394238.ece.
———. 2011. Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press.
———. 2017a. “Hypocrisy on Kashmir.” Frontline, February 17. https://frontline.thehindu.com/the-
nation/hypocrisy-on-kashmir/article9511807.ece.
———. 2017b. “Plebiscite in Kashmir: Stillborn or Killed? Part 1.” Greater Kashmir, January 8. www.
greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/plebiscite-in-kashmir-stillborn-or-killed-part-1/.
OHCHR. 2018. Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian
State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016 to April 2018, and General Human Rights Concerns in
Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Human Rights, June 14, 2018. www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/IN/DevelopmentsInKashmir-
June2016ToApril2018.pdf.
Osuri, Goldie. 2017. “Imperialism, Colonialism and Sovereignty in the (Post)colony: India and Kashmir.”
Third World Quarterly 38(11): 2428–2443.
Parvaiz, Ather. 2016. “As Always, Water Issues Create a Stir in Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.” Scroll,
June 29. https://scroll.in/article/810786/water-issues-spark-furore-in-jammu-kashmir-assembly.
Qadri, Nasir. 2019. “Kashmir back at UN Security Council Table.” August 16. Accessed July 25,
2021.https://ssrn.com/abstract=3438912 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3438912.
Rather, Nayeem. 2017. “Institutionalizing Kashmir’s Collective Memory is Our Primary Need: Parvez
Imroz.” Wande Magazine, November 7. www.wandemag.com/kashmir-interview-parvez-imroz/.
Reynolds, John. 2017. Empire, Emergency and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds, John and Sujith Xavier. 2016. The Dark Corners of the World.” Journal of International Criminal
Justice 14(4): 959–983.
Saito, Natsu Taylor. 2020. Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists. New York:
New York University Press.
339
Shucksmith, Christy and Nigel White. 2015. “United Nations Military Observer Group in India and
Pakistan (UNMOGIP).” In The Oxford Handbook of United Nations Peacekeeping, 133–143. Oxford:
Taseer, Rashid. 1973. Tehriq-i-Huriyat-i-Kashmir, Vol 1. Srinagar: Ali Brothers.
Telegraph. 2001. “UN Headache Adds to India’s Kashmir Agony.” October 1. www.telegraphindia.com/
india/un-headache-adds-to-india-s-kashmir-agony/cid/915433.
Westcott, Stephen P. 2020. “Self-Determination and State Sovereignty: The Case of UN Involvement
in Jammu and Kashmir.” In The United Nations: Friend or Foe of Self-Determination? edited by Jakob R.
Avgustin, 127–143. Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing.
Wirsing, Robert G. 2008. “The Kashmir Territorial Dispute: The Indus Runs Through It.” The Brown
Journal of World Affairs 15(1): 225–240.
340
24
THE FORMS AND PRACTICES
OF INDIAN SETTLER/
COLONIAL SOVEREIGNTY
IN KASHMIR
Goldie Osuri
Introduction
Is the Indian “post” colonial nation-state colonial? This chapter discusses definitions and debates
around the concepts of colonialism, imperialism, occupation, and settler colonialism, making an
argument for their overlapping applicability in diagnosing the relationship between the Indian
state and Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. The term Indian-administered Jammu and
Kashmir is used here to foreground the continuing claim of state subjects of the erstwhile
princely state of Jammu and Kashmir to self-determination through the United Nations’ Secu-
rity Council resolutions between 1948 and 1956. Alongside the term “administered,” used
where relevant to indicate its status of unrealized self-determination, this chapter will also
deploy the term Indian-occupied Kashmir, concerned as it is with outlining the coloniality of
the postcolonial Indian state.
Over the past few decades, the proliferation of academic scholarship drawing on postcolonial
and decolonial theory across disciplines has meant examining not only the political and material
legacy of European colonialisms, but also examining the colonial foundation of what consti-
tutes knowledge itself. For both postcolonial and decolonial theory, the legacy of European
Enlightenment, situated in the context of multiple forms of European colonialism, has been to
map the world either as East/West or North/South through the binaries of reason and unrea-
son, civilization and barbarism, religion and superstition, and history and pre-history (Bhambra
2014). Many of these critiques and calls to scholar-activism regarding dismantling of the legacies
of European colonialism are crucial for the world in which we live. However, simultaneously, it
is also imperative to examine how it is that a postcolonial state and its anti-colonial nationalism
emerging from anti-colonial movements can be diagnosed as colonial precisely at the moment
of independence from European colonial powers. Postcolonial nation-states sought to expand
their sovereignty over peoples and territory – especially princely states within British India –
who did not want to cede their sovereignty to the newly formed nation-states (Osuri 2017;
Ankit 2018). In this regard, the case of Jammu and Kashmir presents an excellent example as
a princely state whose accession, which may have been legally questionable, was based on the
provision that the people of Kashmir would determine their political future (Lamb 1997). As
the promise of self-determination was accorded but betrayed, the Indian postcolonial state can
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-30 341

Goldie Osuri
be deemed colonial as the state subject of Jammu and Kashmir cannot be said to have ceded
sovereignty to the Indian state through popular “collective will” (Dar 2010; Duschinski and
Ghosh 2017: 4; Lone 2018).
Such a diagnosis may be productive for deconstructing the binaries of “East” and “West” or
“North” and “South” at the heart of postcolonial and decolonial theories in order to examine
contemporary geopolitics. Theories and debates about colonialism often refer to the period of
European colonialisms because these colonialisms have had a direct effect in terms of knowledge
production about the non-European colonized and often inform the political, social and eco-
nomic forms, organizations and institutions that constitute postcolonial states (Mazrui 2005).
While these theories and debates appear to reference the binary between Europe and non-
Europe, they are also relevant to the context of postcolonial colonialisms because of the con-
ceptual understandings of colonialism they provide, albeit with a certain fine-tuning. In this
section, I refer to a few of these theories and debates.
Valentin Y. Mudimbe (1988) provides a substantial definition of some overarching elements
of European colonialism in the Invention of Africa. Drawing on the etymology of colonialism
from the Latin word “colére” meaning “to cultivate or to design,” Mudimbe comments on the
fact that “the historical colonial experience does not and obviously cannot reflect the peace-
ful connotations of these words” (ibid.: 14). The Invention of Africa outlines three elements that
constitute the arrangement of European colonialism: “the domination of physical space, the
reformation of natives’ minds, and the integration of local economic histories into the Western
perspective” (ibid.: 15). As Mudimbe argues, these complementary projects form the “colo-
nizing structure, which completely embraces the physical, human, and spiritual aspects of the
colonizing experience” (ibid.: 15). The arrangement of these three elements – territory, knowl-
edge, and political economy – can be said to be hallmarks of a classic understanding of colo-
nialism, distinct from terms like settler colonialism, imperialism, or occupation. However, it is
necessary to recognize that these terms also overlap; they highlight the interconnected histories
which constitute our current political, economic and social order. For example, the invention of
knowledge regarding “African” otherness as primitive and inferior, and “Whiteness as property”
justified the political economy of the devastating trade of slaves from different regions of Africa
to the Caribbean and to the Americas (Harris 1993; Shillam 2012). Destructive for the lives
and worlds of African slaves as well as their present successors, the political economy of slav-
ery, in turn, informed the economies of the settler colonialisms of the Americas, an economy
built on massacres and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples (Harris 1993; Fitzgerald 2015).
Indigenous peoples in the Americas, in Australia, and in Canada still live within settler colonial
structures (Moreton-Robinson 2015; Bhandar 2018). Settler colonialism was not just an event,
as Patrick Wolfe (2006) argued, but underpins the structure and logic of these nation-states.
The interconnected histories and terminologies of colonialism, imperialism, occupation and
settler colonialism are also applicable to Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, as this chap-
ter will demonstrate. In this sense, the concept of colonialism as a set of arrangements can be
understood as something that is not static, but also subject to rearrangement, emphasizing differ-
ent or variant forms of imperialism and occupation at different times, given changing political,
economic, and social conditions. The three elements that Mudimbe (1988) emphasizes – ter-
ritory, knowledge, and economy – involve the exercise of colonial authority or sovereignty.
Understanding colonial sovereignty in Carl Schmitt’s (1985) discussion of sovereignty as politi-
cal authority and decisionism over the lives and deaths of people makes sense in the context of
Indian rule, especially in the Kashmir Valley. Here even the rule of law, meant to be democratic
and impartial, has been exercised through the institution of exceptions that involve the exercise
of political decisionism as evident in Kashmir over the last few decades (Hussain 2003). The
342
Indian Settler/Colonial Sovereignty
exercise of colonial sovereignty can also be understood through Michel Foucault’s (2003) notion
of biopolitics or power over life, where biopolitics signifies the regulation and management of
populations. Biopolitics or power over life through militarized governance indicates the Indian
state’s occupation and continual necropolitical engagement in Kashmir (Bhan, Duschinski and
Zia 2018: 11). Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe (2003) has argued, extends the definition of
biopolitics, where biopolitics is inadequate to describe the ways in which colonialism and death
plays a role in the exercise of power. Jasbir Puar’s (2017) identification of “the right to maim”
demonstrates what they call a “triangulation of the hierarchies of living and dying” in relation
to “deliberate maiming” (2017: 137). The right to maim also plays a crucial role in the exercise
of Indian sovereignty over Kashmir as Ather Zia (2019a) demonstrates. This cluster of poststruc-
tural conceptual understandings of sovereignty, biopolitics, and necropolitics through which
the Indian nation-state exercises colonial rule over Kashmir also illuminates the ways in which
Kashmiri resistance movements have engaged with these forms of power in multifaceted gen-
dered ways: through armed rebellion, stone pelting, unarmed protests (risking being maimed
and killed), through international human rights engagements, and through poetry, writing,
filmmaking, and art (Ali 2017; Mir 2018; Malik 2019).
Reshaping Sovereignty Through Dogra Rule

These resistance movements have a longer history of engagement with alien rule, and can be
said to shape Kashmiri imaginations of azaadi or freedom from Indian colonial rule (Hussain
2018). This is why it is important to pay attention to the context of “Kashmir’s modern his-
tory” which begins in 1846 through British acquisition of the regions occupied by the Sikh
Empire (Zutshi 2018: 7). The details of this period help explain the context to Indian exercise
of colonial sovereignty in relation to Indian-occupied Kashmir, which began in 1947 during
the emergence of the newly formed states of India and Pakistan (an outcome of anti-colonial
freedom movements against the British on the subcontinent). Some recounting of this history
is necessary as it sheds light on the transfer of forms of colonial sovereignty where it concerned
the region of Kashmir from one elite rule to the next. The 1846 Treaty of Amritsar sealed the
British East India Company’s sale of an entire region to a Dogra feudatory of the Sikh empire,
Gulab Singh, whose betrayal of the Sikhs helped the British defeat the Sikh empire (Singh
1971). This region included Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Kashmir (now in Pakistan-administered
Kashmir), Aksai Chin in East Ladakh (a region occupied by China), the Kashmir Valley, Ladakh
and Jammu (now occupied by India). Inshah Malik points to Kashmiri resistance under a Sikh
empire governor against the Dogra army’s advance into Srinagar (2019: 24). As Malik states,
“the Dogra Army had to seek British armed intervention to quash this rebellion and Kashmiris
were in no position to resist the imperial army” (Malik 2019: 24).
British collaboration with the Dogras to create a buffer state for themselves against the
Afghan empire and the Russian state made for a number of changes. Mridu Rai (2004) argues
that British imposition of Dogra sovereignty also reshaped the exercise of sovereignty in the
princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. She states that British sale of the region to the Dogra ruler,
“endowed the individual ruler with a personalized form of sovereignty, erasing earlier traditions
of layered authority shared simultaneously by various levels in Kashmiri society” (2004: 4). As
the British emphasized the Rajputness, and consequently the Hinduness of the Dogras in order
to legitimize them as rulers, Kashmiri Muslims, who were “the vast majority,” “found them-
selves unrepresented in an enterprise of Dogra domination without legitimacy” (Rai 2004: 4).
And Dogra rule proved to be repressive in its harsh taxation, instituting a system of forced labor,
no representation in local or court administration, and blatant discrimination of Muslim subjects
343
Goldie Osuri
in terms of religious freedom (Copland 1981; Rai 2004; Malik 2019). In these changes to the
ways in which sovereignty was exercised, a particular kind of feudal biopolitical categorization
of populations took place through colonial Orientalist framings of the categories of religion,
race, gender, caste and class, a legacy which continues through Indian rule (Bhan 2018).
This exercise of Dogra feudal sovereignty, reshaped by British indirect colonial rule, also
had the effect of shaping Kashmiri Muslim resistance and Kashmiri subjectivities in their resist-
ance to Dogra rule. So, for example, by 1847, the first Dogra ruler Gulab Singh introduced
such severe taxation on shawl weavers that they began fleeing Kashmir to go into neighboring
Punjab (Malik 2019: 24). Amit Kumar (2013) has written of the significance of the Shawl Baf
Tehreek or the shawl weavers movement protesting the high taxation which left shawl weavers
in penury. Kashmiri shawls were already circulating in world trade since the sixteenth century
(Zutshi 2009: 423). Robert Thorpe, a British army official, had noted that the high taxes on
shawls meant that “two-thirds of the population perished due to starvation, and many villages in
Kashmir were destroyed” (qtd. in Malik 2019: 25). Amit Kumar (2013) and Inshah Malik (2019)
note that the shawl weavers’ severe repression and resistance movement could be understood to
be a modern collective awakening of Kashmiri national consciousness to foreign rule.
Given about a century of the cruelty of Dogra rule, it is no surprise that by the 1930s, Kash-
miri mobilization against Dogra rule was significant and included not only artisans, but also the
educated elite and resulted in protests and agitations (Copland 1981; Ali 2017). A number of
associations were formed for the purpose of political mobilization. Inshah Malik (2019) states
that women were often part of these protests and agitations. The July 13 firing on unarmed pro-
testors in 1931 resulting in the death of 24 people including a woman named Mogel, “marked
a serious political turn” (Malik 2019: 26). This day is marked as Martyrs Day. By 1946, after
more than a decade of agitation and protests, Kashmiri leader Sheikh Abdullah launched the
Quit Kashmir movement against Hindu Dogra rule. He was imprisoned by the Maharajah (Kak
2013: 290).
The Bloodied Transfer of Sovereign Power

By 1947, with the departure of the British, the newly independent “post” colonial states of India
and Pakistan sought to expand their sovereignty by assimilating princely states that remained
independent (Ankit 2016). Maharajah Hari Singh of the state of Jammu and Kashmir did not
want to join either state. This was a bloodied time for the princely state of Jammu and Kash-
mir. The communal violence of the newly created India and Pakistan “spilled into Kashmir’s
Jammu Province” where 200,000 Muslims were killed, an act “endorsed” by the Maharajah (Zia
2019b: 56). The massacres were instrumental for a desired demographic change in the region
of Jammu. Given news of these massacres, Kashmiris from the Poonch region staged an armed
rebellion (Mahmud 2018: 214; Snedden 2015). The rebellion was bolstered by the support of
“Pathan tribal militia” from the “North-West Frontier province and tribal areas” (Mahmud
2018: 214). The conflict became the first India-Pakistan war fought which ended on Janu-
ary 5, 1949. Given these conditions, and the proclamation of independent or Azad Kashmir on
October 24 by those from Poonch, Mirpur and Muzaffarabad, the Maharajah hurriedly acceded
to the Indian state on October 26, 1947 (Snedden 2015; Mahmud 2018). Sheikh Abdullah is
said to have been “a willing partner in this deal” after his release from prison (Kak 2013: 290).
Historians have cast doubt on the chronology of the signing of the instrument of acces-
sion; if the accession was signed after the landing of Indian troops then one could say that the
Indian army had invaded Kashmir (Lamb 1997: 157; Schofield 2010: 55–56). Even if we take
the accession to be legal, it was made with the proviso that the people of Kashmir would be
344
able to determine their political future through a plebiscite or a referendum to join either India
or Pakistan. The 1948 United Security Council Resolution 47 was the first to recommend a
series of measures to the governments of India and Pakistan to cease the war and “to create
proper conditions for a free and impartial plebiscite” for the people of the “State of Jammu and
Kashmir” to accede to either state (Bhan Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia 2018: 20). In 1950, the UN
brokered a cease-fire agreement and appointed UN Military Observers, with both countries
agreeing to hold a free and fair plebiscite so that the people of Kashmir could decide their fate.
Subsequent United Nations Security Council resolutions reiterated this condition. As Duschin-
ski and Ghosh argue, “the legal foundations of contemporary claims for self-determination are a
series of UN Security Council resolutions addressing the need for a plebiscite to determine the
region’s political future” (2017: 4). Duschinski and Ghosh further emphasize that the resolutions
register the UN’s commitments to bringing about a mediated settlement by ascertain-

ing the collective will of Kashmiri people – a collective will expressed through a mass
popular movement for azaadi, first from autocratic Dogra rule during the colonial
period, and then from Indian rule.
(Duschinski and Ghosh 2017: 4)
Kashmiri claim to self-determination, therefore, can be said to reside in the first instance in
the will of the Kashmiri people which has never been ascertained. With reference to inter-
national law, Fozia Lone (2018) argues that Kashmiri claim to self-determination can also be
evidenced with reference to the fact that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir predates
the states of India and Pakistan and that Kashmiris could be said to constitute a distinct people.
The claim to self-determination articulated by the United Nations Security Council resides in
the denied sovereignty of the people of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. As
this plebiscite was never held, this moment can also be regarded as the transfer of sovereignty
from Dogra colonial rule to Indian colonial rule, one which held in abeyance a promise that
was soon betrayed in subsequent years. Hence the history of the state of Jammu and Kashmir
and the struggle of Kashmiris has been that of a denied sovereignty and the struggle for azaadi
or freedom (Bhan Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia 2018; Osuri 2017). This moment constitutes the
inauguration of Indian colonial rule. Simultaneously, the seeds of Indian settler colonialism were
sown through the massacre of Muslims intended as a strategy for demographic change in Jammu
(Mushtaq and Amin 2021).
Drawing on historical research on the accession of Junagadh, and with reference to the princely
states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, Rakesh Ankit has theorized that the relationship between the
princely states and the nations of India and Pakistan followed the logic of “appropriation and
acquisition” through state violence and machinations (2018: 110). Ankit argues that Indian
Hindu majoritarian state sovereignty was produced through “violence, constitutive or founda-
tional of a new institutional and political order” (2016: 403). This new political order sought
to expand its sovereignty over the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir initially through the
promise of a plebiscite, and then through the institution and adoption of Article 370 in the Indian
Constitution. As Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia state, Article 370 gave “the people of the state the
right to form their own constituent assembly, draft their own constitution, and choose their
own flag” (2018: 16). The article also established the category of state subjects and prohibited
“any non-resident from purchasing land in the state” (ibid.: 16). Defence, Foreign Affairs and
Communications were to be governed by the Indian government. The principle of autonomy,
however, was hollowed out by a number of legal mechanisms and presidential orders which
ensured that the Indian government effectively controlled the sovereignty of Kashmir (Noorani
345
Goldie Osuri
2011: 303–330). These phases of the erosion of Kashmiri autonomy and the subsequent mili-
tarization of Kashmir could be said to inaugurate India’s occupation of Kashmir involving the
tactics of imperialism as the next couple of sections demonstrate.
A Sovereign Exercise of “Occupational Constitutionalism”

The enactment of the Preventative Detention Act in 1954 and its subsequent amendments,
Sumantra Bose has argued, turned “Indian-controlled Kashmir into a draconian police state in
which civil rights and political liberties were virtually non-existent” (2007: 171). Duschinski
and Ghosh have called this process one of “occupational constitutionalism” (2017: 4). Cit-
ing Lisa Hajjar’s (2005) work on military occupation as “a distinctly illiberal type of political
arrangement, combining elements of colonialism (foreign rule) and a state of emergency (mar-
tial law),” Duschinski and Ghosh state that India’s relationship to Kashmir is
a form of foreign dominance and control produced through the annexation of part of
Kashmir’s territory and its legal sovereignty to India in the aftermath of independence
and reproduced through a series of legal mechanisms and processes across time that
institute a state of emergency and permanent crisis in Kashmir.
(2017: 5)
The political order of instituting Article 370 in Kashmir appears to demonstrate Indian imperial
rule as an element of Indian colonial tactics in Kashmir. Edward Said has defined imperialism as
“the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant
territory” (1994: 8). Said differentiates colonialism from imperialism by arguing that colonial-
ism is often a “consequence of imperialism” through the “implanting of settlements” (1994: 8).
Given the hollowing out Article 370 and the institution of a continual state of emergency in
Kashmir, India’s relationship to Kashmir can be argued as colonial rule, through the combina-
tion of the tactics of imperialism and military occupation (Kaul 2011; Anand 2012).
In many ways, until the 2019 nullification of Article 370 and the annexation of Kashmir,
the alibi of democracy has been the mainstay of India’s narrative regarding Kashmir. Democracy
in Kashmir, however, has only been an alibi, and not the substance of the relationship between
India and Kashmir ( Junaid 2013). As Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia have argued, “Kashmir’s pro-
visionality” allowed for “the active maintenance of a façade of democracy” (2018: 17). The
provisionality of autonomy, in other words, allowed for a continual framing of Kashmir “as a
dangerous border zone and a threat to the integrity of the nation, and the continued implemen-
tation of laws of exception” (Bhan, Duschinski and Zia 2018: 17). Before the armed rebellion of
1989, India’s relationship to Kashmir was characterized by political repression. Or as Mohamad
Junaid comments, Indian rule involved “the manipulation of elections,” the arrest of any politi-
cal opponents who challenged this rule, and creation and support for a “small wealthy clique
with interests wedded to the Indian control over Kashmir” (2013: 160).
Elections were first held in Kashmir in 1951, but these were held in “an atmosphere of
dissent and repression” (Bhan, Duschinski and Zia 2018: 21). Describing the National Confer-
ence’s (close to the Indian National Congress at the time) campaign during these elections,
Pandit Rughonath Vaishnavi, a lawyer, political activist, and a founder member of the National
Congress, described night raids on opponents of the National Congress who were “mainly
Muslim conference workers and any other political big-wigs who did not see eye to eye with
the NC” (qtd. in Bhan, Duschinski and Zia. 2018: 21). Yet by 1953, Sheikh Abdullah, leader
of the National Conference Party and a close friend and ally of Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru was
346
himself arrested. He is said to have formed a sub-committee in May 1953 which favored a
“plebiscite in the entire territory to determine the core issue of legitimate sovereignty” (Bose
2003: 64). Prime Minister Nehru “justified Abdullah’s eviction from office before India’s Parlia-
ment” in September 1953,
on the grounds that he had lost the confidence of the majority of his cabinet and by
his actions caused “distress to the people.” However, there was no convincing “demo-
cratic” justification for Abdullah’s arrest (and prolonged imprisonment in a Jammu jail.
(ibid.: 66)
In fact, charges against Sheikh Abdullah were dropped in 1963.

Between the 1950s and 1970s, successive puppet governments “adopted a new constitu-
tion for the state, confirming accessions and the formal special status relationship with India”
(Tremblay 2018: 228). By 1956, India’s Home Minister Gobind Ballabh Pant declared that
Kashmir was an integral part of India, and that plebiscite was no longer possible. Members of
the National Conference who constituted a new party called the Plebiscite Front were arrested
when they announced that they would contest elections in 1972; they were arrested under the
Preventive Detention Act (Bose 2007: 173; Faheem 2018). As Tremblay argues, these were
“integrative politics” on the part of the Indian government (2018: 229). These politics of forced
integration or direct control of Kashmiri sovereignty and a continual denial of the demand for
plebiscite illuminates Indian strategies of colonial rule during these years. Citing Benvinisti
(2013), Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia state that the “law of occupation” does not need to be a
result of “actual fighting,” but can be applicable “from the threat of the use of force, from an
armistice agreement, from a peace agreement or from other processes through which a territory
comes under the control of a foreign state” (2018: 10). The decades between the 1950s and the
1980s appear to describe such a process of colonial occupation.
The Practice of Military Occupation

This long history of manipulation of elections, political repression and the rigged elections of
1987 which followed the denial of the promise of self-determination resulted in the armed
rebellion of 1989. While the official Indian narrative emphasizes Pakistani “cross-border terror-
ism” as part of its narrative, for Kashmiris this was an indigenous armed struggle against India
which sought support from Pakistan. Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia note that “India sought to
crush the rebellion through a massive counterinsurgency assault against insurgent and civilian
populations, deploying more than 700,000 military and paramilitary forces in the region” (2018:
2). The deployment of military force was accompanied by the legal infrastructure of exception
through both the declaration of the state of emergency as well as through laws that provided
effective impunity to the armed forces, that is, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and the
Jammu and Kashmir Disturbed Areas Act which have been in place since the 1990s (Duschinski
and Ghosh 2017: 5). Three decades later, “this counterinsurgency regime” of military occupa-
tion and impunity became a part of the everyday life of Kashmiris living in a “perpetual state of
siege” with “everyday conditions of surveillance, punishment, and control” (Bhan, Duschinski
and Zia 2018: 2).
The extent of the necropolitical collective punishment that inscribes Kashmiri experience of
life from the 1990s has been extensively documented by local human rights organizations such
as the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society in extremely difficult conditions.1 These
reports exist alongside significant reports by international human rights organizations such as
347
Goldie Osuri
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Physicians for Human Rights on Kashmir.
The United Nations’ Office of the Human Rights Commissioner reports (2018, 2019) con-
firmed these human rights violations and recommended the establishment of a Commission of
Inquiry, a recommendation that was rejected by the Indian government (The Wire 2019). Even
a brief glimpse of these reports demonstrates the widespread, systematic, and necropolitical
ways in which the Indian state through its military occupation has engaged in brutal torture,
extrajudicial killings, mass rapes, and enforced disappearances over decades. Seema Kazi (2009,
2018), Batool et al. (2016), Kaul and Zia (2018), Zia (2019b), and Malik (2019) have discussed
the integral ways in which gender has played a role in the sexual and gendered violence of the
occupation, as well as the significant role that women have played in the struggle for political
freedom. In the face of the massive scale of human rights violations, Kashmiris have staged local
and international human rights and legal interventions in their calls for justice (Duschinski and
Hoffman 2011; Mathur 2016; Zia and Duschinski 2018; Zia 2019b). Yet the brutality of the
exercise of Indian colonial sovereignty continues to remain an everyday fact for Kashmiris.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the quest for sovereignty in relation to territorial integrity of
the nation involves the “disintegration of those bodies always already suspect and anti-national
through sexual torture, rape, maiming, disappearing and massacre” (Osuri 2015: 9). These very
bodies “reappear in official documents and statements as those who have to have been raped, tor-
tured, and killed, for the sake of an imagined bodily integrity of the nation” (ibid.: 9). Ather Zia
has argued that the “motif of the body in the context of violence has been pivotal for tracing
the contours of physical power practiced by the sovereign state on its subjects” (2018: 103).
Discussing the 2013 execution of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri hung to satisfy “the collective con-
science” of the Indian nation for the crime of terrorism without proper evidence, Zia states that
“the spectacle of the killable body is important for the consolidation of the nation-state project
of India and for concretizing India’s irrefutable sovereignty” (ibid.: 103). These spectacles have
been routine on Indian media as well as social media especially since the mass Kashmiri civilian
uprisings from 2008 on. These uprisings also illustrate popular support for the disproportion-
ately small militancy. The “killable” Kashmiri body figures as part of India’s sovereign right
to kill and maim, demonstrated by the mass blinding of Kashmiri children in the wake of the
killing of rebel commander Burhan Wani in 2016 (Waheed 2016; Zia 2019a). Deepti Misri
(2019) has written of the international campaigns which highlighted these mass blindings and
reclaimed the humanity of the vulnerable Kashmiri body as part of Kashmiri freedom activism.
Despite indiscriminate killings and maiming, the mass public protests by Kashmiris continued,
resulting in what Ather Zia (2016) has called “a referendum in blood.” Alongside the intensify-
ing necropolitical engagement of Indian colonial sovereignty since the 1990s, therefore, it is also
important to remember the continual protest songs and dreams of Kashmiri resistance (Bhan
Bhan, Duschinski, and Zia 2018; Zargar 2019).
One of the significant aspects of India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir has been that every
Indian government has engaged in colonial tactics in Kashmir. Public support for the discourse
of “Kashmir is an integral part of India” seems to be largely the principle of all Indian politi-
cal parties as well as the general public. Scholars from the discipline of international relations
scholars, deemed to be India’s Kashmir “experts,” have discussed Kashmir through the lens of
Pakistani “cross-border terrorism,” assuming that Kashmir is a part of India rather than paying
attention to Kashmiri narratives of self-determination (Pant 2004; Behera 2006). In the post-
9/11 context of a global Islamophobia which structures the discourse of “counter-terrorism,”
this narrative has become India’s mainstay framing in relation to Kashmir. Among a few sig-
nificant figures of the Indian left, there has been, over the last decade, an awareness of India’s
colonial tactics and brutality in Kashmir. These include the writer Arundhati Roy (2011, 2019)
348
and Pankaj Mishra (2011), who had begun advocating for the freedom of Kashmir early on.
Recently, some subaltern studies scholars like Partha Chatterjee (2019) have mentioned “inter-
nal colonialism” as a way of addressing India’s engagement with Kashmir. Elsewhere I have ana-
lyzed how the discourse of “internal colonialism” is one that continues to understand Kashmir
as a part of Indian territory rather than acknowledging Kashmiri claim to self-determination
(Osuri 2017). Scholars like Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2009) and Nitasha Kaul (2018) have con-
tributed to an understanding of India’s cultural narratives steeped in Indian nationalism and a
gendered form of Orientalism in relation to Kashmir as a “territory of desire.” Amit Kumar and
Fayaz Ahmad Dar (2015) have argued that Indian nationalist historiography repeats some of the
errors of British colonial historiography in silencing Kashmiri subaltern history, a history that
cannot be equated with Indian nationalist or subaltern histories.
A Settler Colonial Sovereignty

The August 5, 2019, siege of Kashmir accompanied by the nullification of Article 370 trans-
formed India’s colonial engagement in Kashmir into a structural settler colonial one Samreen
Mushtaq and Mudasir Amin (2021) argue that the processes of settler colonialism had long been
underway before the annexation. However, the unprecedented siege of August 2019, and the
political and legal changes that demonstrate a formal structural Indian settler colonialism in
Kashmir need to be marked. The siege was unprecedented in terms of a blanket communica-
tion shutdown which included the internet, mobile connectivity, and landlines, Indian armed
forces were increased to over a million, and there were mass arrests including that of Kashmir’s
political leadership, leaders of the Jammu and Kashmir Bar Association, leaders of the Jammu
and Kashmir Chamber of Commerce, social activists, and even scholars (Bhan, Duschinski and
Osuri 2019). Since then, six fact-finding missions found evidence of extensive night raids, tor-
ture, and sexual assault.2
The siege can be said to be the third phase of a blatant undemocratic move in India’s long
durée of the colonial occupation of Kashmir. Article 370’s nullification, also meant the dissolu-
tion of Article 35A of the Indian constitution, an article that confirmed the exclusive property
rights of Kashmiris as “permanent residents” of the state. Accompanying this dissolution, the
state of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir has now been bifurcated into two Union Ter-
ritories directly controlled by the central government. No Kashmiri has had any say in these
changes. Because any remnant of Kashmiri autonomy, or the sovereignty of native Kashmiris
over land or property rights, is now no longer exclusive, the conditions for settler colonialism
were realized through the May 2020 domicile law notification, which enabled the opportunity
of domicile status to certain categories of Indian settlers (Mushtaq and Amin 2021). Along-
side these changes, the Indian government called for corporate investments into Kashmir (Essa
2019).
The effects of the 2019 siege and the changes in Kashmir continue to be documented. But
preliminary reports illustrated extensive damage not only in terms of human rights violations,
but also Kashmir’s economy as well as its fragile ecology (Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and
Industry 2020; Parvaiz 2020; Jammu and Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society 2020). Ather
Zia (2020) notes that the 2019 annexation of Kashmir is a realization of a long-held dream of
Hindutva nationalists, nationalists who dream of a “Hindu nation,” and who currently govern
India. The blatant exclusion of Muslims from the 2019 Citizen Amendment Act (CAA), which
guarantees the right of return for Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Christian, Jain, or Parsi refugees who
entered India by December 31, 2014, from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan demon-
strates the dream (or the nightmare) of a Hindu nation (The Wire 2020). Amidst unprecedented
349
Goldie Osuri
protests in India against these moves, the Citizen Amendment Act was accompanied by the
move to put together a National Registry of Citizens (BBC News 2019). Mukul Kesavan (2019)
has argued that together these moves threaten to make many Indian Muslims stateless. As India
continues on its fascist journey, Indian Muslims are demonized, and Kashmiri Muslims “are
doubly marked as the demonized other” (Zia 2020).
Conclusion
Rachel Busbridge has argued that the framework of settler colonialism has brought a legibility
to analyses of Palestine as an occupation in comparison to studies of the United States, Australia,
and Canada (2018: 98). This legibility is both appropriate and required in relation to India’s
transformative necropolitical engagement in Kashmir. As Indian settler colonial fascism contin-
ues to prove catastrophic for Kashmiris even as they continue to resist, it is absolutely crucial to
understand the history of India’s engagement with Kashmir in terms of the overlapping terms of
colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. To this end, while it is important to understand
Hindutva fascism in the current era, it is important to map the colonial, imperial and settler
colonial forms and practices through which Indian state violence continues to be exercised in
Kashmir. Aime Cesaire (1972) once argued for tracing European fascism in the Nazi era to
European colonialism. The same could be said with regard to tracing India’s fascism in the cur-
rent era to its settler/colonial relationship to Kashmir.
Notes
1 See the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society webpages for major human rights reports as well
as an annual review of human rights in Jammu and Kashmir: http://jkccs.net
2 These are the reports from the fact-finding missions in the immediate aftermath of the August 2019
siege: Jean Dreze, Kavita Krishnan, Maimoona Mollah, and Vimal Bhai, Caged Kashmir, 14 August 2019,
www.nchro.org/index.php/2019/08/14/kashmir-caged-a-fact-finding-report-by-jean-dreze-kavita-
krishnan-maimoona-mollah-and-vimal-bhai/; National Federation of Indian Women, Pragatish-
eel Mahila Sangathan Delhi, and Muslim Women’s Forum, “Women’s Voice: Fact-finding report
on Kashmir,” September 24, 2019, http://en.maktoobmedia.com/2019/09/24/full-text-womens-
voice-fact-finding-report-on-kashmir; Women against Sexual Violence and State Repression, Zulm,
Zakhm, Azaadi . . . The Voices of Kashmiri Women, October 5, 2019, https://wssnet.org/2019/10/05/
zulm-zakhm-azaadi-the-voices-of-kashmiri-women/; Anirudh Kala, Brinelle D’Souza, Revati Laul &
Shabnam Hashmi, #KashmirCivilDisobedience: Trauma, Resistance, Resilience, Two Months On,
12 October 2019, <https://kashmirscholars.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/kashmir-civil-disobediance-
a-citizens-report.pdf>; Nitya Ramakrishnan & Nandini Sundar, ‘ “Go back to India and cover every
statue of Gandhi so that he doesn’t have to face this shame”: Kashmiris mark the 150th Anniver-
sary of Gandhi’s birthday with Satyagraha’, October 14, 2019, https://kashmirscholars.files.wordpress.
com/2019/10/nitya-nandini-report-on-kashmir-public.pdf; Mihir Desai et al., Imprisoned Resist-
ance: 5 August and its aftermath, October 31, 2019, www.pucl.org/sites/default/files/reports/Impris
oned%20Resistance-final%20for%20dissemination.pdf
Works Cited
Ali, Rao Farman. 2017. History of Armed Struggles in Kashmir. Srinagar: JayKay Books.
Anand, Dibyesh. 2012. “China and India: Postcolonial Informal Empires in the Emerging Global Order.”
Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 24(1): 68–86.
Ankit, Rakesh. 2016. “The Accession of Junagadh, 1947–48: Colonial sovereignty, state violence, and
post-independence India.” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 53(3): 371–404.
———. 2018. “Junagadh, India and the Logic of Occupation and Appropriation, 1947–1949.” Studies in
History 34(2): 109–140.
350
Batool, Essar, Ifrah Butt, Samreena Mushtaq, Munaza Rashid, and Natasha Rather. 2016. Do you Remem-
ber Kunan Poshpora. New Delhi: Zubaan.
BBC News. 2019. “Citizenship Amendment Bill: India’s New Anti-Muslim Law Explained.”
———. December 11. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-50670393.
Behera, Navnita Chadha. 2006. Demystifying Kashmir. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
Benvinisti, Eyal. 2013. The International Law of Occupation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Bhambra, Gurminder. 2014. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies 17(2): 115–121.
Bhan, Mona. 2018. “’In Search of the Aryan Seed’: Race, Religion, and Sexuality in Indian-occupied
Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and
Cynthia Mahmood, 74–102. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bhan, Mona, Haley Duschinski, and Goldie Osuri. 2019. “The International Community Must Intervene
in Kashmir.” Open Democracy, August 14. www.opendemocracy.net/en/international-community-
must-intervene-kashmir/.
Bhan, Mona, Haley Duschinski, and Ather Zia. 2018. “Introduction. ‘Rebels of the Street’: Violence,
Protest and Freedom in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona
Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood, 1–41. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Bose, Sumantra. 2003. Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace. Boston: Harvard University Press.
Bose, Sumantra. 2007. Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri-Lanka. Boston:
Harvard University Press.
Busbridge, Rachel. 2018. “Israel-Palestine and the Settler-Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decol-
onization.” Theory, Culture & Society 35(1): 91–115.
Cesairé, Aimé. 1972. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Chatterjee, Partha. 2019. “Kashmir is the Test Bed for a New Model of Internal Colonialism.” The Wire,
August 28.
Copland, Ian. 1981. “Islam and Political Mobilisation in Kashmir, 1931–34.” Pacific Affairs 54(2): 228–259.
Dar, Masrook. 2010. “Negotiations on Kashmir: A Concealed Story.” Foreign Policy Journal, August 5.
www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/08/05/negotiations-on-kashmir-a-concealed-story/3/.
Desai, Mihir et al. 2019. Imprisoned Resistance: 5 August and Its aftermath. October 31. www.pucl.org/sites/
default/files/reports/Imprisoned%20Resistance-final%20for%20dissemination.pdf.
Dreze, Jean, Kavita Krishnan, Maimoona Mollah, and Vimal Bhai. 2019. Caged Kashmir. August 14.
www.nchro.org/index.php/2019/08/14/kashmir-caged-a-fact-finding-report-by-jean-dreze-kavita-
krishnan-maimoona-mollah-and-vimal-bhai/.
Duschinski, Haley and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh. 2017. “Constituting the Occupation: Preventative
49(3): 314–337.
Duschinski, Haley and Bruce Hoffman. 2011. “Everyday Violence, institutional denial, and struggles for
justice in Kashmir.” Race and Class 52(4): 44–70.
Essa, Azad. 2019. “Arab Regimes Are Fully on Board with India’s Settler-Colonial Project in Kashmir.”August 21.
www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/arab-nations-are full-board-indias-settler-colonial-project-kashmir.
Faheem, Farrukh. 2018. “Interrogating the Ordinary: Everyday Politics and the Struggle for Azadi in
Cynthia Mahmood. 230–247. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Fitzgerald, Stephanie. 2015. Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence. Albuquer-
que: University of New Mexico.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. London: Allen Lane.
Hajjar, Lisa. 2005. Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza. Berkeley:
Harris, Cheryl. 1993. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review 106(8): 1707–1791.
Hussain, Nasser. 2003. The Jurisprudence of Emergency. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Hussain, Shahla. 2018. “Kashmiri Visions of Freedom: The Past and the Present.” In Kashmir: History,
Politics, Representation, edited by Chitralekha Zutshi. 89–110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jammu and Kashmir Coalition for Civil Society 2020. “Kashmir’s Internet Siege: An Ongoing Assault on
Digital Rights.” August. https://jkccs.net/report-kashmirs-internet-siege/.
Junaid, Mohamed. 2013. “Death and Life Under Occupation: Space, Violence and Memory in Kashmir.”
351
Goldie Osuri
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. 2009. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. Ranikhet: Permanent
Black.
Kala, Anirudh, Brinelle D’Souza, Revati Laul, and Shabnam Hashmi. 2019. #KashmirCivilDisobedience:
Trauma, Resistance, Resilience, Two Months On. October 12. https://kashmirscholars.files.wordpress.
com/2019/10/kashmir-civil-disobediance-a-citizens-report.pdf.
Kak, Sanjay, ed. 2013. Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir. Chicago, IL: Haymarket
Books.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2019. “India’s Settler-Colonial Project in Kashmir Takes a Disturbing Turn.” The Washington
Post, August 5. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/05/indias-settler-colonial-project-kashmir-
takes-disturbing-turn/.
The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce and Industry. 2020. “Preliminary Economic Loss Assessment
Report.” January 13. https://kashmirscholars.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/kashmir-chamber-of-
commerce-report-january-2020.pdf.
Kaul, Suvir. 2011. “Indian Empire (and the Case of Kashmir).” Economic and Political Weekly XVI(13):
66–75.
Kaul, Nitasha. 2018. “India’s Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender and (Anti) Nationalism.” Femi-
nist Review 119(1): 126–143.
Kaul, Nitasha and Ather Zia. 2018. “Knowing in Our Own Ways.” Economic and Political Weekly LIII(47):
33–35.
Kazi, Seema. 2018. “Law, Gender and Governance in Kashmir.” In Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation,
edited by Chitralekha Zutshi, 150–171. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kazi, Seema. 2009. Between Democracy and Nation: Gender and Militarisation in Kashmir. London: Oxford
University Press.
Kesavan, Mukul. 2019. “The Greatest Threat to Indian Democracy Today.” The Telegraph, July 28. www.
telegraphindia.com/opinion/nrc-and-the-citizenship-bill-are-the-greatest-threat-to-indian-democ
racy-today/cid/1695315.
Kumar, Amit and Fayaz Ahmad Dar. 2015. “Marginality and Historiography: The Case of Kashmir’s His-
tory.” Economic and Political Weekly 50(39).
Kumar, Amit. 2013. “The revolt of 1865.” Kashmir Reader, May 2.
Lamb, Alastair. 1997. Incomplete Partition: The Genesis of the Kashmir Dispute 1947–1948. Hertingfordbury:
Roxford.
Lone, Fozia. 2018. Historical Title, Self-Determination, and the Kashmir Question: Changing Perspectives in
International Law. Leiden & Boston: Brill.
Malik, Inshah. 2019. Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir. London: Palgrave
Pivot.
Mahmud, Ershad. 2018. “The Contingencies of Everyday Life in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.” In Resisting
Occupation in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood,
Mathur, Shubh. 2016. The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict: Grief and Courage in a South Asian Borderland.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Mazrui, Ali. A 2005. “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Said, V.Y. Mudimbe, and beyond.” Research in
African Literatures 36(3): 68–82.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15(11): 11–40.
Mishra, Pankaj. 2011. “Introduction.” In Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, edited by Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhatt,
Angana P. Chatterji, Habbah Khatun, Pankaj Mishra, and Arundhati Roy, 1–6. London and New York:
Verso.
Misri, Deepti. 2019. “Showing Humanity, Violence and Visuality in Kashmir.” Cultural Studies 33(3):
527–549.
Mir, Hilal. 2018. “Kashmir’s Everlasting Insurgency.” TRT World, January 30. www.trtworld.com/opinion/
essay-in-the-kashmir-valley-insurgency-is-a-way-of-life-14724.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mudimbe, Valentin Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mushtaq, Samreen and Mudasir Amin. 2021. “ ‘We Will Memorise Our Home’: Exploring Settler Colo-
nialism as an Interpretive Framework for Kashmir.” Third World Quarterley 42(12): 3012–3029.
National Federation of Indian Women, Pragatisheel Mahila Sangathan Delhi, and Muslim Women’s Forum.
2019. “Women’s Voice: Fact-finding report on Kashmir.” September 24. http://en.maktoobmedia.
com/2019/09/24/full-text-womens-voice-fact-finding-report-on-kashmir.
352
Noorani, A. G. 2011. Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Osuri, Goldie. 2015. “Sovereignty, Postcoloniality, and Gendering Human Rights: Rape and Occupa-
tion.” Borderlands Ejournal 14(1): 1–21.
———. 2017. “Imperialism, Colonialism, and Sovereignty in the (Post) Colony: India and Kashmir.” Third
World Quarterly 38(11): 2428–2443.
Pant, Harsh. 2004. “India-Israel Partnership: Convergence and Constraints.” Middle East Review of Interna-
tional Affairs 4: 60–73.
Parvaiz, Athar 2020. “Forest Land Identified for Development After Reorganisation of Jammu and Kash-
mir.” The Wire, January 8. https://thewire.in/government/forest-land-jammu-and-kashmir.
Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham and London: Duke University
Press.
Rai, Mridu. 2004. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir. London: Hurst.
Ramakrishnan, Nitya & Nandini Sundar 2019. “ ‘Go Back to India and Cover Every Statue of Gandhi
So That He Doesn’t Have to Face This Shame’: Kashmiris Mark the 150th Anniversary of Gandhi’s
Birthday with Satyagraha.” October 14. https://kashmirscholars.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/nitya-
nandini-report-on-kashmir-public.pdf.
Roy, Arundhati. 2011. “Azadi: The Only Thing Kashmiris Want.” In Kashmir: The Case for Freedom, edited
by Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhatt, Angana P. Chatterji, Habbah Khatun, Pankaj Mishra, and Arundhati Roy,
57–71. London and New York: Verso.
———. 2019. “The Silence is the Loudest Sound.” The New York Times, August 15.
Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage.
Schmitt, Carl. 1985. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, translated by George
Schwab, Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press.
Schofield, Victoria. 2010. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War. London, New York:
IB Tauris.
Shillam, Robbie. 2012. “Forget English Freedom, Remember Atlantic Slavery: Common Law, Commercial
Law and the Significance of Slavery for Classical Political Economy.” New Political Economy 17(5): 591–609.
Singh, Bawa Satinder. 1971. “Raja Gulab Singh’s Role in the first Anglo-Sikh War.” Modern Asian Studies
5(1): 35–59.
Snedden, Christopher. 2015. Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris. London: Hurst and Company.
Tremblay, Reeta Chowdhari. 2018. “Contested Governance, Competing Nationalisms and Disenchanted
Publics: Kashmir beyond Intractability?” In Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation, edited by Chitrale-
kha Zutshi, 220–244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2018. “Report on the Situation of
Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016
to April 2018, and General Concerns in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan.” June 14.
www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/IN/DevelopmentsInKashmirJune2016ToApril2018.pdf.
———. 2019. “Update of the Situation of Human Rights in Indian-administered Kashmir and Pakistan-
administered Kashmir from May 2018 to April 2019.” July 8. www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/
IN/KashmirUpdateReport_8July2019.pdf.
Waheed, Mirza. 2016. “India’s Crackdown in Kashmir: Is this the World’s First Mass Blinding?” The
Guardian, November 8. www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/08/india-crackdown-in-kashmir-
is-this-worlds-first-mass-blinding.
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler-colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research
8(4): 387–409.
Women Against Sexual Violence and State Repression. 2019. Zulm, Zakhm, Azaadi . . . The Voices of
Kashmiri Women, October 5. https://wssnet.org/2019/10/05/zulm-zakhm-azaadi-the-voices-of-
kashmiri-women/.
Zargar, Haris. 2019. “Kashmir’s Resistance Anthem.” New Frame, October. www.newframe.com/kashmirs-
resistance-anthem/.
Zia, Ather. 2016. “Azadi Resurrected: A Referendum in Blood.” Huffington Post India, July 31. www.
huffingtonpost.in/ather-zia/azadi-resurrected-a-referendum-in-blood_a_21460446/.
———. 2018. “The Killable Kashmiri Body: The Life and Execution of Afzal Guru.” In Resisting Occupa-
tion in Kashmir, edited by Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, Ather Zia, and Cynthia Mahmood, 103–128.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
———. 2019a “Blinding Kashmiris: The Right to Maim and the Indian Military Occupation in Kashmir.”
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21(6): 773–786.
353
Goldie Osuri
———. 2019b. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: Uni-
———. 2020. “The Hindu Rashtra Comes of Age.” Contending Modernities, January 3. https://contend
ingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/the-hindu-rashtra-comes-of-age/.
Zia, Ather and Haley Duschinski. 2018. “Kashmir Quagmire: The Legend of UNO Sahab.” Outlook India,
July 4. www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/kashmir-quagmire-the-legend-of-uno-sahab/300353.
Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2009. “’Designed for Eternity’: Kashmiri Shawls, Empire, and Cultures of Production
and Consumption in Mid-Victorian Britain.” Journal of British Studies 48(2): 420–440.
———. 2018. “Introduction: New Directions in the Study of Kashmir.” In Kashmir: History, Politics, Rep-
resentation, edited by Chitralekha Zutshi, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
354
25
SANCTIONED IGNORANCE
AND THE CRISIS OF
SOLIDARITY FOR KASHMIR
Ather Zia
Introduction
In 1948 the issue of Kashmir and Palestine was amongst the first on the agenda of the newly
formed United Nations. Yet in contemporary geopolitics, Kashmir is often relegated to a simple
bilateral and territorial conflict between India and Pakistan. Over the years the right to self-
determination of Kashmiri people mandated by the UN has been sidelined. Cold war politics
facilitated the Indian government in gradually downgrading Kashmir to the point of calling
it a domestic matter and a law-and-order situation. After 9/11, India has further subsumed
Kashmiri resistance under the stereotype of “Islamic terrorism.” In the last few decades, how-
ever, India’s hegemonic discourse on Kashmir has begun to wane. The Kashmir issue became
re-internationalized when India militarily and forcibly stripped Kashmir of its autonomy in
2019. This chapter deploys the concept of “sanctioned ignorance” (Spivak 1999) to trace how
the Kashmir issue and the demands of Kashmiris have been overwritten, invalidated, and crimi-
nalized by India. The analysis contends that the Indian discourse obfuscated the Kashmir issue
which led to the waning of international attention and solidarity for the Kashmiris. To forge a
global solidarity for Kashmir will entail understanding the issue in its original historical context
and reinstate it as a genuine people’s resistance.
In Spivak’s theorization, sanctioned ignorance appears as the Western colonial silencing
of native people’s voices and histories. Sanctioned ignorance traces how purposeful silencing
through the “dismissing of a particular context as being irrelevant” (1985: 6) to propagate a spe-
cific, rather motivated way of looking at the world. Spivak’s focus is on the indigenous scholars
and students who are silenced in educational institutions which are predominantly Western
European in their intellectual and philosophical traditions. The lens of sanctioned ignorance
enables an understanding of how Western hegemonic knowledge and ethnocentric research
have justified colonial conquest. This chapter while drawing on Spivak’s theorization applies
it in a different context that demonstrates how India’s hegemonic discourse paves the way for
settler colonial policies in Kashmir.1 Scholars state that the increasingly neocolonial condition
of the Indian nation-state demands an understanding of its “colonial constitutionality” (Barua
2010) and “recalibration of one of the central tenets of these studies: the division of the world
into the Europe that colonized, and the non-Europe that was colonized” (Osuri 2019). Thus,
India needs to be understood in terms of “postcolonial colonialism” (ibid.), even before 2014,
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-31 355

Ather Zia
when the Hindu supremacist vision came to fruition. In this light, the Indian occupation in
Kashmir and its military goals become clear.
The dominant Indian nationalist ideologies project Kashmir as if it had no political history,
identity, or aspiration prior to India becoming a country. The desire for self-determination is
treated as deviance and the Kashmiri resistance is criminalized and punished as terrorism. All the
ruling dispensations in India thus far have downgraded Kashmir from an international dispute
to domestic dispute to be handled internally (Kaul 2018). For decades, explanations from the
Indian administration about the dispute have made Pakistan hypervisible solely as the enemy
state. A vested silence is maintained on its own the policies and the barbarity of its military
occupation which began in 1947 itself (Duschinski et al. 2018; Lamb 1991; Snedden 2013).
In Indian popular and political culture, from the secular parties to religious ones, Kashmir is
seamlessly woven into the Indian nation-state. The Indian nation-state’s ideas around gender,
beauty, religion, and honor have influenced the country’s Kashmir policy creating limits of
legitimacy on how to talk about Kashmir ( Julka 2021). The limits of legitimacy resonate with
the contours of sanctioned ignorance – about what is made true and false about Kashmir in the
Indian political discourse. Thus, the Indian vantage becomes legitimate and Kashmiri resist-
ance becomes illicit. India’s national honor, and sovereignty are seen as being threatened by the
Kashmiri resistance.
The refusal to acknowledge Kashmir as a genuine political dispute ensures that any solidarity
in Indian quarters, if any at all, is selective and shallow. Even amongst the Indian progressive
sections, any support shown is often limited to amelioration of human rights violations or at
the most removal of draconian laws in the Valley. Such a limited and selective solidarity ends
up bolstering the hegemonic Indian narrative. It obfuscates “the lived realities of the occupied
Kashmiri people” (Amin and Mushtaq 2020) and strengthens the Indian settler colonial project
in Kashmir. This chapter argues that to overcome the sanctioned ignorance around Kashmir
India must be acknowledged as a neocolonial power, and Kashmir as its long-held colony where
the nation’s settler colonial desires are coming to fruition (Duschinski et al. 2018; Ghosh 2019;
Harvard Law Review 2020; Amin and Mushtaq 2020).
The renewal of Kashmir struggle was marked by the start of the armed insurrection in
1989. Since then, Kashmir has increasingly re-entered global discourse while confronting the
Indian military occupation’s increasingly disproportionate brutality. The Indian policy of mili-
tary occupation in Kashmir is being increasingly challenged and disputed by Kashmiris on the
ground. Even though under brutal repression, they protest India through a daily resistance
which is cultural, political, and intellectual in nature (Duschinski and Hoffman 2011; Bhan
et al. 2020). The Kashmiri Intifada, which is the name given to the cultural and political resist-
ance movement that includes grassroots activism, civilian uprisings, street fighting, human rights
advocacy, literature, and art, has also evolved (Zia 2020). An increasing number of Kashmiri
activists, writers, journalists, scholars, and human rights defenders active both inside and outside
Kashmir have continued to shed critical light on the voices of Kashmiris in an unprecedented
manner (Kanjwal 2019a, 2019b).
In the last decade, Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship has coalesced around the centrality
of Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination and independence; demands which is rejected
by the Indian government. The Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship illumines the region’s
often neglected history before and after 1947 and the purposeful negation of Kashmiri people’s
demands by the hegemonic powers (Rai 2004, 2018; Duschinski et al. 2018; Lone 2018; Malik
2019; Zia 2019; Hussain 2021). On August 5, 2019, Indian occupied Kashmir burst anew into
the international conscience when India militarily and against its own constitution removed
the region’s quasi-autonomous status (Parthasathy 2019; Deshmane 2019). As Kashmiris in the
356
Crisis of Solidarity for Kashmir
region were silenced, the diaspora and their allies were mobilized to garner support for the
besieged people. August 2019 became another milestone in the re-internationalization of the
issue. The crisis was so grave that Genocide Watch put out an alert on the region and The Lancet
wrote an editorial on the ensuing humanitarian crisis (Stanton 2019).
In the last 30 years, global human rights organizations including Amnesty International,
Human Rights Watch, Medicins Sans Frontiers, and the Red Cross have been able to report
on Kashmir but not without increasing challenges. As recently as 2019, the International Com-
mittee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had to suspend its work in Kashmir after it was stripped of
its autonomy (Mir 2020). In the early 1990s, a report by the International Commission of
Jurists (1995) reported on not just human rights violations but also the need for implementing
Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination. The United Nations Military Observer Group
maintains 44 installations in the region. In 2018, the United Nations Human Rights Commis-
sion (OHCHR) took full cognizance of the human rights violations committed by the Indian
government since an uprising broke out in 2016. This OHCHR report became a milestone
in the process of rejuvenating the Kashmir issue. Despite the UN having mandate on resolving
the dispute, the Indian government, political and media elite as well as masses denounced the
report as meddling in India’s internal matter (Krishnan 2018). The report was called “fallacious,
tendentious, and motivated” and its findings held as “overtly prejudiced” that sought to “build a
false narrative” (Gopalan 2018). This report notably countered India’s downgrading of Kashmir
to a mere domestic dispute.
The following sections illuminate the ways in which sanctioned ignorance is bolstered
through vocabularies of hegemony that impose Indian ownership over Kashmir, and selective
solidarity which rather than help the Kashmiri cause ends up strengthening the Indian state’s
hold on Kashmir.
The Sanctioned Ignorance of Atoot Ang and Kashmiriyat

In Indian cultural and political discourse, an oft-repeated trope is that Kashmir is an “atoot ang”
(inseparable part) of India. This claim is contrary to Kashmiris for whom accession to India was
forced and temporary, and subject to the arbitration from the UN (Duschinski et al. 2018). It
begs the question, how do the Indian government, politicians, and masses including celebrities
and other opinion leaders accept Kashmir as an unbreakable part without consensus from Kash-
miris. Even the special status assigned to Kashmir under Article 370 of the Indian constitution,
now forcibly removed, is a testament to the uniqueness of Kashmiri nationalism. Despite India’s
policies to win their hearts and minds, Kashmiris never subscribed to the Indian identity (Times
of India 2020; Kaul 2010). While the trope of atoot ang goes against the consensus of Kashmiris,
it has become a mantra to gauge the patriotism of Indians themselves.
Most of the Indian opinion considers “Kashmir is a property of India – a valuable piece of
real estate that Pakistan wants to grab – and that Kashmiris are a nuisance who must be taught
to behave” (Chatterji 2018). However, Kashmir’s history and politics before or after 1947 does
not support the fact that Kashmir is an atoot ang of India. The relationship with India even
under the special status was very much contested, coerced, and deemed temporary until the
plebiscite was held. Yet Indian government’s policies saw “integration” of Kashmir down the
line as the only possibility, with or without people’s consensus. In this, the weaponization of
electoral democracy through client politicians, further solidified the trope atoot ang to justify
India’s control. The trope of integration requires a drastic shift from the history of Kashmir
and the historical demands of its peoples. To achieve this, the process of coercive engagement
began with Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru the doyen of the “secular” Indian National Congress
357
Ather Zia
(INC), India’s oldest political party with roots in British politics. Nehru is India’s first Prime
Minister who lauded as single-handedly delivering Kashmir to India (Noorani 2019). On one
hand Nehru promised to honor the Kashmiris’ right to self-determination and simultaneously
claimed that complete integration of Kashmir was only a matter of time because autonomy was
already being eroded. The autonomy statute established a constitutional relationship with India
which became a trojan horse inside Kashmir. It acted as a conduit to steadily implement laws
that subsumed the promise of plebiscite and criminalized all movements for self-determination,
thus eviscerating itself. In 2019, the INC minister publicly boasted that they had diluted Arti-
cle 370 twelve times without creating a spectacle unlike the current government headed by
the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indeed, previous governments had done
it discreetly through puppet regimes, coups, coercion, rigged elections, and detention. Thus,
the removal of autonomy by the BJP was only a culmination of old policies. Some opinions
portray the removal of autonomy by the BJP as “radically different” (Chatterji 2018), which is
misleading. It is well established that all Indian governments since 1947 have followed the same
nationalist policy in Kashmir (Noorani 2014).
Critical Kashmir Studies scholars have challenged India’s arguments, especially those that
obfuscate Kashmir’s historical demand for democratic sovereignty; present the Kashmir issue as
Pakistan’s proxy war; reduce Kashmiri resistance to the erroneous stereotype of “Islamic ter-
rorism”; and relegate the dispute to a domestic law and order situation. Exhaustive re-analysis
of historical events has established that in 1947 India acted as the aggressor (Lamb 1991; Scho-
field 2003; Osuri 2017; Lone 2018); that there is a discrepancy in the signing of the treaty of
accession with India (Lamb 1991; Faheem 2018); and that the uprising in the western parts of
Kashmir, which India reduces to a “tribal raid,” was not a simply Pakistani invasion but rather
a revolt led by Kashmiris (Lamb 1991; Snedden 2013; Duschinski et al. 2018; Zia 2019; Malik
2019; Hussain 2021). Questions have been raised on the validity of the fleeing and defeated
king acceding the entire princely state, including the liberated region of Azad (free) Kashmir
to India (Lamb 1991; Snedden 2013). These are only few of the important questions which
the Indian historical narratives ignore to make Indian control over Kashmir appear natural and
legitimate. However, in the last two decades a distinct shift is occurring around understanding
Kashmir. From analyzing the Kashmir dispute using the exploratory lens of “internal colo-
nialism” (Chatterji 2018) to a growing body of scholarship on Kashmir which seeks “clearer
more accountable knowledge” (Osuri 2020) to ultimately overcoming the colonial unknow-
ing2 around Kashmir (Da Costa 2019). The questions around engaging with the “discomfort
of Indian occupation” (Dar 2015) are becoming crucial in decolonizing knowledge about
Kashmir.
Like atoot ang, the trope of kashmiriyat (Kashmiriness) has been imposed on Kashmiris. Kash-
miriyat is a term that is supposed to invoke the ideal of religious syncretism between the native
Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits (Brahmins). Critical Kashmir Studies and Kashmiri scholars
argue that the word kashmiriyat is a notion invented after 1947 by National Conference a
political party that was hugely influenced by Jawaharlal Nehru and favored joining India (Hassan
2010; Bhan, Misri, and Zia 2020). The suffix “iyat” which means the condition or state of being
the thing or being in the role; it is often denoted by the word it is suffixed to, comes from Urdu.
If at all Kashmiriness was to be a word in Kashmiri it would have been kashrut and not kashmiri-
yat. The sloganeering around kashmiriyat by the Indian government is denounced as propaganda
by Kashmiri masses and scholars alike (Aslam 2018).
Kashmiri scholars both Pandit and Muslims warn that this manufactured wordplay on reli-
gious syncretism is deployed to simplistically serve Indian secularism (Rai 2004) and it does not
attend to the nuances of religious difference (Zutshi 2003). The communal relations between
358
the Pandits and Muslims were unequal and marred by difference in status, caste, class, and politi-
cal loyalties. The Muslims were a marginalized despite being an exponentially larger population
and a dominant portion of the Pandit population were political and economic elite (Rai 2004).
However, the Indian political narrative disingenuously imposes a simplistic harmony between
the two communities (Wani 2011). Pakistan is cast as the sole reason for sowing discord in the
Kashmiri society.
Selective Solidarity and Human Rights Violations

Solidarity for Kashmir from the Indian activist quarters, be it from individuals or collectives
predicates only on curbing human rights violations by the Indian troops. They stop short of
acknowledging Kashmir as a genuine political dispute, thus, behaving as if human rights viola-
tions exist in a vacuum. Calling for the prosecution of guilty army personnel is rare because it is
seen unpatriotic and unfavorable (Navlakha 2011). A few Indian activists who dared to confront
their government to treat Kashmir as a political dispute or condemned the army have been stra-
tegically persecuted or silenced (Bharadwaj 2020). There has not been a single prosecution of
armed forces personnel by the Indian government. On the contrary they receive promotions,
awards, on the spot commendations, and other recognitions (Singh 2017). The Indian troops
inside Kashmir are protected by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) which gives
the armed and paramilitary forces sweeping powers that facilitate arbitrary arrest and detention,
custodial and extrajudicial executions, torture, rape, and otherwise cruel, inhuman, degrading
treatment, and it reinforces the impunity of offenders acting under it, including the authority
to shoot to kill (Human Rights Watch 2006; OHCHR 2018). The Indian government hails
AFPSA the holy grail without which their troops cannot function in Kashmir (Economic Times
2018). This becomes a tacit admission about the Indian government’s inability to suppress Kash-
miri resistance without violating basic human rights. Casting Kashmiri resistance unquestion-
ingly in the stereotype of “Islamic terrorism” the Indian government aligns its military action
in Kashmir with the global war on terrorism (Pandit 2019). This enables India to carry to carry
out gross human rights violations in full glare of the global community while propagating its
settler colonial policies without criticism.
The discourse around Kashmiris, be it generated in media, government, or masses projects
their society as Islamic orthodoxy and uniquely misogynistic. Kashmiri women are framed as
hapless victims of the male-dominated resistance movement. They are seen as stereotypically
oppressed, dependent, passive, and without agency (Malik 2019; Zia 2019). Kashmiri men
are hyper-fetishized as the stereotypes of “Islamists,” “terrorists,” and “orthodox” from whose
clutches Kashmiri women and Kashmiri land must be freed. The specter of gender discrimina-
tion against Kashmiri women was made central by the Indian government in the removal of
autonomy in 2019. Discrimination of women was made to appear as a natural outcome of the
stereotype of Kashmiri Muslim patriarchy which in the common Indian narrative is portrayed
as uniquely violent and oppressive to all women. Kashmir’s autonomous status was framed as a
shield for a virulent Muslim patriarchal structure that perpetrated gender injustice as exempli-
fied by the women who married non-Kashmiris. Earlier in 2013, when Modi was campaign-
ing as a Prime Ministerial candidate, he had called for ending gender discrimination against
Kashmiri women (Yasir 2013). Modi had even used the example of the then Kashmir’s Chief
Minister Omar Abdullah’s sister, who is married to a non-Kashmiri blatantly lying about how
she was unable to buy property (ibid.). Even though this was refuted by Omar Abdullah himself
as not having basis on ground or the law but in India, nor the people, nor media or activists
registered this fact.
359
Ather Zia
Kashmiris of all shades – legal experts, local politicians, activists, journalists, and scholars –
deemed the gender discrimination argument to be dubious and strawman at best (Zia 2019). Yet
this reasoning was received uncritically by the Indian masses and in the long run became pivotal
in removal of autonomy. The Indian state blatantly projected itself as the protector of Kashmiri
women’s rights while its own record of human rights abuses and sexual violence in Kashmir
which is internationally documented and denounced, was negated. And this despite Kashmiri
women themselves voicing their dissent against the fetishization and stereotyping by the Indian
government and masses (Bhasin 2019; Kanth 2018; Kaul and Zia 2020).
Even though in the recent decades some literature in India has emerged that presents a more
nuanced analysis of Kashmiri women’s experiences and agency (Kazi 2010; Manecksha 2016).
Yet much of it propagates the trope of imperial feminism through trying to save Kashmiri
women who are often patronized and seen as subjects that need rescuing from their men (Bhat
2017; Malik 2019; Zia 2020). The solidarity proffered by Indian feminist groups to Kashmiri
women is limited to amelioration of the human rights violations. The human rights rhetoric
has become a universalizing lens especially in the Western liberal feminist perspective through
which women in global south must be rescued from aberrant violence (Abu Lughod 2002;
Chowdhary 2009; Grewal 1998). Indeed, Kashmiri women are seen in isolation from their men
and communities and exhorted as a separate category to be protected. Thus, when it comes
to Kashmiri women Indian feminism deploys a brown version of Western imperial feminism.
Feminist scholars who work in South Asia (including Kashmiri feminist scholars) have pre-
viously highlighted that the solidarity Indian feminists offer to Kashmiri women is within the
myopic frame of human rights issue while a deliberate silence is maintained on Kashmir’s dis-
puted political status (see “A Decolonial Statement on #MeToo in Kashmir” 2018; Ali et al.
2019).
The mere improvement of the human rights record of the Indian forces is not the end goal
of Kashmiri’s demands. The grave human rights abuses by the Indian military are a symptom of
the occupation and repression of the real demand of the Kashmiris for liberation and the right
to self-determination. The use of simplistic human rights discourse presumes women only as
individual, autonomous beings who can be rescued, rather than as members of families or other
group identities. This further demonizes the disempowered Kashmiri men as the oppressors of
their women. While attempting to pit the Kashmiri men as against their women, India is pro-
moted as the savior of Kashmiri women. Kashmiri men are not just demonized but marginal-
ized and feminized as a group in a patriarchal military occupation. The spectrum of protecting
human rights in Kashmir is limited to curbing military violence negating the fact that the right
to self-determination is also a human right.
Following the removal of autonomy, many Indian politicians and citizens publicly celebrated
the military conquest of Kashmir. Social media was flooded with misogynistic songs and rac-
ist tropes of “fair” Kashmiri women who were objectified as the spoils of war to be sexually
harassed, kidnapped, or forcibly married. There was little to no protest on behalf of Kashmiri
women from social justice or gender justice organizations. Thus, gender discrimination which
the government of India had propped as a reason for the removal of autonomy seemed a ruse,
in service of Indian hyper-religious and nationalist project in Kashmir.
Commenting on the activist groups who reported on Kashmir after August 2019, Kashmir
Scholars Consultative and Advocacy Network (KSCAN, a group of Kashmir and Kashmiri
scholars) noted that all were
uniformly disturbing, documenting: mass detentions of elected officials, doctors, law-

yers, and children as young as 12; use of torture and lethal force against civilians;
360
dwindling supplies of life-saving medical treatments and the inability of patients to

access hospitals; curtailing of religious freedoms; economic and ecological destruction;
land grabs; and demographic change.
(KSCAN 2019)
Recognizing the myth of the “backward” Kashmiri woman, the People’s Union for Civil Liber-
ties (PUCL) called for recognizing the dispute between peoples of Jammu and Kashmir and the
Indian government and
initiating an open a transparent unconditional dialogue with the peoples of Jammu and
Kashmir and their representatives so as to address peoples’ aspirations to determine and
define their own destinies through democratic means and to find a political solution
that respects the democratic will of the people in accordance with human rights and
international law.
(PUCL 2019)
Another group declared,
the whole of Kashmir is, now, a prison, under military control. The decisions taken
by the Modi Government on J&K are immoral, unconstitutional, and illegal. The
means being adopted by the Modi Government to hold Kashmiris’ captive and sup-
press potential protests are also immoral, unconstitutional, and illegal. We demand the
immediate restoration of Articles 370 and 35A. We assert that no decision about the
status or future of J&K should be taken without the will of its people.
(Dreze et al. 2019)
Re-conquering Kashmir and the Crisis of Solidarity

Sanctioned ignorance relates to ways in which intellectual practices obscure contemporary
concerns such as global capitalism and neocolonial processes. Sanctioned ignorance is, there-
fore, inseparable from colonial domination (Spivak 1985: 199). This was manifest during
the siege of August 5, 2019, when India unliterally and militarily removed Kashmir’s special
autonomous status under Article 370. The Indian government justified the removal of Kash-
mir’s autonomy by saying autonomy had impeded the region’s development and gave a host
of strawman arguments to support it (Zia 2019). For the Kashmiri people, living in a Muslim
majority state, their long-standing fear of settler colonialism and its attendant evils of dispos-
session and cultural imperialism already in motion were openly imposed after August 2019
( Junaid 2019). Nearly all the eight million Kashmiris were imprisoned in their homes under a
curfew and communication lockdown. There was a complete communication blackout, which
meant no phones, no internet, and not even basic cable TV. While curfews, communication
bans, and lockdowns are not new to Kashmiris, the intensity and the duration of the siege
sent a shockwave across the international community. India broke its own record in the long-
est internet shutdown; over eight months which continued partially through the Covid-19
pandemic.
The injustice being meted on Kashmiris was celebrated by “much of the Indian public”
sharing their “vulgar joy” as “Kashmir Azad ho gaya aaj” (“Kashmir has been freed today”)
(Anand 2019). The Indian government projected the forcible removal of Kashmir’s autonomy
as “integration” of Kashmir, where Kashmiris viewed it as “conquering” or re-annexation of
361
Ather Zia
Kashmir. The brazen display of the “victor” and “conquerors” mentality by the Indian masses
illustrates how deep the sanctioned ignorance permeates. There were not many Indian voices
that protested the erasure of Kashmir’s autonomy. The only disagreements pertained to the bra-
zen indiscretion of the military spectacle and not the removal itself.
India in its early years of formation saw its role in anti-colonial movements vis-á-vis indig-
enous people’s resistance. In some measure, it was an ally of Palestine despite its linkages with
the Israeli settler state. Even though today India is deeply entrenched diplomatically and militar-
ily with Israeli settler state, Indian government, and masses profess support for the Palestinian
people (Osuri 2020). While the sentiment is that Palestine is under illegal occupation, the same
understanding is not extended to Kashmir. The brazen neglect of “Kashmir being a Palestine
that no one knows about” (Zia 2019) comes from the sanctioned ignorance which allows for
Indians to see Kashmir as “not occupation.” It appears that the sanctioned ignorance is also a
deliberate ignorance to justify Indian settler colonization.
The world is fast-moving together for closer conversations on how to fight injustices wrecked
by the neo-imperial and neoliberal order globally, including issues ranging from ecocide to mal-
development to occupations and dispossession of local and indigenous peoples. Even though
India has benefited from its postcolonial location and is heralded as the largest democracy in
South Asia, however imperfect, its neocolonial desires manifest and solidify in Kashmir. In
Kashmir, India has weaponized electoral democracy as a “politics” to camouflage its military
occupation (Zia 2019). Duschinski and Ghosh (2017: 34) call India’s strategy “occupational
constitutionalism” a form of legal incorporation of Kashmir that “became sedimented through
the work of the courts across time.” Full contextual understanding, in the bright glare of history,
for any issue is a stepping-stone toward forging solidarity. This process requires an amalgam
of situated knowledge, genuine acknowledgment, recognition of one’s own positionality; all
focused to alter the status quo and push a just resolution. The recognition that Kashmir is under
the Indian military occupation becomes imperative in lending a genuine solidarity to Kashmir
and anything less stands as mere tokenism.
Notes
1 Thus far, nation-states like India itself have been understood quite successfully in postcolonial terms.
The analytical lens of the subaltern, another Spivakian term, is preeminent in this school of thought.
But where do zones like Kashmir and Kashmiri people fit in this context? For Kashmir, postcolonial
theory might be guilty of hiding as much as it has exposed. This chapter deploys postcolonial analysis
to understand the predicament of those invisibilized by the post colonies themselves.
2 “Colonial unknowing endeavors to render unintelligible the entanglements of racialization and coloni-
zation, occluding the mutable historicity of colonial structures and attributing finality to conquest and
dispossession” (Vimalassery et al. 2016).
Works Cited
Abu Lughod. 2002. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural
Relativism and Its Others.” American Anthopologist 104(3): 783–790.
Ali, Nosheen, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukher-
jee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia. 2019. “Geographies of Occupation in South Asia.”
Feminist Studies 45(2–3).
Amin, Mudasir and Samreen Mushtaq. 2020. “On Solidarity: Reading Love, Loss, and Longing in Kash-
mir.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 27(3): 380–384.
362
Anand, Dibyesh. 2019. “Kashmir Is a Dress Rehearsal for Hindu Nationalist Fantasies.” Foreign Policy,
August 8. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/08/kashmir-is-a-dress-rehearsal-for-hindu-nationalist-
fantasies/.
Aslam, M. J. 2018. “Kashmiriyat: Fact or Fiction? A Kashmiri Perspective.” Countercurrents. https://coun-
tercurrents.org/2018/04/kashmiriyat-fact-or-fiction-a-kashmiri-perspective/.
Baruah, Sanjib. 2010. “AFSPA: Legacy of Colonial Constitutionalism.” Seminar 615.
Bharadwaj, Ananya. 2020. “Gautam Navlakha had links with Pakistan’s ISI, says NIA in Bhima Koregaon
chargesheet.” The Print, October 10. https://theprint.in/india/gautam-navlakha-had-links-with-
pakistans-isi-says-nia-in-bhima-koregaon-chargesheet/520717/.
Bhasin, Anuradha. 2019. “The Valley of Fear: Is Kashmir Finally ‘Free’?” Sabrang India. September 10.
https://www.sabrangindia.in/content-authors/anuradha-bhasin-jamwal.
Bhat, Adil. 2017. “Oppressed by Religion, Kashmiri Women Are Forgetting How to Sing.” The Wire,
August 17. https://thewire.in/culture/kashmir-women-zaira-wasim.
Chatterji, Partha. 2018. “Kashmir is the Test Bed for a New Model of Internal Colonialism.” The Wire, August 28.
https://thewire.in/government/kashmir-is-the-test-bed-for-a-new-model-of-internal-colonialism.
Chowdhary Elora Halim. 2009. “Braiding US Women of Color and Transnational Feminisms.” Cultural
Dynamics 21(1): 51–78.
Da Costa, Dia. 2019. “Kashmir: Memories of Colonial Unknowing.” Digital Humanities India, Febru-
ary 28. www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=905d3055675049f593290428102ea55f.
Dar, Huma. 2015. “When Will You Engage with the ‘Discomfort’ of Indian Occupied Kashmir?” Pulse Media,
September 10. https://pulsemedia.org/2015/09/10/dear-prof-chatterjee-when-will-you-engage-with-
the-discomfort-of-indian-occupied-kashmir/.
“A Decolonial Statement on #MeToo in Kashmir.” 2018. The Ladies Finger, October 10. http://theladies-
finger.com/a-decolonial-feminist-statement-on-me-too-in-kashmir/.
Deshmane, Akshay. 2019. “Kashmir: Scrapping Article 370 ‘Unconstitutional,’ ‘Deceitful,’ Says Legal
Expert A.G. Noorani.” Huffington Post India, August 8.
Devji, Faisal. 2010. “Kashmir and Intifada.” Thesigers, October 1. http://thesigers.com/analysis/2010/10/1/
kashmir-and-the-intifada.html.
Dreze, Jean, Krishnan Kavita, Maimoona Mollah, and Vimal Bhai. 2019. Kashmir Caged: A Fact Finding
Report. https://kashmirscholarsnetwork.org/kashmir-crisis-updates/.
Duschinski, Haley and Shrimoyee Nandini Ghosh. 2017. “Constituting the Occupation: Preven-
tive Detention and Permanent Emergency in Kashmir.” The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial
Law 49(3): 314–337.
Duschinski, Haley and Bruce Hoffman. 2011. “Everyday Violence, Institutional Denial and Struggles for
Justice in Kashmir.” Race and Class 52(4): 44–70.
Economic Times. 2018. “AFSPA: Parrikar calls Act Mandatory if Army is to Operate in Kashmir or
Any Other State.” July 12. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/afspa-parrikar-
calls-act-mandatory-if-army-is-to-operate-in-kashmir-or-any-other-state/articleshow/47457243.
cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst.
Faheem Farrukh. 2018. “Interrogating the Ordinary: Everyday Politics and the Struggle for Azadi in
Cynthia Mahmood. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gopalan, Sandeep. 2018. “UN’s Call for Inquiry into Kashmir Conflict is Misguided.”The Hill, June 19. https://
thehill.com/opinion/international/392854-uns-call-for-inquiry-into-kashmir-conflict-is-misguided.
Ghosh, Shrimoyee Nandini. 2019. “Dismantling Kashmir’s Special Status, One Nation, One Flag, One
Constitution?” Raoit, September 10. www.raiot.in/dismantling-370-in-kashmir-part-1/[https://
perma.cc/8ZB5-KZZN].28.INDIA.
Grewal, Inderpal. 1998. “ ‘Women’s Rights as Human Rights’: Feminist Practices, Global Feminism, and
Human Rights Regimes in Transnationality.” Citizenship Studies 3(3): 337–354.
Harvard Law Review. 2021. “From Domicile to Dominion: Indian Settler Colonial Agenda in Kashmir.”
134(7): 2530–2551. https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/134-Harv.-L.-Rev.-
2530–1.pdf.
363
Ather Zia
Hassan, K. H. 2010. “Migration of Kashmiri: Kashmiriyat Challenged.” Working Paper 237. Bangalore,
India: The Institute for Social and Economic Change.
Human Rights Watch. 2006. Everyone Lives in Fear: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir. New York:
Human Rights Watch.
Hussain, Shehla. 2021. Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Indian Express. 2018. “India Rejects UN Human Rights Report on Kashmir, Terms it ‘Motivated,
Fallacious.” June 14. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/motivated-and-fallacious-india-on-uns-
human-rights-report-on-kashmir-5217156/.
India Today. 2016. “Kanhaiya Kumar at India Today Conclave: Kashmir an Integral Part of India.”
March 18. www.indiatoday.in/india/delhi/story/kashmir-an-integral-part-of-india-jnus-kanhaiya-
kumar-at-india-today-conclave-313945-2016-03-18.
Kanth, Fatima. 2018. “Narratives of Kashmiri Women’s Protests, Women in Resistance.” Review of Women’s
Studies, Special Issue, Economic and Political Weekly (edited by Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia Ather) 53(47):
42–46.
International Commission of Jurists. 1995. Human Rights in Kashmir. Geneva, Switzerland. www.icj.
org/wp-content/uploads/1995/01/India-human-righst-in-Kashmir-fact-finding-mission-report-
1995-eng.pdf.
Junaid, Mohammad. 2019. “Disinherited and Disempowered, Kashmiris Have No Option but to Resist.”
The Globe Post, August 12. https://theglobepost.com/2019/08/12/kashmir-india-resistance/.
Julka, Amit. 2021. “Gendered Honor: How Mass Common Sense Shaped India’s Foreign Policy in Jammu
and Kashmir, 1947–1950.” Global Studies Quarterly 1(3). https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksab009.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2019a. “India’s Settler-Colonial Project in Kashmir Takes a Disturbing Turn.” Washington Post,
August 5. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/05/indias-settler-colonial-project-kashmir-
takes-disturbing-turn/.
———. 2019b. “The Day the Story of Kashmir Changed Forever.” Al Jazeera, October 24. www.aljazeera.
com/opinions/2019/10/24/the-day-the-story-of-kashmir-changed-forever.
Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Advocacy Network (KSCAN). 2019. “Letter to European Parliament
Members Visiting Kashmir on October 29, 2019.” October 28. https://kashmirscholars.files.wordpress.
com/2019/10/urgent-letter-to-ep-members-visiting-india-final.pdf.
Kaul, Nitasha. 2010. “Kashmir: A Place of Blood and Memory.” Open Democracy, August 31. www.open-
democracy.net/en/openindia/kashmir-from-contact-zone-to-conflict-zone/#_ftnref2.
———. 2018. “India’s Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender, (Anti)Nationalism.” Feminist Review
119(1): 126–143.
Kaul, Nitasha and Ather Zia. 2020. Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? New Delhi: Women Unlimited.
Kaul Suvir. 2018. Of Gardens and Graves: Kashmir, Poetry, Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Kazi, Seema. 2010. Between Democracy & Nation: Gender and Militarisation in Kashmir. New Delhi, India:
Women Unlimited.
Krishnan Kavita. 2018. “India’s Panicky Response to UN Report on Kashmir.” Sabrang India, Novem-
ber 30. https://sabrangindia.in/content-authors/kavita-krishnan-0.
Lamb, Alistair. 1991. Kashmir: A Disputed Legacy 1846–1990. London: Oxford.
Levin, S. Woolf Nicky. 2016. “A Million People ‘Check In’ at Standing Rock on Facebook to Sup-
port Dakota Pipeline Protesters.” The Guardian, October 31. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/
oct/31/north-dakota-access-pipeline-protest-mass-facebook-check-in.
Lone, Fozia N. 2018. Historical Title, Self-Determination and the Kashmir Question. Leiden: Brill Nijhoff.
Malik, Inshah. 2019. Muslim Women, Resistance and Agency: The Case of Kashmir. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Manecksha, Freny. 2016. Behold, I Shine: Narratives of Kashmir’s Women and Children. New Delhi: Rupa
Publications.
Mir, Hilal. 2020. “Kashmiris Suffer Further as ICRC Stops Humanitarian Work.” TRT World, January 15.
www.trtworld.com/magazine/kashmiris-suffer-further-as-icrc-stops-humanitarian-work-32965.
Mishra, Nityanand. 2017. “The Etymology of Kashmir: Setting the Record Straight.” Swarajya Magazine,
April 2. https://swarajyamag.com/culture/the-etymology-of-kashmir-setting-the-record-straight.
Misri, Deepti and Mona Bhan. 2019. “Kashmiri Pandits Must Reimagine the Idea of Return to Kashmir.”
Al Jazeera, August 10.www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/8/10/kashmiri-pandits-must-reimagine-
the-idea-of-return-to-kashmir.
364
Navlakha, Gautam. 2011. “The False Gods of Military Suppression.” In Until My Freedom Has Come, edited
by Sanjay Kak. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Noorani, A. G. 2014. The Dispute of Kashmir 1947–2012, Vol. 1 & 2. New Delhi: Tulika Books.
———. 2019. “From Kashmir and 370 to Partition, BJP’s Hatred of Nehru is Fuelled by Falsehood.”
The Wire, November 14. https://thewire.in/history/from-kashmir-and-370-to-partition-bjps-hatred-
of-nehru-is-fuelled-by-falsehoods.
Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukher-
jee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia. 2019. “Geographies of Occupation in South Asia.”
Feminist Studies 45(2–3).
OHCHR (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights). 2018. “Report on the Situation of
Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016
to April 2018.”
Osuri, Goldie 2017. “Imperialism, Colonialism and Sovereignty in the (Post)colony: India and Kash-
mir.” Third World Quarterly 38(11): 2428–2443.
———. 2019. “Kashmiris Are Living a Long Nightmare of Indian Colonialism.” The Conversation. https://
theconversation.com/kashmiris-are-living-a-long-nightmare-of-indian-colonialism-121925.
———. 2020. “Kashmir and Palestine: Itineraries of (Anti) Colonial Solidarity.” Identities: Global Studies
in Culture & Power 27(3).
Pandit, Idrisa. 2019. “India is Escalating Kashmir Conflict by Painting it as Terrorism.” Open Democracy,
December 2. www.opendemocracy.net/en/openindia/india-escalating-kashmir-conflict-painting-it-
terrorism/.
Parthasathy, S. 2019. “An Exercise of Executive Whim: Negation of Article 370 in J&K Doesn’t Stand up
to Constitutional Test, Strikes at Federalism.” Times of India, August 7.
People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL). 2019. “Imprisoned Resistance.” www.pucl.org/sites/default/
files/reports/Imprisoned%20Resistance-final%20for%20dissemination.pdf.
Rai, Mridu. 2004. Hindu Ruler, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir. Princeton, NJ:
———. 2018. “The Indian Constituent Assembly and the Making of Hindus and Muslims in Jammu and
Kashmir.” Asian Affairs 49(2): 205–221.
Singh, Sushant. 2017. “Despite Probe, Army Chief Gave Award ‘on the Spot’ to Major Gogoi Who Tied Man
to Jeep.” The Times of India, May 24. https://indianexpress.com/article/india/despite-probe-army-
chief-gave-award-on-the-spot-to-major-gogoi-who-tied-man-to-jeep-4670794/.
Schofield, Victoria. 2003. Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan, and the Unending War. London, UK: I.B.
Tauris.
Snedden, Christopher. 2013. Kashmir: The Unwritten History. Noida, India: Harper Collins.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1985. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Selected Subaltern Studies,
edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Oxford: Oxford University Press
———. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Boston: Harvard
University Press.
Stanton, Gregory. 2019. “Genocide Alert for Kashmir, India.” Genocidewatch, August 15. www.genocide-
watch.com/single-post/2019/08/15/Genocide-Alert-for-Kashmir-India.
Times of India. 2020. “Kashmiris Don’t Feel They’re Indian: Farooq.” September 24. https://timesofindia.
indiatimes.com/india/kashmiris-dont-feel-theyre-indian-farooq/articleshow/78286995.cms.
Vimalassery, Manu, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein. 2016. “Introduction: On Colonial
Unknowing.” Theory & Event 19(4).
Wani, Gull. 2011. “The Dimensions of the Kashmiri Identity.” In Kashmiriyat Through the Ages, edited by
Fida Mohammad Hassnain. Srinagar: Gulshan Books.
Yasir, Sameer. 2013. “Modi’s ‘Lalkar’ Rally: New Stand on Article 370, Hints at New Ally.” First Post,
December 2. www.firstpost.com/politics/modis-lalkar-rally-new-stand-on-article-370-alliance-with-
pdp-1260445.html.
Zia, Ather. 2019. “The Long Read: Straw Man Arguments and the Removal of Article 370.” Asia Dialogue,
September 27. https://theasiadialogue.com/2019/09/27/the-long-read-straw-man-arguments-and-
the-removal-of-article-370/.
———. 2020a. “The Haunting Specter of Hindu Ethnonationalist-Neocolonial Development in the
Indian Occupied Kashmir.” Development 63: 60–66.
365
Ather Zia
———. 2020b. “Hindu Rashtra Comes of Age.” Contending Modernities, January 3. https://contending-
modernities.nd.edu/global-currents/the-hindu-rashtra-comes-of-age/.
———. 2020c. “ ‘Their Wounds are our Wounds’: A Case for Affective Solidarity between Palestine.”
Identities: Studies in Global Culture and Power 27(3): 357–375.
Zia, Ather, Haley Duschinski and Mona Bhan. 2020. “A Year of Siege. Politics of Annexation and Settler
colonialism in Kashmir.” In Speaking Justice to Power: Kashmir. Association of Political and Legal Anthro-
pology, July 30. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/speaking-justice-to-power-kashmir/.
Zutshi, Chitrelekha. 2003. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity and the Making of Kashmir. New
Delhi, India: Permanent Black.
366
26
KASHMIR, FEMINISMS, AND
GLOBAL SOLIDARITIES
Nitasha Kaul
The Terms: Kashmir, Feminism, Solidarity

In the 1980s, when photocopiers were still a distant dream, women sat in groups
for nights on end to write posters and make copies of the literature to pass it on
to members and followers. Posters of Zainab Al-Ghazali or Leila Khaled1 were the
highlights of such night groups. These collectives would meet at different places,
mostly at homes. Hundreds of copies were made by women overnight, as Shareefe
remembers: “Our hands would pain or feel numb from so much writing”
(Shareefe’s interview in Bemun on April 15, 2013,
quoted in Inshah Malik 2015: 65)
People – everyday people, masses of defiant people – took to the streets in East
Berlin and simply, eloquently broke boundary rules and lived through the experi-
ence. Such people were not even a glimmer in the eye of reigning IR theories of
the time. They still are not: IR was taken by surprise again when the same kinds of
people rose against the autocrats of one after another Middle Eastern state in 2011.
[fn.] The field seems hogtied to the notion that ordinary people cannot have the
type of agency in international relations that can shift polarity or overpower embed-
ded authoritarian regimes.
(Christine Sylvester 2013: 9)
I begin by acknowledging the burdens of reflecting upon the itineraries of conceptual travel
between the three terms – Kashmir, feminism, solidarity – each of them being vitally dense but
ultimately partial signifiers of the projects they betoken and the people they affect and implicate
in their folds. This is not a chapter about “the Kashmir issue” or women in conflict. Instead,
here I consider what is made available to our understanding by thinking together the three
terms: Kashmir, feminism, and solidarity. In the first part of this chapter, I argue that thinking
these terms together can reveal the limitations and contradictions of solidarity when it comes to
the Indian feminist response, and the Indian Muslim response, to Kashmir. In the second part,
I discuss the relative global lack of solidarity with Kashmir in spite of the parallels with other
occupations. I point to how this relates to an understanding of international relations where
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-32 367

Nitasha Kaul
conflicts are widely made sense of in disembodied terms and nonviolent struggles are considered
worthier than violent resistance. I conclude with a call for the urgnt need to generate trans-
contextual solidarities.
The subheading here has been chosen deliberately in order to create a dissonance with the
title of the chapter, and emphasize that each of these terms can, and must, be read in the plural,
but often are not. There is not one Kashmir, but many; and the simple shift of this vocabulary
allows us to move from the rigid and straitjacketed description of “the Kashmir issue” put for-
ward by distant commentators who focus on territoriality, national interests, states, and rivalries.
While this focus may be inherited from the methodological assumptions of their disciplines,
it is nevertheless unjustified, because it powerfully constructs the narratives and understanding
of an issue while claiming to merely reflect it. We need to understand “the Kashmir issue” as
sensately experienced – in history, in memory, in pain, in loss, in desire, in longing, in suffer-
ing, in chanting, in awaiting, in celebrating, in mourning – by the very bodies of the people
who are the “Kashmir issue.” To reiterate, there is not one Kashmir, but many; and for multiple
individuals or groups, the “issue” is different and deeply embedded in their diverse experiences
of bodies and societies.
That there are feminisms in the plural has been forcefully registered, over the last decades
by Black, postcolonial and Third World feminists, upon the consciousness of Western liberal
feminists, who were drawn to the appeal of universalist emancipatory projects that were endog-
enously enlightened and benevolently capable of liberating Other women from their men and
their oppressions. However, even in the second decade of the twenty-first century, these same
feminists do not accept the rights of women who are not like them, to chart their own paths
that combine adherence to religion with resistance to patriarchy and military occupation. Kash-
miri Muslim women’s resistance, as comprehended by South Asian, and specifically Indian,
feminists is a case in point. To be heard, those who struggle for rights and justice in postcolonial
imperial democracies must translate their demands into a “universal,” secular idiom of expres-
sion. That is to say, victims of oppression and occupation are expected to dress and speak in
certain ways, which are tone-deaf to the visible signifiers of Muslim and Islamic identity. Indi-
ans often emphasize that Kashmiri women are suffering through a denial of their human rights
and that they need to be “liberated” from the tyrannies of Islam which are further exacerbated
in a conflict zone. The conflict zone itself is seen as merely a reactive response to “terrorism”
and “law and order” problem, rather than as resulting from a permanent state of militarization.
These narratives are an alibi by the Indian government and its allies to keep administering/con-
trolling a population that has not consented to such rule and, indeed, experiences the Indian
presence as an occupation.
The literature on solidarity in politics, philosophy, and sociology has often proceeded along
parallel trajectories, and here I will draw from what broadly passes under the term political soli-
darity (see Scholz 2008). Within this, it is not unusual to find “political solidarity” itself as being
distinguished from “human solidarity”; further, it is generally asserted that an unconditional
solidarity stemming from shared human existence is unrealistic. I find this a priori assumption
to be problematic. There are different possible regimes of structuration that can shape individual
moral capacities when it comes to the abilities to be in solidarity with others who are facing
injustice or oppression. In short, my position here is close to a radical anti-national cosmopoli-
tan ethics, in that global solidarities are not only possible, but quite crucially, ever more neces-
sary. In this chapter, I will concern myself with what the presence/absence and directionalities
of solidarities, especially of the kind espoused by critical feminist consciousness,2 tells us about
knowing and acting upon locations, privileges, and practices.
368
Kashmir, Feminisms, Global Solidarities
Contours of Indian Feminist/Muslim Solidarity With Kashmir

The inhabitants of the erstwhile princely state of Jammu and Kashmir have been marked by
one of the longest-running political disputes in the world. While people in the different regions
have been differently affected by human rights violations, loss of livelihoods, militarization,
and armed struggle, all of them continue to be impacted by the conflict insofar as their lands
and identities are hostage to de facto control by India and Pakistan.3 Kashmir Valley, the nub
of Indian-administered (occupied) Kashmir ranks amongst the highest militarized areas in the
world. In the longer history of the region, multiple religious, ethnic, class and other identities
have at various times moved up and down the hierarchies; however, for the last several dec-
ades, and especially since the 1990s, the communalization of the political dispute has meant
that the population has been divided, dispossessed, and brutalized. Scholars have extensively
documented various aspects of the history, politics, society of the region. In terms of atrocities
and injustices faced by the people, the Kashmiri experiences are comparable to those of other
oppressed peoples.
Given these realities, the following points are salient. Historically, there have been specific
ideological constituencies of people in postcolonial India and Pakistan – broadly mapping the
Right in Pakistan and the Left in India – who have advocated for the rights of Kashmiri Mus-
lims. With very few exceptions, the situation of “Kashmir” during the twentieth century fig-
ured in the global imaginary as only a territorial dispute that features in the wars between the
surrounding countries. The internal and indigenous political movements in the region itself
were suppressed repeatedly. Through infrastructure and patronage, ethnic cleavages between
the different regions of former princely state of J&K – Jammu, Kashmir Valley, Ladakh, Azad
Kashmir, Gilgit Baltistan – were encouraged in the newer areas of IAK and PAK. The Pakistani
state projected the people under its control as already free, and the Pakistani right-wing took up
the cause of the rights of Indian Kashmiris with fervor. The extension of solidarity in this case
was consonant with a co-religionist (Kashmiri Muslims as fellow Muslims) understanding of
shared identity based on the two-nation theory with its thesis, influential for the subcontinental
partition in 1947, that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations.4
For its part, since independence, the Indian state has emphasized a self-congratulatory image
of itself as a secular democratic pluralist postcolonial nation-state in sharp contrast to Pakistan,
which is constructed as its radical Other.5 This virtuous self-fashioning of nationalist public
discourse in India, combined with an entrenched right-wing project,6 which is steeped in viru-
lent Brahminical supremacism and Islamophobia,7 has meant that the Indian public was mostly
unaware of the brutalizations carried out by the Indian armed forces, and of the struggles and
resistance of Kashmiris. This includes Indian left liberals, feminists, and progressives, who, with
very few notable exceptions, continued to stay silent on Kashmir, or at best, refer to the human
rights abuses, but not to the right of Kashmiris to self-determination (see Dalwai 2019; Pandit
2020). In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a gradual feminist acknowledgment
of Kashmir has been produced by post 9/11 glocal politics, participation in fact-finding missions
to Kashmir, immersion in reports by Kashmiri human rights activists, reading newer Kashmiri
scholarship, and the growing parallels of colonial occupation of, and by, India, both in history
and in contemporary times.
Although the post-2014 Modi-led BJP Hindutva project (with its onslaught of multidimen-
sional violence and shutting down of dissent) is making new kinds of solidarities possible in
India between different protesters such as university students, Dalit activists, farmers, religious
minorities, Kashmir generally still figures at the “seditious” end of anti-nationalism’s spectrum.
369
Nitasha Kaul
In other words, while critics and dissenters of the Hindutva project are labelled “anti-national,”
the harshest condemnation and the charge of “sedition” accrues to those who speak of the
Kashmiri right to self-determination. Thus, these new articulations of solidarity also tend to
emphasize human rights abuses rather than reference the basic facts of the historical-political
dispute that make the abuses of the occupation, qua occupation, inevitable. Even so, every pass-
ing year brings more evidence of the fundamental need for an anti-nationalist feminist solidarity
of Indians with the rights of Kashmiris. For instance, the blatant attacks on JNU student leaders
(especially Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, and Anirban Bhattacharya), who were charged with
sedition in 2016 for allegedly having raised slogans for Kashmiri freedom (see Kaul 2018: 136–
138), necessitated a statement of feminist solidarity, which never materialized. In 2019 again,
there have been violent attacks on dissenters after the unilateral Indian abrogation of articles in
the Indian Constitution that profoundly changed the political, legal and constitutional status
of people living in Indian administered J&K without any consultation or consent from them,
and was accompanied by mass arrests, arbitrary detentions, collective punishment, and enforced
silencing (see Chatterji 2019; Kaul 2019a). In the months that followed the constitutional coup
of August 5, 2019, several Indian feminists were part of fact-finding missions that went to the
region and produced reports that explicitly documented the suffering and silencing of the peo-
ple,8 but none of the reports explicitly referred to the history of the political dispute, or called
for Kashmiri self-determination.
Moreover, as Malik (2015) explains, the political expressions of Kashmiri Muslim women
are in tension with Indian women’s intervention. Noting the different phases of resistance to
Indian control in Kashmir, she draws parallels with how the “tensions between ‘West’ and
‘Islam’ over the female body and rights are replicated in a similar fashion between Kashmir and
India” (60). She aptly summarizes, “Indian feminism often disregards Kashmiri women’s alle-
giance to the azaadi (freedom) movement, while Kashmiri women, in turn, abhor the national-
ism in the Indian feminist project” (61). Narrating two kinds of interventions by women in the
armed struggle for self-determination, the Islamist intervention and the Kashmiri nationalist
intervention, Malik (ibid.; see also Malik 2018), in her insightful work, shows how women
draw on different elements of their Muslim identities in their resistance against occupation and
militarism only to have their actions reduced to religious-cultural terms. Thus, their dual chal-
lenge to the Indian state/occupation and to patriarchal norms in their communities is never
fully recognized.
Freedom is a word that haunts the postcolonial world of the twenty-first century. Women,
especially, have been in the vanguard, leading global protests in recent years, resisting for
freedoms that are theirs by right. Freedom, or azaadi, is a word that resounds yet is insist-
ently refused hearing. It is indeed paradoxical to note the ways in which “Free Kashmir” is
interpreted in the political journeys of Indian solidarity. More than once, Indian activists
have made the distinction between “freedom in India” and “freedom from India.” The focus
on “freedom in India” is a “safer” position espoused by most; it reflects a nostalgic longing
for a romanticized and exotic Kashmir (and Kashmiris) that could be Indian were it not for
continued and systematic Indian brutalities. In this cartographically intact imaginary of the
Indian geo-body, the “head of Mother India,” or Kashmir, is not marked as independent, or
worse, Pakistani (for a feminist analysis of Indian obsession with Kashmir, see Kaul 2018). On
the other hand, the few who speak of “freedom from India” are rained with punishments and
labelled as “seditious anti-nationals.” The continued insistence upon this difference and the
general focus on “freedom in India” is indicative of the outer limits of Indian solidarities with
the Kashmiri calls for “azaadi.”
370
The understanding of, and solidarities with, Kashmiris in contemporary India have been
perforce belated, uneven, and partial. As Uma Chakravarti (2008: 22, emphasis in original)
explains in her thoughtful piece looking back at the intersection of gender, Indian state, and
Kashmir:
For most sections of the Indian middle class, Kashmir is a problem created by Pakistan
and its prioritising of Muslim religious identity as the sole basis of nationalism. What
gets erased in this construction is the long struggle for independence within Kashmir
from a feudal monarchical rule of an oppressive social and political system.
Her essay also reveals the longer history of labelling Indians, especially women, who speak
for Kashmiri rights as “anti-national,” through the figure of Mridula Sarabhai,9 who defied
Nehru on his treatment of Sheikh Abdullah and was deemed anti-national and imprisoned. As
a woman who had earlier been a prisoner in colonial India, Sarabhai “found little difference
between imprisonment by the British and the nationalist governments” (27). Narrating her
own “journey of realisation,” Chakravarti quotes human rights lawyer Nandita Haksar (35, 37),
“Let us look at the long and bitter conflict [in Kashmir] from a feminist perspective. Does it not
occur to you that forced unions between peoples or nations are very similar to forced unions
between men and women?”
Feminist inquiry and action, in spite of its multitudinous polyvocality, typically has an eman-
cipatory/ethical impulse; it has been marked by noting the disorientations of “women” in
relation to “nation.” The dehumanizing feminization and oppression of women is akin to the
feminization and oppression of the colonized. This is important to note in the context of Kash-
mir – not only because women are better peace builders, or because their suffering, resistance
and mourning in conflict is more likely to generate solidarity in those who are indifferent and
apathetic, but – because of the core resonance between the “freedom” sought by the marginalized
and oppressed anywhere, and specifically the calls for “azaadi” in Kashmir. There is a similarity
between dehumanizing feminization and colonization in how the consent of women and the
colonized is violated and they are unable to be conceived as equal, human, rights-bearing indi-
viduals. Thus, self-determination is denied to subjugated populations facing colonial powers;
their consent is deemed irrelevant and their experiences are sought to be manipulated in the
guise of instructive paternalist control.
The unevenness of Indian solidarities with Kashmiris is also compounded by the historical
refusal of Indian Muslims to speak for the rights of Kashmiri Muslims and against their oppres-
sion by the Indian state. This point is important because it challenges the portrayal of Kashmir
as elementally a religious issue originating from a shared pan-Islamic project. Without a doubt,
as Mridu Rai (2004) has argued, the oppressive Dogra era of Hindu Rulers-Muslim subjects
was a prominent factor in an important stream of early twentieth-century Kashmiri nationalism
in its religious and secular variants. However, the ancient hatred thesis of political conflict does
not apply, and neither does a simplistic and naturalized Hindu versus Muslim divide. Identi-
ties are constructed along multiple vectors of interests and ideologies; the Indian nationalist
position on Kashmir as espoused by Indian Muslims is reflective both of the successfully per-
formative Indian nationalist subject, and also, of the precarity of such a subject when they are
not the nation’s ideal type. The tragic limits of Indian solidarity with Kashmir, irrespective of
religion – for both Indian Hindus and Indian Muslims – were illustrated in an incident shared
on social media in 2020 when a Kashmiri Muslim woman speaking about the Indian military
oppression of Kashmiris outside the Jama Masjid in Delhi, was asked to stop or move elsewhere
371
Nitasha Kaul
by others, including Indian Muslims (Twitter, January 22, 2020). Although Indians (including
Indian Muslims) have been protesting ever more in 2019–2020 at the multiplying suppression
of their democratic rights, the presence of a Kashmiri Muslim woman, speaking about Indian
injustice in Kashmir reflected an unacceptable risk to Indian protestors, as well as being indica-
tive of how distant the brutalization of Kashmiris under Indian “democracy” is, to them.
The only version of Indian solidarity with Kashmiris, which is deemed legitimate (especially
by the cheerleaders of Hindutva) is that extended to Kashmiri Pandits (KPs). Instead of request-
ing judicial inquiries into violence, rapes, massacres, and losses of both Kashmiri Muslims and
Kashmiri Pandits, or addressing the conflict in order to move toward a just peace that would
enable Kashmiri Pandits to return to their homes and Kashmiri Muslims to find justice, the
proponents of Hindutva want Kashmir to be a rallying point for the Hindu nation. The tragedy
of Kashmir’s Hindu minority Pandit community and their exodus has been successfully weap-
onized; it is not viewed through the lens of anti-minority violence in conflict, or as resulting
from the actions of a state that failed different kinds of Kashmiris, but presented almost exclu-
sively as being about Hindu persecution, existential Islamic barbarism, and Pakistani machina-
tion (see Kaul 2016, 2017, 2019b; Misri and Bhan 2019; Trisal 2019).
In the Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi from December 2019- March 2020, Indian Muslim
women have been at the forefront of demanding nondiscriminatory access to citizenship under
the Constitution. On 19th January 2020, the protestors commemorated the KP exodus a trag-
edy. This commemoration represented a selective symbolism insofar as no similar commemora-
tion was made for other tragedies and repeated massacres faced by Kashmiri Muslims as people
resisting the Indian state. The fact that Indian Muslims commemorated the exodus of KPs in the
context of their protests against the Indian state’s encroachment on their own rights to Indian
citizenship while simultaneously failing to condemn the Indian military’s violation of Kashmiri
Muslims’ civil liberties and human rights is a contradiction. It suggests that solidarity with KPs
serves as a means to assert Indian citizenship and thus demonstrates the conditions of precarity
for Muslim minorities in the imperial democracy of a postcolonial state.
(Non)Solidarities With Kashmir in the Global Register

If the conjunctions of thinking Kashmir, feminisms, and solidarities in the region present us
with many incomplete and overlapping pictures, then the global feminist scenario, by and large,
has been oblivious to Kashmir. Every few years, the word “Kashmir” breaks into the world news
cycle with some new atrocity or accelerated and egregious violence committed upon its people,
or fears of war between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, or a natural disaster. And there it
stops. Meanwhile, the relentless survival and resistance struggle of Kashmiris continues under
conditions of military occupation. Even in the most intense phases of Kashmiri struggle and
resistance, there has been little or no engagement by prominent global feminist movements, or
even scholars.10 Here, I am not referring to non-Kashmiri female scholars of Kashmir who are
located in the West, but I am addressing the paucity of literature by global feminists on Kashmir.
To explain this failure of engagement as an ethical act of Western and other feminists choosing
to not speak for others does not persuade me (on this, see also Spivak 1988; Alcoff 1991). The
alternative to “saving brown women from brown men” is not utter indifference about what
happens in the “darker nations” and to those people.
Kashmiris, Muslims, and people of different genders, resisting for their rights at the periph-
ery of a non-Western nation-state in a Euro-American centric late capitalist post-modernity,
are manifestly alive to the dissimulations of multiple, sometimes competing, at other times
contradictory, emancipatory discourses that are issued in the name of feminism or solidarity.
372
This is not to say that sincere feminist engagement of solidarity is impossible. In fact, several
Kashmiri scholars, especially women located outside of Kashmir, who are thus able to bypass
the restrictions, have worked very hard in recent times to generate connections in scholarship
and activism with allies).11
Critical feminist consciousness, if it is to be in any way meaningful, intersectional, and
decolonial, must engage simultaneously with multiply situated sites of oppressive nation-statist
power to draw insights from and extend solidarities to the oppressed. Mohanty (2011: 76) asks
an important question: “what does a radical, anti-imperialist feminist engagement consist of
at this time?” Her argument is that the United States (in the US–Mexican borderlands), Israel
(in the West Bank and Gaza), and India (in the Kashmir Valley) act as “neoliberal, securitised,
imperial states” that “mobilise anatomies of violence anchored in colonial legacies and capitalist
profit-making” (ibid.: 79, 83). She refers to how these countries have been engaged in endless
wars since their founding years, as evidenced by military expenditures and the mutual relation-
ships of military aid and defense supplies. She highlights a profound similarity in the forms of
governmentality exercised by these states, especially as experienced by those who are at their
borderlands and controlled by them in the name of rationales such as humanitarianism. Those
bodies that are at the receiving end of such securitized regimes and cultures of impunity (see
Duschinski 2009, 2010, Mohanty terms, “bio-militarised” (2011: 80).
A bio-militarised body lives under a constant state of dispossession and with the lack
of basic civil rights evident in the dissolution of citizenship in occupied or securitised
zones. It is always particular dispossessed bodies – indigenous, immigrant, Muslim,
race, class, and gender-marked bodies that are bio-deregulated or bio-militarised,
never generic ones.
Kashmiri bodies, especially those of Kashmiri women, as Mushtaq and Bukhari (2018: 84)
point out, are bio-militarized; they are victims of violence and their bodies are turned into
symbolic battlefields. Feminism, like other progressive ideologies, is open to being subverted in
content while being deployed in name.12 In the manner of colonial narratives, the empower-
ment of women is used by the Indian state to paper over the question of its legitimacy.13 “An
important ethical question, then, is: how can the same state that employs violence, denies
justice, kills, blinds, and rapes with impunity, claim to be empowering people in general and
women in particular?” (ibid.: 87).
There is also the question of directionality, especially in view of the rather systematically
nonlinear and nonreciprocal evidence of solidarities. For instance, I note that in the filmmaker
Sanjay Kak’s compilation of photographic work by Kashmiris between 1986 and 2016, there is
evidence of graffiti in Kashmir Valley as far back as the 1980s that referred to solidarities with
Palestine. The Indians too historically expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, but this
has proceeded apace with the growing Indian government alliance with Israel. As Osuri (2019:
12) asks, “If the Palestine issue is being discussed through the settler-colonial framework, what
lens can be used to describe India’s relationship to Kashmir?”14
An indispensable part of global solidarities with Kashmiris, is a relentless witnessing that
must also translate into a fundamental letting in of Kashmir into the feminist understanding
of international relations and war, not merely as an empirical site in the non-West where the
default theoretical assumptions and conceptual schemas can be tested, or falsified owing to the
“different”/“abnormal” nature of non-Western locations and populations, but as narratives of
bodies that experience endless war. Feminist and critical perspectives in international relations
are moving toward the understanding of war as an experience, as what Butler terms a sensate
373
Nitasha Kaul
regime. Doing so is to bring the experiencing body into the abstraction of war, as well as to
exercise vigilance toward what looks and feels like war, but does not name itself as such. If we
borrow Sylvester’s framing of war as “a politics of injury,” and study it as a social institution, then
people count as participants who have experiences and agencies related to

war. . . . Experience is therefore the physical and emotional connections with war that people
live – with their bodies and their minds and as social creatures in specific circumstances.
(2013: 3–5, emphasis in original)
This is not the same as a feminist focus on security, it is closer to the serious study of war in all its
dimensions, as it affects the bodies of those who are its everyday participants, and also those who
are its spectators (for instance, see Zia 2019). This latter is equally important because it allows
for an understanding of the justifications that are projected and the emotions that are lined up
with the “prescribed war scripts” (Sylvester 2013: 6). Such an epistemological reframing within
disciplines that count war at their core would permit systematic analyses of Kashmir not as an
unpeopled territorial site of potential wars between India and Pakistan, but as an inhabited space
where people’s bodies experience the politics of injury incessantly. It is then further possible
to examine the work of hegemonic narratives of conflict, and ask how and why and whom do
they console?
A final point to note is the relationship of global solidarities to the question of violent resist-
ance. The basic distinction between force and violence is available to us from the Weberian idea
of the state, where the violence of the state is “force” since the state is – in that means and not
ends based – definition, a human community that successfully claims a monopoly over the legit-
imate use of physical force within a given territory. Thomas (2011) looks at the reasons for why
“violence” as a concept is something not spoken about in the discipline of International Rela-
tions. Clearly, this has the potential to “create a discourse whereby state violence is accepted as
legitimate and a normal part of the functioning of relations between states” (ibid.: 1835). Like
the epistemic reformulations of war, the micropolitical and everyday questions of violence are
only now being opened up to scrutiny in International (or more pertinently, inter-state) Rela-
tions, where they were kept in an ideological freeze so that violent resistance was sought to
be understood without addressing enduring state violence. The question of political solidarity
with violent resistance in liberation struggles against oppression or injustices has often divided
opinions (consider, for instance, Arendt, Fanon, Sartre on violence and power). However, even
philosophers (such as Scholz 2007: 50, emphases original) who have argued for the incompat-
ibility between political solidarity and physically violent forms of activism and resistance, have
conceded that this incompatibility is in principle, but harder to maintain in practice:
in practice, it is much more difficult to make a strong claim that violence is not used
or ought not to be used in response to oppression and injustice. Here we can learn
from work on civil disobedience. . . . The principled stance of civil disobedience sets it
morally apart from criminal activity even if it is legally similar. Just as those who practice
civil disobedience must weigh the costs of breaking an unjust law against the damage
to the rule of law, so too must those who act in resistance to oppression weigh the costs
of using violence in self-defense against the damage to the unity of political solidarity.
These conversations have internalist as well as externalist aspects that Kashmiris and others
need to approach. Thinking back to the cautions offered by critical Kashmiri feminists on the
nature of superficial or problematic solidarities, scholarly analyses also might take seriously the
374
ways in which the occupation has been internalized in Kashmiri society, and how that inhibits
the formation of solidarities within Kashmiris, even those in the Valley. It is in the nature of an
occupation to inhibit such empathies, but beyond that, the contemporary role and trajectories
of capital cry out for investigation; here I mean capital in all its material and ideological manifes-
tations – as it stratifies social groups, sublimates into symbolism, generates possessions, imposes
constraints, and creates political dis/trust.15
“Solidarity” is often used as a beautiful word, and as Armstrong and Prashad (2005: 221–222)
explain, in taking a measure of solidarities by giving them “history, contradictions, and affect,”
there is always the fear that it may “rob them of their more supernatural qualities, but it may also
allow for the development of more durable bonds among our unknown cohorts in the struggle.”
If more rigorous internalist understandings of solidarities are required in Kashmir, then equally,
the pathways, connectivities, and interests that generate externalist solidarities on Kashmir out-
side of the region, especially in the West, also deserve more analysis for the ways in which they
circulate on the digital sphere and intersect with technology and global feminist concerns (see
Misri 2020); link up with diasporic sentiments to construct the contextual identity of “Kash-
mir,” “Kashmiri,” or “Kashmiriyat” (see Ali 2002); or circulate as solidarity movements in activ-
ist youth communities on university campuses (see Spencer 2019).
Conclusion
Of enduring importance in prolonged conflicts is the role of victim identities in individual and
collective constructions of the self. What I call the “discourses of competing victimhoods,” play
a significant role in inhibiting the formation of solidarities between Kashmiri Pandits and Kash-
miri Muslims. Over the decades, the interested parties have pushed for the successful commu-
nalization of an inherently political dispute, so that today the histories and memories of different
Kashmiri communities are seen in parallel and against each other rather than within the same
frame of oppression, injustice, and neglect that has plagued them all. Key in sustaining these
injustices is the sustained alienation, abjection and distancing of Kashmiris; the legitimation of
narratives of dispossession and oppression, the separation of imaginaries, and the systematization
and institutionalization of knowledge that perpetuates the conflict. One may ask, what is the
way out of a Gordian knot of such magnitude? (Kaul 2017):
What else, but truths and reconciliations, recognition of the pain and suffering of
each other as Kashmiris, solidarity and creation of processes to speak to each other
in order to realize a future of peace and freedom, multiplying the representation of
voices within a framework of trustworthy mediated dialogue, honoring of principles
of human rights and self-determination, move towards alternative media that allows
for honest understanding of issues in all their complexity, growing of the voices that
speak for justice and humanity, and the writing of many, many stories that can be
heard by those who need to empathize.
And in this, solidarities, across the intersectional messiness of global movements, are essential to
grow (see Kanjwal 2016). It is not that the ways forward on making Kashmiri lives livable are
not imaginable, do not exist, or cannot be realized. Kashmiri women scholars have collectively
spoken in the powerful idiom of postcolonial criticality, saying that the question that people
should ask is not “Can the Kashmiri women speak?” but rather “Can you hear them?” Kashmiri
women, within and outside of Kashmir, have always been speaking, and their voices have not
been heard (see Kaul and Zia 2018: 2020).
375
Nitasha Kaul
Today, quasi/authoritarian regimes around the world learn repertoires of action from each
other; in the months following the Constitutional Coup in Kashmir in August 2019, the Iranian
government too turned off the internet to tamp down on dissent and in Chile, the government
fired on protestors with pellets. Solidarity with Kashmiris is a vital part of the critical global
feminist struggles against economic-political-social disenfranchisement and dispossession. As we
witness the proliferation of a deeply illiberal politics around the world – seemingly unstoppable
and sustained by the forces of transnational capital and ever improved technology that has often
turned the electoral legitimation of leadership in procedural democracies into a predictable
algorithmic exercise – we must understand and enact solidarities across borders. The understand-
ing across struggles is important, for our affinities have the potential to be both always already
universal and also rhizomatically distributed, and this must underwrite the unconditional
extensions of critical solidarities. At the forefront of the ongoing global protests and resistance
against authoritarian rule, environmental destruction, human rights abuses and more, have been
women. It is in this sense, that “women’s work” is the work of revolution, deeply embedded in
human solidarities that are vital to the preservation of the people and the planet.
Notes
1 These are iconic Muslim women who pioneered Islamist feminism and resistance in liberation move-
ments. Zainab Al-Ghazali (1917–2005) was an Egyptian activist and founder of Muslim Women’s
Association, and Leila Khaled (1944–) is a militant Palestinian activist member of the Popular Front for
the Liberation of Palestine.
2 As Reilly (2007: 187) notes, “A global feminist consciousness that challenges the systemic interplay of
patriarchal, capitalist, and racist power relations is integral to contesting false universalization and neo-
imperialist manifestations of supposedly cosmopolitan values.”
3 In addition, there is the uninhabited territory under Chinese control.
4 It is not hard to find examples of progressive Pakistani writers or commentators, for instance Altaf
Fatima, in the second part of the twentieth century, who did not speak about Kashmir in their work.
5 This right-wing project becomes ever more explicit with passing time as instances of Hindutva funda-
mentalism in India are referred to as ‘India becoming Pakistan’, or the countless instances where dissent
in India is retorted at with allegations of anti-nationalism and the phrase “Go to Pakistan.”
6 The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a nationwide organization that is the ideological parent of
Modi-led BJP, was founded in 1925. The “Sangh Parivar” family of Hindu nationalist organizations
played an active role in national and regional politics both before and after the Indian Independence
and partition, toward the goal of promoting their idea of the Hindu India.
7 See Dar (2015) for an interrogation of the silence and complicity of postcolonial/subaltern theorists in
the Brahminical colonial project of India in Kashmir.
8 Several reports by Indian feminists and civil society activists chronicled the human rights abuses. These
include – “Women’s Voice: Fact Finding Report on Kashmir September 17th-21st 2019”, “News
Behind the Barbed Wire: Kashmir’s Information Blockade”, “Kashmir Caged: A fact-finding report”,
“#KashmirCivilDisobedience: A Citizen’s Report.”
9 Chakravarti (ibid., 27) tells us that Sarabhai was declared mad and put in an asylum: “Resistance to a
blind nationalism and the demands of loyalty from its citizens by a nation-state in South Asia in the
postcolonial period was indeed a madness if it was the position of a single individual, and that too a
woman.”
10 The evidence for this is not hard to locate. From ‘Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action’
(Routledge, 1992) to ‘New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities’ (Zed 2012), the men-
tion of Kashmir is conspicuously absent. Likewise, in the broader literature on humanitarian crises,
intervention, security, state-making, there is no reference to Kashmir (for instance, see the Rout-
ledge series on international relations and global politics, or on intervention and statebuilding). Being
a Kashmiri, feminist, and a politics and international relations scholar, having to constantly argue
against this absence of Kashmir is also part of my own lived experience in both academia and feminist
movements.
376
11 I refer here to the labor of organic, autonomous, digital and real transnational solidarities generated
by scholars, contributors, volunteers, activists through SWK (Stand with Kashmir), KSCAN (Kashmir
Scholars Consultative Action Network), Kashmir Solidarity Network (KSN), Critical Kashmir Studies
Collective, and others.
12 See Mushtaq and Bukhari 2018, passim). Also, as Bhan (2013: 6) has noted in the context of using
‘healing touch’/compassion/environmentalism as a strategy, the “tropes of heart warfare, healing, and
compassion and their deployment by states are crucial to the emerging yet pervasive strategy of govern-
ance in war-torn regions.”
13 See Kanjwal (2018) for a longer history of the state-led feminism in Kashmir.
14 This is, of course, a rhetorical question. In fact, in 2019, the Indian consul general in New York explic-
itly called for Israel style settlements in Kashmir for Kashmiri Pandits (see MEE Staff 2019).
15 See Kaul (2021) for further detail on this, especially the conceptualisation of “econonationalism”
understood as the uses of a liberatory rationale of development for the purposes of coloniality in
Kashmir.
Works Cited
Alcoff, Linda. 1991. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique (20): 5–32. DOI:
10.2307/1354221.
Ali, Nasreen. 2002. “Kashmiri Nationalism Beyond the Nation-State.” South Asia Research 22(2): 145–160.
Armstrong, Elizabeth and Prashad, Vijay. 2005. “Solidarity: War Rights and Women’s Rights.” The New
Centennial Review 5(1): 213–253.
New York: Routledge.
Chakravarti, Uma. 2008. “Archiving the Nation-State in Feminist Praxis: A South Asian Perspective.”
Communities & Collections Division of Libraries South Asian Born-Digital NGO Reports Collection Project,
Faculty Digital Archive: NYU Libraries. https://archive.nyu.edu/handle/2451/34235.
Chatterji, Angana. 2019. Written Testimony for Hearing on ‘Human Rights in South Asia: Views from the
State Department and the Region, Panel II’, 116th Congress. US House of Representatives, Commit-
tee on Foreign Affairs, 22 October. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA05/20191022/110143/
HHRG-116-FA05-Wstate- ChatterjiA-20191022.pdf.
Dalwai, Sameena. 2019. “To Kashmir, a ‘Paigham’ of Solidarity and Love from an Indian Woman.”
The Wire, September 27. https://thewire.in/women/to-kashmir-a-paigam-of-solidarity-and-love- from-
an-indian-woman.
Dar, Huma. 2015. “Dear Prof. Chatterjee, When Will You Engage with the ‘Discomfort’ of Indian
Occupied Kashmir?” Pulse Media, September 10. https://pulsemedia.org/2015/09/10/dear-prof-
chatterjee-when-will-you-engage-with-the-discomfort-of-indian-occupied-kashmir/.
Duschinski, Haley. 2009. “Destiny Effects: Militarization, State Power, and Punitive Containment in
Kashmir Valley.” Anthropological Quarterly 82(3): 691–718.
Duschinski, Haley. 2010. “Reproducing Regimes of Impunity: Fake Encounters and the Informalization
of Violence in Kashmir Valley.” Cultural Studies 24(1): 110–132.
Inshah, Malik. 2018. Muslim Women, Agency and Resistance Politics: The Case of Kashmir. New York, NY:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Kanjwal, Hafsa. 2016. “The Fight to Free Kashmir Requires Your Solidarity.” Critical Kashmir Studies Col-
lective, July 15. https://criticalkashmirstudies.com/2016/07/15/free-kashmir-your-solidarity/.
———. 2018. “The New Kashmiri Woman: State-led Feminism in ‘Naya Kashmir.’ ” In “Women and
Kashmir.” Review of Women’s Studies (RWS)/Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), edited by Nitasha Kaul
and Ather Zia 47(1): 36–41.
Kaul, Nitasha. 2016. “Kashmiri Pandits Are a Pawn in the Games of Hindutva Forces.” The Wire, Janu-
ary 7. https://thewire. in/18690/kashmiri-pandits-are-a-pawn-in-the-games-of-hindutva-forces/.
———. 2017. “Kashmir: The Communalisation of a Political Dispute.” Al Jazeera Op-Ed, July 26.
www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/07/kashmir-communalisation-political- dispute-1707250
82030871.html.
———. 2018. “India’s Obsession with Kashmir: Democracy, Gender, (Anti) Nationalism.” Feminist Review
119(1): 126–143.
377
Nitasha Kaul
———. 2019a. “Written Testimony for Hearing on ‘Human Rights in South Asia: Views from the State
Department and the Region, Panel II.’ ” 116th Congress. US House of Representatives, Commit-
tee on Foreign Affairs, October 22. https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA05/20191022/110143/
HHRG-116-FA05-Wstate-KaulN- 20191022.pdf.
———. 2019b. “Kashmir Is Under the Heel of India’s Colonialism.” Foreign Policy, August 13. https://
foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/13/kashmir-is-under-the-heel-of-indias- colonialism/.
———. 2021. “Coloniality and/as Development in Kashmir: Econonationalism.” Feminist Review 128(1):
114–131.
Kaul, Nitasha and Zia, Ather. 2018. “Knowing in Our Own Ways.” In “Women and Kashmir.” Review
of Women’s Studies (RWS)/Economic and Political Weekly (EPW), edited by Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia
47(1): 33–35.
———. eds. 2020. Can You Hear the Kashmiri Women Speak? Narratives of Resistance and Resilience. New
Delhi: Women Unlimited/ Kali for Women Press.
Malik, Inshah. 2015. “Imaginations of Self and Struggle: Women in the Kashmiri Armed Resistance.”
Economic & Political Weekly L(49): 60–66.
MEE Staff. 2019. “India consul general in United States calls for ‘Israeli model’in Kashmir.”Middle East Eye, Novem-
ber 26. www.middleeasteye.net/news/india-consul-general-united-states- calls-israeli-solution-kashmir.
Misri, Deepti. 2020. “From Appropriative to Transnational Solidarities: #JusticeForAsifa and #MeToo in
Kashmir.” In Can You Hear the Kashmiri Women Speak? Narratives of Resistance and Resilience, edited by
Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia. New Delhi: Women Unlimited/ Kali for Women Press.
Misri, Deepti and Bhan, Mona. 2019. “Kashmiri Pandits Must Reimagine the Idea of Return to Kashmir.”
Al Jazeera Op-Ed, August 10. www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/kashmiri- pandits-imagine-idea-
return-kashmir-190810183932740.html.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2011. “Imperial Democracies, Militarized Zones, Feminist Engagements.”
Economic & Political Weekly XLVI(13): 76–84.
Mushtaq, Samreen and Syed Rabia Bukhari. 2018. “Critique of the State’s Narrative of Women Empow-
erment in Kashmir.” Economic & Political Weekly LIII(2): 82–87.
Osuri, Goldie. 2019. “Kashmir and Palestine: Itineraries of (anti) Colonial Solidarity.” Identities DOI:
10.1080/1070289X.2019.1675334.
Pandit, Niharika. 2020. “Anti-colonial Feminist Solidarity and Politics of Location.” LSE Engenderings
Blog, January 9. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2020/01/09/anti-colonial-feminist-solidarity-and-
politics-of-location/.
Reilly, Niamh. 2007. “Cosmopolitan Feminism and Human Rights.” Hypatia 22(4): 180–198.
Rowbotham, Sheila. 1992. Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action. New York: Routledge.
Roy, Srila. ed. 2012. New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities. London: Zed.
Scholz, Sally. 2007. “Political Solidarity and Violent Resistance.” Journal of Social Philosophy 38(1): 38–52.
———. 2008. Political Solidarity. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Spencer, Dustie. 2019. “Azadi Activists Abroad: Transnational Activism in the New Kashmiri Freedom
Movement.” PhD diss., University of Edinburgh.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Sylvester, Christine. 2013. War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis.
New York: Routledge.
Thomas, Claire. 2011. “Why Don’t We Talk About ‘Violence’ in International Relations?” Review of Inter-
national Studies 37(4): 1815–1836. DOI: 10.1017/S0260210510001154.
Trisal, Nishita. 2019. “India Must Stop Weaponizing the Pain of Kashmiri Pandits.” The Washington Post,
August 22. www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/22/i-am-kashmiri-pandit-india-must-stop-
weaponizing-pain-our-past/.
Zia, Ather. 2019. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: Uni-
378
27
KASHMIR DIASPORA
MOBILIZATIONS
Toward Transnational Solidarity in an Age
of Settler Colonialism
Hafsa Kanjwal
Introduction
A few days before August 5, 2019, Kashmiri Americans affiliated with the group Stand with
Kashmir, along with other diaspora Kashmiris and allies, rolled out the “Red for Kashmir”
campaign, encouraging supporters to change their profile pictures to red across social media
platforms to raise awareness of increasing levels of repression in Kashmir. By the time the Indian
government de-operationalized Article 370 of the Indian constitution and demoted the region
to a union territory directly under the Indian government a few days later, all forms of commu-
nication, including landlines, mobile services, and internet, had been shut down. Kashmir had
been effectively cut off from the rest of the world. In that moment, the Kashmiri diaspora – a
transnational network of individuals and families across the United States, United Kingdom,
Canada, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East – effectively became the voice of a silenced
people (Sadeque 2019).
Over the next few months, the diaspora drew attention to the historical and present-day
dimensions of India’s occupation and settler colonial project in Kashmir by organizing major
protests, engaging in political advocacy campaigns with their elected officials and government
representatives, and conducting a series of educational events in universities and community
spaces. It was – as a number of participants in interviews for this project stated – unprecedented
for the Kashmiri diaspora to be so politically mobilized on the issue since the early 1990s. Fear-
ing that the Indian government had taken a drastic and irrevocable step that would pave the way
for genocide of Kashmiri Muslims, the diaspora felt it had a moral responsibility to speak on
behalf of their now silenced nation.
Diaspora mobilizations that emerge from conflict-generated regions are often involved in
advocacy efforts which involve
individual and collective action of identity-based social entrepreneurs who organize

and encourage migrants to behave in a concerted way to make home-land oriented
claims, bring about a political objective, or contribute to a cause.
(Koinova 2016: 501)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-33 379

Hafsa Kanjwal
Part of this includes the harnessing of “material and symbolic resources to reach a collective
goal.” These mobilizations can occur through national (host country) or transnational networks.
Yet, even amid these conflict-generated diaspora mobilizations – a number of contestations and
dilemmas emerge.
As Kashmiri American movements gained traction in the months following August 5, it
became clear that engaging in diaspora mobilization for Kashmir requires serious and sustained
engagement with questions of privilege, positionality, and representation. Who constitutes the
Kashmiri diaspora, and what should be its role? What is a transformative solidarity model
for Kashmir, and what fault lines should be addressed to build it? And most important, how
does a small, less-resourced diaspora facilitate and amplify a long-standing resistance movement
against an occupying power with significant material resources and global economic and politi-
cal influence?
Diaspora engagement on the issue of Kashmir is not new. British Kashmiris, especially those
from Azad Kashmir, have engaged in significant activism across decades (Ali 2009; Ellis and
Khan 1998;). In the UK in the late 1970s, Amanullah Khan founded the Jammu and Kashmir
Liberation Front ( JKLF), an explicitly pro-independence party that ultimately initiated the
armed struggle in Indian occupied Kashmir (Sökefeld and Bolognani 2011). In the 1990s,
both the US and UK diaspora were active in raising awareness of India’s militarization, human
rights violations, the resistance movement and the right to self-determination. Over the past
few decades, diasporic activism has ebbed and flowed for reasons including fear and frustration,
tensions over aspirational differences, privilege, and political apathy – as well as more founda-
tional ideological concerns and questions surrounding the role of the diaspora in the politically
contested context of Kashmir.
In this chapter, I critically analyze the complexities of diaspora mobilization and transnational
solidarity work through examination of the US-based, Indian-occupied Kashmiri Muslim dias-
pora movement. My focus on the Kashmiri Muslim diaspora from the Indian-occupied Kash-
mir Valley is designed, not to restrict conceptualizations of the Kashmiri diaspora overall, but
rather to narrow the scope of my project based on my own research and advocacy. I approach
these questions through the lens of my own experiences as a Kashmiri American who was born
in Kashmir and raised in the US, who has extensive networks of family and friends in Kashmir,
and who regularly returns to Kashmir for research and family visits. My active engagement as a
Kashmir scholar in the Kashmiri American diaspora mobilizations include detailed discussions
with variously positioned individuals across a wide diaspora community network in the United
States as well as the United Kingdom and Europe, planning and coordination of campus and
community events, rallies, and summits, and communication with students, activists, research-
ers, journalists, and artists in Kashmir. My positionality as a Kashmiri American researcher is
very much embedded in the structures of privilege that being in the United States provides me,
and I continuously attempt to be self-reflexive by challenging interrogating identity categories
and power dynamics. I have also conducted several oral history interviews with diaspora leader-
ship from the 1990s and gathered informational materials from a number of relevant organi-
zations. I argue that the Kashmiri American diaspora should pursue a model of transnational
solidarity activism, and that this role must be mediated by a critical self-reflexivity on the part
of the diaspora that engages with questions of privilege and positionality.
Thinking Through the Kashmir “Diaspora”

The term diaspora refers to “social groups that settle and establish themselves in another country
and are internally heterogeneous. . . . Diasporas are rarely constituted by a single factor other
380
Kashmir Diaspora Mobilizations
than the broadest of connections to a specific homeland” (Smith 2007: 5). Diaspora is a use-
ful category, as it “configures certain conceptions of movement, settlement, and the attendant
negotiations with power” (Bald et al. 2013: 7). However, as scholars have argued, the term
can also be limiting. In the context of Kashmir, the term “diaspora” is complicated by the
already contested nature of the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Does the Kashmir
diaspora, for example, only include individuals from the Kashmir Valley? How does it factor
in Kashmiri Pandits, many of whom may not broadly identify with the movement for self-
determination? Does it include people from Jammu and Ladakh? Azad Kashmir? Gilgit-Bal-
tistan? Do Kashmiris who have settled in different cities in India or Pakistan constitute a dias-
pora? It is clear that the diaspora itself is diverse geographically, religiously, ethnically, politically,
and linguistically. Different diaspora communities have varying political interests and aspira-
tions – important distinctions to consider for broader diaspora mobilizations.
Scholars have also raised concerns over the ways in which the term diaspora flattens the mul-
tiplicity of displacements in time and space and whether the term diaspora can accommodate
or coexist with a “politics of return” (Peteet 2007). Writing on the Palestinian diaspora, Peteet
calls for a disaggregation of the term diaspora that would “facilitate more precise and complex
understandings of different types of movements, their historical and political origins, and the
role of violence” (Peteet 2007: 629). Similarly, the Kashmiri diaspora is diverse not only in terms
of its demographic composition, but also in terms of the multiple reasons for which people were
made to leave, even before 1947. This ranges from political and economic persecution, forced
migration, ethnic cleansing, political oppression, and economic opportunity. Multiple historical
contexts – including political and economic repression by the pre-1947 Dogra regime, ethnic
cleansing of Jammu Muslims in 1947 by the Dogra Maharaja, migration of workers from Mir-
pur in Azad Kashmir to the United Kingdom, departure of Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims from
the Valley in the early 1990s – have shaped the varying displacements of what could potentially
constitute a “diaspora.” Crucially, “uncritical invocations of diaspora risk minimizing the range
of traumatic conditions that fuel displacement and the way these shape sociocultural formations
and subjectivity” (Peteet 2007: 630). Thinking through the modes of diaspora mobilizations
requires attention to this range of “traumatic conditions” as well as to the politics of return,
given the region’s division between two hostile nation-states, and the people originating or
displaced from either side are rarely able to travel across.
Over the past few decades, scholarship in international relations and political science has
focused on the role of diaspora communities in contributing to political developments in their
“homeland.” Much of this literature has focused on whether diasporas have contributed to their
homeland in roles that can either create conflict or build peace (Smith 2007). More recent work
has focused on the question of diaspora positionality – whether
embedded in a certain context, diaspora political agents can take advantage of a con-
glomeration of unique socio-spatial characteristics of that place such as institutions,
networks, resources, political culture, infrastructure, history, position of the state in the
international system, and others.
(Koinova 2017: 603)
Later in this chapter, I examine the ways in which the Kashmiri American diaspora is implicated
in the processes of US empire.
In our conversations, Kashmiris in Kashmir often draw a distinction between the experi-
ences of Kashmiris living “on the ground” and “under occupation,” and the experiences of
the “diaspora” who had the “privilege” to leave. This distinction expresses the sense that the
381
Hafsa Kanjwal
diaspora is disconnected from what is happening in Kashmir, given their spatial and temporal
distance from the homeland. This corresponds to one of the primary criticisms of the Kashmiri-
American diaspora: that they occupy a space of privilege, removed from realities on the ground,
that makes it difficult for them to understand the depth of what is happening in Kashmir and to
authentically speak about that experience. This critique is compounded by the sentiment that
Kashmiri diasporas worldwide had not mobilized in meaningful ways prior to August 5, and
that the new diaspora mobilizations may be driven by multiple motivations, such as securing
one’s economic interests amid a settler colonial project. This trust deficit poses significant chal-
lenges to Kashmiri diaspora communities in the United States and elsewhere.
Nonetheless, despite criticisms, many in Kashmir feel the diaspora has a role to play in advo-
cating for Kashmir – although there are also multiple understandings of that role. Some argue
that the diaspora can and should only take direction from “the ground,” and not serve in any
representative capacity for Kashmir, or claim to speak “for” the people of Kashmir, but rather
amplify their voices. In this perspective, diaspora leadership should not emerge to serve in a
representative capacity. This position suggests that any diasporic attempts to represent Kashmir
would not derive legitimacy from “the ground.”
Many in the diaspora do not necessarily see a striking binary between those in the diaspora
and those in the “homeland” because itinerant migration patterns are constantly evolving and
because many in the diaspora have also lived through and experienced life under occupation.
Arguing against such distinctions based on notions of authenticity, they claim that political
mobilizations driven by hierarchies of victimhood and suffering will lead to counterproduc-
tive forms of exclusion and fragmentation. They also argue that given the ways in which the
Indian state has completely clamped down on any form of dissent in Kashmir and placed all
of the resistance leadership under arrest or detention, the time may come where the diaspora
will potentially have to play a bigger role in terms of representation, especially in international
platforms.
The example of revolutionary movements (such as Palestine, Iran, and Algeria) is instructive
to this discussion, given the formative role that those who were in exile – and thus away from
the “ground” – played in shaping the contours of such movements. Given that formative think-
ing and organizing for major social and political movements happened among those in exile
(some more successful than others), one of my interviewees, Imraan Mir, a Kashmiri American
lawyer, posed the question: “Does the diaspora have a role in influencing and shaping the nar-
rative that ultimately contributes to what people in Kashmir think about their future and their
aspirations?” If the diaspora has a responsibility – given its tremendous privilege, which includes
time, space, and resources – “how do they then ethically raise concerns about Kashmir, or use
that privilege? Can privilege be used constructively to take the conversation or shape the out-
come in a particular way?” (Mir, Interview). Here, the use of the term “privilege” is not per-
ceived negatively, but rather as a responsibility – a call to action. A similar question that merits
consideration is the role of the Kashmiri intelligentsia, a number of whom are spread across the
United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and elsewhere. Given the statist and functional
educational systems that exist in Kashmir as well as political repression in Kashmir, can an intel-
ligentsia come together from within the diaspora?
These questions do not have easy answers. I suggest that these categories continuously be
negotiated and re-negotiated given the circumstances in Kashmir. More critically, another ques-
tion that arises out of this set of concerns is who constitutes the “self ” embodied in the move-
ment for “self-determination.” If the diaspora is included in this “self,” then is the diaspora an
integral part of the movement, and not simply a tool of amplification? And if the diaspora is not
included in this “self,” then what are the boundaries, and how are they negotiated?
382
A transnational solidarity model requires a radical shift away from past or present forms of
mobilization that also complicate particular categories. And an engaged diaspora must remain
cognizant and accountable of its privilege, engaging in continual reflection on the ways in
which acts of (mis)representation may enact epistemic – or actual – violence on Kashmiris.
Here, I take a cue from Bourgois and Schonberg, whose analysis of representational practices
in relation to ethnography and photography can also apply to diaspora advocacy. They argue
that representational practices are “torn between objectifying and humanizing, exploiting and
giving voice, propagandizing and documenting injustice, stigmatizing and revealing; foment-
ing voyeurism and promoting empathy; stereotyping and analyzing” (Bourgois and Schonberg
2009: 15). This is a fine line to tread. How can we reimagine categories of belonging to Kash-
mir that refuse an articulation in relation to competing identities, authenticities, or victimhood,
while also maintaining cognizance of different forms of privilege and positionality?
History of the Kashmiri American Muslim Diaspora

As with a number of other immigrant groups to the United States, it is important to situate the
Kashmiri American Muslim diaspora in the backdrop of “shifting regimes of capital accumula-
tion, drawing out a historical continuum moving from territorially based empire to neocoloni-
alism” (Bald et al. 2013: 5). This includes understanding the role of wars, capitalist expansion,
militarism, religious mobilization, and political movements in shaping the demographic con-
tours of diaspora as well as the “longstanding and ongoing military, geopolitical, and economic
pursuits” of the United States in South Asia.
While a small number of Kashmiris came to the United States for further education as early
as the 1930s, the first substantial group of Kashmiri Americans that settled in the United States
were professionals – mostly doctors – that arrived after the Immigration and Nationality Act of
1965 abolished an earlier quota system based on national origin and established a new immi-
gration policy that attracted educated, skilled labor to the United States. The implementation
of this act enabled physicians, engineers, and other professionals to come to the United States,
mostly for economic opportunities. Many of them were from relatively privileged upper mid-
dle class or bureaucratic families in Kashmir, including those affiliated with the state govern-
ment. Members of Islamic study circles and groups, including Jamaat-i-Islami, relocated to the
US and UK after facing increasing repression from the J&K state government. The 1990s saw
another wave of Kashmiri Muslim immigration to the United States, especially after the rise of
the armed rebellion. Since 2000, a number of young professionals, many of them scientists or in
information technology, have moved to the United States for education and employment, given
the lack of opportunities in Kashmir, as well as increasing hostility toward Kashmiri Muslims
in India. Over the past five decades, the causes of migration in the diaspora range from seeking
economic and educational opportunities to fleeing political persecution and violence.
In the initial decades of Kashmiri presence in the US, there was some political activity.
Farooq Kathwari, the Kashmiri American CEO and President of Ethan Allen, narrates that
he arrived in the United States in the mid-1960s to attend business school in New York. At
the time, Kashmir was a topic of heated debate at the United Nations. Kathwari established a
committee for the future of Kashmir and wrote a manifesto making the case for a free Kash-
mir (Kathwari 2019: 74). According to Ghulam Nabi Mir, a Kashmiri American doctor who
moved to the United States in 1974 and was instrumental in the early history of the Kashmiri
American diaspora, the initial group of physicians were not politically active (Mir, Interview
2020). In subsequent years, a number of them wrote brochures about Kashmir and tried to raise
awareness of the issue. The group initially sponsored a number of awareness raising activities and
383
Hafsa Kanjwal
was involved with the national Muslim Students Association, of which two of them, Ghulam
Nabi Fai and Sayyid Syeed, had a leadership role (Fai, Interview 2020). One of their activities
was collecting funds for orphans in Kashmir. In 1978, a group of Kashmiri Americans founded
the Kashmir Muslim Association of North America (KMA) that continued awareness rais-
ing activities. Throughout the 1980s, the KMA would often meet in Buffalo, New York, the
adopted home to a number of Kashmiri immigrants given a number of families that had initially
settled there.
Political Advocacy in the 1990s

Significant political activity took hold in the 1990s. The start of the armed rebellion, massive
civilian uprising, imposition of Governor’s rule, and subsequent militarization and massacres
of Kashmiri civilians resulted in what Maria Koinova calls a “critical juncture.” This juncture
led to a “transformative event” in which the diaspora dramatically increased its mobilization
in response to reports of grave human rights violations (Koinova 2018). In 1990, the Kashmir
American Council (KAC) was incorporated after nearly 100 Kashmiri Americans met at a
home in Maryland. Ghulam Nabi Fai, who had been active with the Muslim Students Asso-
ciation and related diaspora advocacy efforts, was selected by an ad hoc board of community
leaders to serve as its executive director. Separately, Farooq Kathwari organized the Committee
for Solidarity in Kashmir, which included both Hindu and Muslim Kashmiris. The committee
“found common ground and issued a number of statements calling for a fair settlement of the
Kashmir issue” (Kathwari 2019: 204).
In our interview, Mir mentioned that the first gathering in Maryland attracted Kashmiri
Americans from across the political spectrum, including some linked to the pro-Indian politi-
cal parties in Kashmir. According to Mir, at that time, the ideological divisions that had begun
to emerge in Kashmir between the JKLF, which supported an independent state, and the
Jamaat-i-Islami, which supported merger with Pakistan, had not surfaced in the diaspora.
Despite varying ideological loyalties among its leadership, the KAC focused on the human
rights violations against Kashmiris as well as a resolution to the Kashmir issue that foreground
Kashmiri aspirations. Even those affiliated with the India-leaning parties were welcome, as
there appeared to be a collective realization “that there is a problem that needs to be resolved”
(Mir, Interview 2020).
The KAC was a nonprofit member-based organization based in Washington, DC with local
meetings in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Buffalo that had a significant Kashmiri pop-
ulation. There was also a Central Coordinating Committee (CCC) made up of seven regional
representatives across the country (Fai, Interview 2020). Due to its sizeable Kashmiri American
population, Buffalo was given two representatives in the CCC in the KAC’s Constitution. The
CCC would meet in different cities across the United States where there was a significant Kash-
miri presence. The KAC actively lobbied both Republican and Democratic Congressional rep-
resentatives, met with White House, State Department, and National Security Council officials,
and also sent reports and briefing documents to various foreign embassies, country missions to
the United Nations, international organizations, and think tanks. The KAC published newslet-
ters, pamphlets, and books on the history of the movement, occupation, lack of independent
political processes, human rights violations, and other political topics. In 1990, they hired a lob-
bying firm to manage their outreach to Congress. The KAC also had close relationships with
a number of American Muslim organizations, including the Islamic Society of North America
(ISNA) and the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA). KAC members met annually at
384
ISNA’s Annual Convention, and they were often a part of the program, speaking at different
sessions. In 1991, some KAC members and British Kashmiris started the World Kashmir Free-
dom Movement (WKFM) to focus specifically on international advocacy.
The KAC’s largest events were the annual peace conferences on Kashmir, that would be held
in Washington, DC and New York City. Conference invitees and participants were not only
Congressional officials, but also US-based professors and think tank experts, as well as official
government representatives and other prominent citizens from India and Pakistan. Indian and
Pakistani officials and journalists were invited to attend and present their viewpoints. Indian
officials never attended in their official capacity, though Pakistani officials would. The KAC
and WKFM also organized conferences in London, Brussels, and Islamabad. Civil society and
political leaders from both Kashmir and the diaspora would attend to meet with American
officials. Other advocacy events included participation in a number of congressional hearings
and briefings on human rights in South Asia, as well as UN-related conferences, and meetings
with the State Department as well as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). KAC
lobbying efforts bore some limited successes. For example, in the 1990s, through its lobbyists
in Congress, the KAC was able to convince the US Congress to halt development aid to India
until India released members of the pro-freedom leadership from prison (Fai, Interview 2020).
In addition, through their lobbying efforts with sympathetic congressional officials, four total
resolutions were introduced in both the House and Senate regarding Kashmir. These resolu-
tions foregrounded the right to self-determination as promised in successive UN resolutions and
condemned the excessive use of force by the Indian forces, while also denouncing the violence
of Kashmiri militant groups. They also called for journalists, human rights organizations, and
humanitarian organizations to have access to Kashmir, and called for a cut in development aid
to India until it improved its human rights in Kashmir (Relating to the Conflict in Kashmir
1995). While not all of the resolutions passed, and some were not able to make it to a vote, the
criticism of India’s human rights record in Kashmir allowed for the amplification of the Kashmir
issue in the US Congress.
KAC and WKFM board members travelled to Pakistan and met with representatives of
the different Kashmiri factions there to encourage unity. Diaspora leadership was intimately
engaged with the Srinagar-based All Parties Hurriyat Conference leaders, speaking to them on
a frequent basis. The KAC would organize, schedule, and host Hurriyat agendas and meetings
when their leadership and representatives visited the US, although the Hurriyat never appointed
any of the diaspora as their official representatives or spokespersons (Fai, Interview 2020). For
example, Yasin Malik, the co-founder of the All Parties Hurriyet Conference and the Chair-
man of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front came to the United States in March 2001. The
KAC organized his meetings with the editorial boards of various newspapers, government mis-
sions of various offices at the UN, ambassadors, congressional officials, think tanks, and State
Department officials (Kashmir American Council 2001). Fai stated that leading offices in the
US government, such as the State Department and the National Security Council, relied on the
KAC to communicate with the resistance leadership in Kashmir.
The KAC’s advocacy efforts focused on providing updated information on recent develop-
ments in Kashmir, including the human rights violations committed by Indian forces, as well
as highlighting the role that the US should play in resolving the dispute. The KAC focused
their attention on demilitarization, ending human rights violations and removing draconian
laws, and fulfilling the right to self-determination, while refusing to endorse a settlement of
either independence or alignment with Pakistan. As Mir said, the primary aim was “how not
to see an Indian soldier in Kashmir.” While the group did have internal discussions on multiple
385
Hafsa Kanjwal
possibilities for the future of Kashmir, Mir states they recognized that “political opinion can
change depending on what is happening.” All of their activities were centered on the premise
that Kashmiris from all regions were an integral part of the Kashmir dispute, and that a legiti-
mate leadership of Kashmiris must be included in all negotiations between India and Pakistan.
They attempted to do outreach to officials and representatives from India and Pakistan, as well
as the various units of the princely Jammu and Kashmir state.
For example, the KAC took a leading role in drafting the “Brussels Resolution,” in April 2004
along with Kuldip Nayar, an Indian parliamentarian and the former High Commissioner of
India to the United Kingdom. The resolution was a part of the “Discourse on Kashmir” jointly
sponsored by the All Party Kashmir Group on Kashmir of the European Parliament and the
ICHR Kashmir Center (The Brussels Resolution 2004). The resolution called for a peace mis-
sion of Kashmiri expatriates to India and Pakistan, a withdrawal of forces and bunkers from
civilian areas, repeal of draconian laws, release of political prisoners, access to human rights
organizations, and the freedom of movement for Hurriyet leaders.
Throughout the 1990s, the KAC faced increasing financial challenges. While Pakistani-
Americans made substantial financial contributions, other Muslim-American communities
offered only limited support. As these pressures mounted, the Indian government also retaliated
against the diaspora leadership by denying a number of them visitor visas. Some of them remain
unable to return to Kashmir.
Other members of the diaspora initiated working groups on Kashmir, and were involved
in direct international diplomacy between India and Pakistan. After meeting with Indian,
Pakistani, and Kashmiri leaders in 1994, and hearing about the vast gulf in understanding
amongst the various stakeholders, Farooq Kathwari founded the Kashmir Study Group (KSG)
in 1996, to “refocus the discussion on some meaningful options rather than on empty nation-
alistic slogans” (Kathwari 2019: 209). The group included congressional representatives, presi-
dents of think tanks and nonprofit organizations, foreign policy experts, academics, and former
ambassadors. Kathwari was the only member from Jammu and Kashmir, which he describes
as a deliberate choice “since [I] was eager to avoid making KSG seem like a political organiza-
tion of a lobbying group representing anyone with a vested interest in the conflict” (Kathwari
2019: 210). The group visited India, Pakistan, and Kashmir in 1997 and spoke to a wide range
of people. The report The Kashmir Dispute at Fifty was published in 1997, and provided a set of
12 recommendations regarding short-term confidence-building measures and other steps. KSG
had relationships with think tanks like the US Institute of Peace and the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, and also held meetings between Indian, Pakistani, and US officials.
Kathwari writes that he kept US officials abreast of his meetings with various political leaders
in South Asia.
The Livingston Proposal was a result of these meetings; the proposal called for the establish-
ment of self-governing entities in both the regions administered by India and Pakistan, and
the establishment of an all-Kashmir body that would coordinate areas of broader interest such
as regional trade, tourism, environment and water resources. The proposal also called for the
demilitarization of all five entities with India and Pakistan responsible for the foreign affairs and
defense of these entities. Kathwari mentions that various stakeholders had given their “cautious
approval” to the framework of the proposal (Kathwari 2019: 217). During the Musharraf-
Vajpayee years, in particular, Kathwari and the KSG played a role in back-channel diplomacy
between the two countries. According to Kathwari, parts of the Livingston proposal would
come to be adopted into the four-point plan between Musharraf and Vajpayee. Progress on the
plan, however, came to a halt after the attack on the Indian parliament on December 12, 2001.
While some discussions continued, Kathwari mentioned that some
386
hard liners in India . . . had dug in their heels. . . . They insisted that India’s leaders
refuse to meet with their Pakistani counterparts without receiving significant up front
concessions – a demand that effectively precluded serious talks.
(Kathwari 2019: 226)
Subsequent attempts to create possibilities for dialogue, including through the Pugwash Confer-
ences on Science and World Affairs 2005, would be derailed as a result of changing geopolitics
in India and Pakistan. Nevertheless, Kathwari believes that the KSG’s work to reframe the
international debate about Kashmir bore some fruit –
certain realities that were formerly little known have not become widely recog-
nized . . . there is now a growing recognition that this region must have the ability to
government itself, and that the self-governing option could also be provided to other
regions of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir.
(Kathwari 2019: 236)
In July 2011, KAC Director Fai was charged with participating in a long-term conspiracy
to act as an agent of the Pakistani government in the US without registering with the Attorney
General in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In December he pled
guilty to conspiracy and tax violations (USA vs. Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai 2012). Fai’s arrest gave
rise to feelings of skepticism, resignation, and betrayal among many members of the Kash-
miri American diaspora community. The lack of human and financial resources also dealt a
significant blow to diasporic mobilization. The arrest was a transformative event, significantly
increasing concerns over trust and surveillance, while decreasing support through donations and
mobilizations. Meanwhile, developments in the subcontinent made the potential for peace talks
elusive. Kashmiris who remained active in diaspora politics struggled to keep the Kashmir issue
alive amongst the balance of the diaspora.
Over time, and especially in the 2000s, the Indian lobby and Indian Americans gained
traction in the US, especially surrounding the passage of the controversial US-India nuclear
agreement in 2005 (Mishra 2016; Kirk 2008; Mistry 2013–14; Kurien 2017). Well-funded and
professional Indian Americans played a critical role in securing the agreement’s passage in the
US Congress. They also became more politically influential – both domestically, but also in
India, as researchers noted a “saffronization” of Indian American politics that contributed to the
rise of Hindu nationalism both in India and in the diaspora, as well as increasing Islamophobia
(Biswas 2010; Rajagopal 2000; Kurien 2004; Jaffrelot and Therwath 2007). September 11 was
yet another transformative event for US relations with South Asia. While the United States
sought a working relationship with Pakistan for the War on Terror, it also began a robust
engagement with India on matters concerning trade, defense, energy, technology, and con-
taining China (van de Wetering 2016; Jaffrelot 2009; Jain 2016). India was able to appropriate
the discourses surrounding the Global War on Terror in the context of Kashmir, and the US
became increasingly hands-off the Kashmir dispute (Baruah 2007). Kashmir was simply not a
priority. In the diaspora as well, concerns rose of political engagement in the post-9/11 con-
text, especially for causes that were being painted as part of the War on Terror (Naber 2006;
Takyar 2019; Maira 2016). Other diaspora groups, including prominent Palestinian Americans,
had experienced severe surveillance and were targeted by the American authorities, such as the
high-profile Holy Land Foundation case (Peled 2018).
Reflecting on the post-9/11 context, Mir commented that “it started to feel impossible,
and many people lost hope in the cause . . . when things are hot, people sign on to it, when
387
Hafsa Kanjwal
the returns start diminishing, everyone falls off the band wagon.” This fatigue is not unique to
Kashmir. Especially in the context of prolonged crisis, when earlier mobilization efforts have
been futile, diasporas find it difficult to be motivated and mobilize in meaningful ways. Indi-
viduals may question the impact of their efforts if they do not see positive outcomes over time,
have no way to voice their political views in the homeland, and have been defeated by particu-
lar transformative events. Koinova analyzes this through a distinction between “sustained” and
“episodic” mobilizations:
Sustained mobilization occurs when organization of claim-making and material

and symbolic resources takes place without interruption to address a common issue.
Despite inevitable competition among individuals, there are common grievances, tar-
gets, action-oriented frames, and formal and informal networks engaged to proac-
tively channel discontent. Episodic mobilization takes place when claims are made
and resources drawn as necessary for specific events. Grievances may exist, but not
be common, and claim-making is mostly reactive. A key distinguishing factor is the
durability of claim-making through perpetuation and interconnection of initiatives,
including organized gatherings, public statements, lobbying, books, blogs, and other
activities.
(Koinova 2016: 503)
For the Kashmir diaspora, this distinction is relevant as political mobilizations have primar-
ily been episodic – the challenge, now, is how to engage in advocacy through more sustained
means.
While political advocacy existed along an episodic continuum, the Kashmiri American dias-
pora has remained involved in various cultural and humanitarian efforts. Over the past two
decades, this has resulted in a consistently sustained engagement with relief and humanitarian
efforts. Many such efforts sought to remain “apolitical” and focus more on developmental or
charitable work. Health care, education, culture, and women’s empowerment were amongst
the target areas. These included groups like Chinar International, the Guru Foundation, the
Kathwari Foundation, Kashmir Earthquake Relief, Kashmircorps, the Kashmir Foundation of
America, Revive Kashmir, Kashmer, Funkar, and the Kashmir Education Initiative, amongst
others.
There was significant humanitarian diasporic mobilization during two main natural disasters:
the earthquake of 2005 and the floods in 2014. The humanitarian and charity organizations
involved had to maintain a strictly apolitical stance, especially given they were beholden to their
Indian FCRA status in order to operate in Kashmir, a dilemma they continue to negotiate. The
Kashmiri American Muslim diaspora has also sought to build a sense of community and belong-
ing and preserve their culture and heritage create a social and cultural space through annual
events such as the Kashmir Gathering of North America (KGNA), a three-day gathering that
brings together Kashmiri Americans and Kashmiri Canadians for a series of social and cultural
events, educational activities, and networking opportunities. In its inception, the gathering was
explicitly apolitical. This was met by criticism by some diaspora members as well as those on
the ground in Kashmir. They argued that while one can understand why humanitarian organi-
zations might have to remain apolitical for pragmatic concerns, to isolate cultural and social
spheres from the political in a space like KGNA is inherently problematic. Given that culture
and identity are inherently political, the sentiment that one can remain “apolitical” exemplifies a
number of fundamental concerns about the self-perception of the diaspora, especially in relation
to respectability politics and US empire.
388
The preceding historical overview highlights that despite being vastly out-resourced and
funded, the Kashmir American diaspora has the potential of playing an important role in bring-
ing Kashmir to the attention of various US and UN bodies, and also serve in a mediating capac-
ity to create a discourse surrounding the importance of a resolution, and push forward talks
between India and Pakistan.
US Empire and the Kashmiri American Diaspora

One of the most important factors the Kashmiri American diaspora must acknowledge as they
raise the Kashmir issue is how they are positioned and embedded in imperial frames in the con-
text of US empire. As Engseng Ho writes in his analysis of the Muslim diaspora:
The subversives who peopled such movements [diasporas] were mobile cosmopolitans
whose agendas were presumably extraterritorial. . . . Their geographical mobility
often meant crossing imperial and departmental jurisdictions, stretching the capacity
of empire for political intelligence. . . . An inferior, subaltern entity which was never-
theless diasporic, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated like empire itself, and enough so to
represent a potential threat.
(Ho 2004: 240)
Thus, while the diaspora might have a certain privilege given its positionality (access to resources,
different transnational networks), it can also potentially serve as a threat, especially in its imperial
context, by privileging its perspectives and methods over that of the people in the homeland, as
well as buying into the imperial logics of the country in which it resides, in this case the United
States. There remains the “threat” of (mis)representation of the situation in Kashmir, people’s
aspirations, and the nuances of the sustained political struggle. For example, the diaspora might
be compelled to craft a narrative that makes the Kashmir cause more palatable for the liberal,
secular-leaning international audience. In my conversations with Kashmir-based activists, the
threat of “misrepresentation” remains one of the primary concerns that people express about
diaspora advocacy.
To exemplify this point, I focus attention on three key issues I have noted in relation to
diaspora mobilization since August 2019: respectability politics, engagement with US imperial
actors, and debates over the future of Kashmir.
In the immediate aftermath of August 5, the Kashmiri-American diaspora held diverse pro-
Kashmir protests in cities including New York, Washington, DC, San Francisco, Atlanta, and
Chicago. A number of these protests included the use of American flags. Although participants
were protesting India’s annexation of Kashmir, some members of the diaspora thought it was
important to underscore that they were Americans first, and deeply patriotic. A number of
people told me that they wanted to appear less “foreign” and “threatening” for average passersby,
and that the flags would make them more approachable to “average Americans.”
However, the group that had organized a number of these protests, Stand with Kashmir
(SWK), had an official “no flags” policy due to the fraught and contested nature of nationalist
symbols. In a memo to their regional leads, SWK emphasized that they encouraged participants
to carry signs and images but to refrain from waving flags:
We do not have to prove our loyalties to any state, but rather speak for universal values.
Flags can be divisive, and alienate progressive allies. . . . We must understand that if
we want allies from movements that speak out against American imperialism or police
389
Hafsa Kanjwal
brutality, carrying an American flag, for example (a country that also engages in occu-
pation and warfare) is in direct contrast to our principles.
(Email correspondence, Stand with Kashmir)
This policy was met with criticism with some in the diaspora who felt that it was too aggressive
and alienating.
In thinking though the politics of flags, I am attentive to the ways in which Muslim com-
munities, especially after 9/11, have internalized Islamophobic rhetoric situating them as
“foreign” or “the other.” In doing so, they are constantly in the practice of having to reas-
sert themselves in ways that make them palatable and conform to the average (read: white)
American. This form of respectability politics views assertions of patriotism as being “authen-
tically” American and a way to bridge the gap between minority and majority communities
while highlighting their broader integration into American society. Yet, as we know from the
example of Black Americans, respectability politics ultimately entrench rather than challenge
the contours of mainstream identity politics, often to the detriment of multiple expressions
of minority identities and in an attempt to accommodate neoliberalism (Harris 2014). Instead
of pointing to the limitations of these discourses, for example, respectability succumbs to the
logic of what counts as being “American.” In addition, the relatively privileged class position
of much of the Kashmiri American diaspora – in many ways a “model minority” in the racial
hierarchies of the United States – creates a form of aspirational whiteness that also impacts how
they view the terrain of advocacy. As a result, Kashmiri American advocacy remains anchored
in the politics of race, class, and respectability. It is here, in particular, where a generational
divide amongst first and second-generation activists can emerge. A number of those in the
second generation have come to political consciousness in an era of criticism of US empire
and racial politics and are much more familiar with the dangers or limitations of respectability
politics. Their understanding of how advocacy should occur is in stark contrast to others who
remain wedded to respectability.
Some in the diaspora were also keen on describing diaspora mobilizations as “peaceful” or
“nonviolent,” even just in statements of their group’s work or mission. They pointed to the
history of Muslim American activism, in particular, being criminalized in the US and how it
was important to situate this activism as being “nonviolent,” given the anxieties surrounding
the War on Terror and its relationship to Kashmir. I was again struck by the internalization of
Islamophobia in these conversations – this belief that Muslims must be inherently violent when
doing any form of political advocacy, and that one needs to unilaterally assert oneself as the
“nonviolent” Muslim in order to be acceptable. Here again, respectability politics conveys a
message that there are still those who are “bad” Muslims – those who “we” are separate from.
In buying into the logic of US empire (as well as Indian empire), and its own categorization of
good vs. bad Muslims, this kind of respectability politics justifies anti-Muslim discourses while
also criminalizing those for whom violence may be a part of a broader anti-colonial strategy.
This tension raises questions about the binary between the diaspora and the ground. Does the
diaspora have the moral authority to condemn the armed struggle in Kashmir? Even if it does
not condemn or condone, how does it accurately represent the historical context of the armed
struggle without falling into imperial narratives of “radicalization”?
Respectability politics expresses itself in other ways as well, primarily through the involve-
ment of progressive allies or advocacy groups in certain actions. In a number of protests, solidar-
ity organizations that stand against police brutality, such as like Black Lives Matter, were invited
to speak, and they compared the militarized police infrastructure in the US and the violence
it metes out against communities of color, in particular, with what was happening in Kashmir.
390
This pivot to an intersectional, transnational approach that foregrounds connections between

multiple systems of oppression is critical for building a solidarity movement for Kashmir. How-
ever, some Kashmiri Americans again felt that it was not relevant to make those connections,
and even if it was, “we might be alienating those who might sympathize with us.” The “not all
cops” mantra was an oft-repeated statement. I was particularly struck by a moment in a protest
in NYC that was surrounded by the NYPD, when an older Kashmiri man started chanting
“Thank you, NYPD” and some others followed, while other activists were aghast at the use of
the slogan. Here again, respectability politics stands in the way of building meaningful relation-
ships with those groups who also face different types of systemic oppression and institutional-
ized violence.
Linked to the question of respectability politics is another query pertaining to the efficacy
of political advocacy in Washington, DC. To be sure, the diaspora faces a formidable rival –
the pro-India lobby in the United States – as well as the increased economic and political ties
between the United States and India. The scope for American action on Kashmir is limited
given the reality of US-India relations. As Bald et al. (2013: 12) note,
India has figured as a major focus of US capital expansion over the past two decades of
neoliberal globalization. It is one of the fastest growing global markets for US goods,
as well as a source of cheap outsourced labor for US technology, communications, and
legal firms.
In addition, there is a sizable Indian-American professional class that has grown in size and
wealth in recent decades. The US-based Campaign to Stop Funding Hate has revealed the
growing power, size, and wealth of the Indian-American professional class. Indians are cel-
ebrated in US media reports as entrepreneurs and CEOs, and Bollywood and yoga continue to
leverage significant soft power for India. The influence of Indian Americans is also “manifest
in the quest flow of hundreds of thousands of NRI dollars to support the violently reactionary
Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar in India” (Bald et al. 2013: 12–13).
The small Kashmiri American diaspora is certainly no match for the pro-India lobby and its
allies, which increasingly includes the pro-Israel lobby, white supremacists, and Kashmiri Pandit
groups. This is evidenced by the ways in which pro-India lobbies, including groups like the
Hindu American Foundation, were able to suspend the introduction of House Resolution 745,
a bipartisan resolution that raised the issue of human rights in Kashmir in the aftermath of the
abrogation (Kumar and Lacy 2020). Based on my own personal experiences, these groups also
tried to repeatedly disrupt the talks and teach-ins in universities and community spaces across
the country, labelling the speakers as “jihadist sympathizers” and “spreading Islamist propa-
ganda.” However, as iterated to me by Fai, this has been a long-standing practice of some mem-
bers of the Indian and Kashmiri Pandit diaspora (Fai, Interview 2020).
While the pro-India lobby is highly mobilized and well connected, the Kashmiri diaspora,
with the support of a number of progressive groups, managed to draw the attention of US
elected officials, some of whom sent letters to the Indian embassy or the White House and
made public statements on the human rights situation in Kashmir. The diaspora raised money
for a number of congressional representatives. Nonetheless, Kashmiri American efforts to appeal
to the US political establishment are fraught with contradictions. On House Resolution 745,
many elected officials were approached by the pro-India lobby as well, and some later softened
their criticism of India and did not insist that the resolution make it to the House floor. While
I argue diaspora mobilization should include political advocacy and congressional lobbying,
these efforts should bear in mind that the US has its own imperial foreign policy agenda and
391
Hafsa Kanjwal
interests. A strategy that solely focuses on political advocacy is not tenable, especially as it will be
dependent on how the US positions its relationship with India as well as the Indian-American
community. These contradictions raise the larger question of how a strategy that incorporates
political advocacy can invoke the moral responsibility of the US while at the same time maintain
a critique of US imperialism?
Finally, when it comes to the future of Kashmir, I argue that it is important for the diaspora
to focus its efforts on calling for the right to self-determination, instead of articulating a par-
ticular future for the region. A number of diaspora groups are explicit in their stance of being
either pro-Pakistan or pro-independence. However, the only ethical stance one can take is to
foreground the will of the people, even while maintaining one’s own personal perspective. Oth-
erwise, the diaspora falls into the dangers of “misrepresentation” and can privilege their own
positions over those in Kashmir.
This issue is also linked to the question of the Pakistan state and Pakistani American groups.
The pro-India lobby leverages two main attacks against the Kashmiri diaspora: they claim
that Pakistan is running and funding diaspora mobilizations, and that the diaspora is full of
“ISI agents,” thereby reinforcing the issue as a conflict between India and Pakistan and erasing
the agency of Kashmiri Americans; and they link diaspora efforts with “Islamist” or “jihadist
groups,” especially as a number of American Muslim organizations have also raised concerns
over India’s actions in Kashmir. For some in the diaspora, the response to these attacks might be
to portray a completely secular narrative that erases the religious specificities of Kashmir. To be
sure, Kashmir is not “just” a Muslim issue; however, it is undeniable that Kashmiri Muslims are
being targeted specifically due to their religious identity. To erase the importance of a Muslim
identity to how many Kashmiris perceive their reality is disingenuous and again falls into the
trap of “misrepresentation” for the sake of secular palatability.
Working with the government of Pakistan will be a fraught exercise for the Kashmir dias-
pora. Although Pakistan is one of the few countries that supports the right to self-determina-
tion, the post-August 5 diaspora mobilizations made it clear that advocacy for Kashmir should
remain distinct from the Pakistan state’s narrative. The international and domestic policy com-
munity perceives Pakistan as advocating for Kashmir to serve its own national interest. Thus, the
diaspora must create its own space independent of the India vs. Pakistan binary, while still calling
for the right to self-determination for Kashmiris. Exercise of the right to self-determination
includes an option of merger with Pakistan. Any alliance with Pakistani state affiliates and indi-
viduals should also bear this concern in mind.
Building a Grassroots, Transnational Solidarity Model

In the United States, the political climate supporting Kashmir’s self-determination is limited.
Conversely, there is broad support relating to human rights concerns, given the number of sup-
porting congressional statements after August 5, 2019. For diaspora mobilizations in the United
States to gain ground, Kashmir needs to be embedded in domestic politics. This is increasingly
possible given the influence and actions of the pro-India and Hindutva lobby. The rise of fas-
cism in India provides an opportunity for the stranglehold of the “world’s largest democracy” to
give way, as US media, corporations, universities, and think-tanks will have to recalibrate their
narratives on India. Although this will create space for the Kashmir narrative to gain traction,
the space will remain limited as long as the US aligns its foreign policy interests with India.
The diaspora, while having relative power compared to its numbers, cannot contend with the
influence of the Indian lobby on its own. Therefore, it must engage both domestic and trans-
national channels and modes of solidarity to leverage support for Kashmir. These can include
392
providing humanitarian support, investing in human capital from Kashmir, starting a Boycott
India campaign, establishing durable coalitions with transnational progressive and/or Muslim
movements, and building grassroots solidarity efforts and political advocacy networks in the US.
Furthermore, the rise of diasporic solidarity communities including progressive diaspora groups
from South Asia, such as South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT) and South Asia
Solidarity Initiative (SASI) allow for greater collaboration. Coalition-building is the diaspora’s
fundamental task, and it should include groups working on issues including climate change,
militarism and war, and gender violence. These multipronged activities should involve a num-
ber of different diaspora groups.
This also entails an understanding of the importance of intersectionality informed by feminist
models of anti-occupation struggles that foreground issues of positionality while also pointing
to interlocking and multiple systems of oppression – such as class, caste, race, and gender – and
how they determine people’s lived realities. Another shift for the diaspora to consider is to repo-
sition the question of Kashmir at the core of a number of other simultaneously ongoing political
struggles and liberation movements (Salih, Welchman and Zambelli 2017). It is a critical time
to create a kind of politics that is able to move beyond exclusively identitarian, religious, or
sectarian impulses and is sustained by shared experiences of living under conditions of colonial-
ism and occupation. In doing so, of course, the uniqueness of each individual struggle must be
respected.
Thinking intersectionally also precipitates a move beyond a human rights or minority rights
legal framework in the case of Kashmir, and toward an anti-colonial liberation framework.
While the diaspora can strategically utilize a human rights framework when needed, it must
also understand that a singular focus on human rights, ignoring liberation, can backfire. The
focus on human rights oftentimes obfuscates the underlying political dynamics, can depoliticize
the core issues, and is entangled with colonial and neoliberal power. For example, Amnesty
International criticizes India’s poor record on human rights in Jammu and Kashmir, but they do
not acknowledge the root of the issue – which is political. Human rights organizations often
duplicate the language of the colonizing powers. This occurs because the “reference point and
authority” of a “juridical, rights-based discourse” are placed with and referred to “bodies, insti-
tutions, conventions, rulings and resolutions that are rooted in hegemonic, juridical structures
rather than indigenous, justice and liberation centered ones” (Salih, Welchman and Zambelli
2017: 14).
The work of first and second generation diaspora Kashmiris points toward the increased use
of a multifaceted approach relying broadly on a multisited embeddedness that entails a form of
belonging to and engagement with multiple communities, contexts, and hybridities. For exam-
ple, the Kashmiri Muslim diaspora in the US must contend not only with the occupation of
the “homeland,” but also with anti-Muslim racism and War on Terror frameworks that emerge
both in the homeland as well as the United States. Here, the need for intersectional approaches
is critical to resist multiple modes of oppression.
The opportunity now exists for the broader Kashmir diaspora intelligentsia – armed with its
scholarship and networks – to reimagine the conditions of possibility for Kashmir, both epis-
temically but also materially. Some of this work is already occurring, as Kashmir scholars across
multiple geograpies are challenging the prevailing academic discourses on Kashmir, and as more
Kashmir-based scholars pursue their PhDs and publish critical scholarship on resistance and
occupation. Advocacy efforts will continue to follow suit. Nonetheless, the success of diaspora
engagement will rely on how much buy-in these efforts get from Kashmiris within Kashmir,
and the ways in which the diaspora seeks to continuously be informed by considerations from
the ground, rather than imposing its own frameworks.
393
Hafsa Kanjwal
Conclusion
August 5, 2019, served as another “critical juncture” in India’s long-standing occupation of
Kashmir. As a moment that significantly threatens Kashmiri identity, land, and livelihood, and
precipitates a settler colonial project, it requires a thorough introspection by the diaspora of
its advocacy on Kashmir. For a truly transformative transnational solidarity framework, the
diaspora must move beyond identitarian claims and toward an intersectional approach that rec-
ognizes the multiple layers and vectors of oppression and seeks to dismantle internal hierarchies
including race, gender, sexuality, and class, among others. The Kashmir issue is part of a broader
network of colonial violence and occupation that is rooted in global interconnections. Youth
activists in Kashmir certainly recognize this, as should the diaspora. Given that the diaspora itself
inhabits multiple belongings and diverse allegiances, “liberation” must be defined beyond the
more classic territorial and national boundaries.
The Kashmir diaspora and other allies – which increasingly include progressive South Asian
organizations – can play an important role in how the US-India relationship matures. It is
important to change the perception of India in the United States. At the moment, US support
for the right to self-determination is minimal. But given the right opportunity, and the appro-
priate multipronged approach, including grassroots, institutional, and international awareness,
the possibilities are endless. To succeed, the diaspora must focus on that which unites instead of
divides. Ideology, personality, and ego, must be left aside. The work must be sustained and pro-
active, and not only responsive to transformative events. While the diaspora must be cognizant
of its privilege and responsibility, it must also recall that the hard work of resistance is happening,
every day, in Kashmir.
Works Cited
Ali, Nasreen. 2009. “The Making of Kashmiri Identity.” South Asian Diaspora 1(2): 181–192.
Bald, Vivek, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery. 2013. “Introduction.” In The Sun
Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of US Power, Vol. 2. New York: New York University Press.
Baruah, A. 2007. “India a ‘Reliable Ally’ Against Global Terrorism: U.S. Reports.” The Hindu, January 13.
Biswas, Bidisha. 2010. “Negotiating the Nation: Diaspora Contestations in the USA about Hindu nation-
alism in India.” Nation and Nationalisms 16(4): 696–714.
Bourgois, Philippe and Jeffrey Schonberg. 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Ellis, Patricia and Zafar Khan. 1998. “Diasporic Mobilization and the Kashmir Issue in British Poli-
tics.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 24(3): 471–488.
Fai, Ghulam Nabi. Interview with Author. March 2020.
Harris, Fredrick C. 2014. “The Rise of Respectability Politics.” Dissent 61(1): 33–37.
Ho, Enseng. 2004. “Empire Through Diasporic Eyes: A View from the Other Boat.” Comparative Studies
in Society and History 46(2): 210–246.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. 2009. “The India-US Rapprochement: State Drive or Middle Class-Driven?” India
Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs 65(1): 1–14.
Jaffrelot, Christophe and Ingrid Therwath. 2007. “The Sangh Parivar and the Hindu Diaspora in the West:
What kind of ‘Long-Distance Nationalism?’ ” International Political Sociology 1(3): 278–295.
Jain, B. M. 2016. India-US Relations in the Age of Uncertainty: An Uneasy Courtship. New York: Routledge.
Kashmir American Council. 2001. “Schedule of Mr. Muhammad Yasin Malik.” Personal Archives, Ghu-
lam Nabi Fai.
———. 2004. “The Brussels Resolution.” Personal Archives. Ghulam Nabi Fai.
Kashmir Study Group. Access April 24, 2020. www.kashmirstudygroup.com.
Kathwari, Farooq. 2019. Trailblazer: From the Mountains of Kashmir to the Summit of Global Business and
Beyond. Austin, TX: Greenleaf Book Group Press.
Kirk, Jason. 2008. “Indian-Americans and the U.S.-India Nuclear Agreement: Consolidation of an Ethnic
Lobby?” Foreign Policy Analysis 4(3): 275–300.
394
Koinova, Maria. 2016. “Sustained vs Episodic Mobilization among Conflict-Generated diasporas.” Interna-
tional Political Science Review 37(4): 500–516.
———. 2017. “Beyond Statist Parameters: Sociospatial Positionality and Diaspora Mobilization in Inter-
national Relations.” International Studies Review 19(4): 597–621.
———. 2018. “Critical Junctures and Transformative Events in Diaspora Mobilization for Kosovo and
Palestinian statehood.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44(8): 1289–1308.
Kumar, Rashmeee and Akela Lacy. 2020. “India Lobbies to Stifle Criticism, Control Messaging in U.S.
Congress amid Rising Anti-Muslim Violence.” The Intercept, March 16.
Kurien, Prema. 2004. “Multiculturalism, Immigrant Religion, and Diasporic Nationalism: The Develop-
ment of an American Hinduism.” Social Problems 51(3): 362–385.
———. 2017. “Majority Versus Minority Religious Status and Diasporic Nationalism: Indian American
Advocacy Organizations.” Nation and Nationalism 23(1): 109–128.
Maira, Sunaina Marr. 2016. The 9/11 Generation: Youth Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror. New
York: New York University Press.
Mir, Ghulam Nabi. Interview with Author. March 2020.
Mir, Imraan. Interview with Author. March 2020.
Mishra, Sangay. 2016. Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans. Minneapolis, MN: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press.
Mistry, Dinshaw. 2013–2014. “The India Lobby and the Nuclear Agreement with India.” Political Science
Quarterly 128(4): 717–746.
Naber, Nadine. 2006. “The Rules of Forced Engagement: Race, Gender, and the Culture of Fear among
Arab Immigrants in San Francisco Post-9/11.” Cultural Dynamics 18(3): 235–267.
Peled, Miko. 2018. Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five. Washington, DC: Just World Books.
Peteet, Julie. 2007. “Problematizing a Palestinian Diaspora.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 39(4):
627–646.
Rajagopal, Arvind. 2000. “Hindu Nationalism in the US: Changing Configurations of Political Practice.”
Ethnic and Racial Studies 23(3): 467–496.
“Relating to the Conflict in Kashmir.” March 29, 1995. HR 123, 104th Congress, 1st Session.
Sadeque, Samira. 2019. “How a Red Dot Symbolized Kashmir Resistance Against India’s Move.” Al
Jazeera English, August 16. www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/08/red-dot-symbolised-kashmiri-resistance-
india-move-190815113019954.html.
Salih, Ruba, Lynn Welchman, and Elena Zambelli. 2017. “The Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM):
Transnational Politics, Inter-national Frameworks and Intersectional Alliances.” Power2Youth Working
Paper, No. 27, April. www.iai.it/sites/default/files/p2y_27.pdf.
Smith, Hazel. 2007. “Diasporas in International Conflict.” In Diasporas in Conflict: Peace-Makers or Peace-
Wreckers, edited by Hazel Smith and Paul Stares, 3–16. Tokyo, New York and Paris: United Nations
University Press.
Sökefeld, Martin and Marta Bolognani. 2011. “Kashmiris in Britain: A Political Project or a Social Real-
ity?” In Pakistan and its Diaspora, edited by Marta Bolognani and Stephen M. Lyon, 111–131. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Takyar, Delaram. 2019. “When Interest Doesn’t Turn into Action: Discrimination, Group Identification,
and Muslim Political Engagement in the Post-9/11 Era.” Social Psychology Quarterly 82(3): 231–253.
USA vs. Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai. 2012. Case No. 1:11-cr-561, Document 68. www.investigativeproject.
org/documents/case_docs/2035.pdf.
Van de Wetering, Carina. 2016. Changing US Foreign Policy Toward India: US-India Relations Since the Cold
War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
395
INDEX
“Aakhri Salute” (Manto) 155 Ambedkar, B. M. 285

Aalaw 78 Ambedkar, B. R. 286–287
Abbas, Chaudhary Gulam 258 Amin, Idi 63
Abdullah, Sheikh Mohammad 23, 25, 37, 239, Amin, Mudasir 349
240, 346–347; Atish-e-Chinar 256; dismissal Amin, Shahid 21
as J&K prime minister 331; Nehru removal Amnesty International 120, 334, 348, 357
of 281; “New Kashmir” plan 25; peasants’ Amreek, Khalsa Sikh 66–67
perception of 28–29, 32; “Quit Kashmir” Anderson, Benedict 174
movement 40; year 1947 and 258–259 Andrabi, Jalil 200
abrogation 4; of article 35A and sovereignty in Anghie, Antony 323, 337
Kashmir 335–336; of Articles 370 and 35A Ankit, Rakesh 345
7, 8; of Jammu & Kashmir special status 7; anti-caste 3–4
Kashmiri ethnic identity and 7 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 171
Accardi, Dean 239–250 Aquinas, Thomas 312
accession of Kashmir to India 325–326 Arab News 106
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 204 Arendt, Hannah 156–157
Afaan 274–275 Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) 359
Afridi, Shahid 223; fictional frames of being Armstrong, Elizabeth 375
223–227 Arnold, David 21
“After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan” Article 35A 7; abrogation of, and sovereignty
(Ali) 187 in Kashmir 335–336; Indian Parliament
Aggarwal, Ravina 49–50 deoperationalization of 281
Ahad Azad, Abdul 3 Article 370 74, 345, 346; abrogation of 7; Indian
Aijazi, Omer 175 inclusion of 330–331; Indian Parliament
Akesson, Bree 227 deoperationalization of 281; Kashmiri women
Ālam, Shayk al- 301, 302 and 8
Alavi, Hamza 30 artifacts as sacred memory forms 141–143;
Al-Badr 207 bumtschoent (quince apple) 142–143; currency
alegropolitics 82–83 notes 143; pheran (cloak) 141–142
Alexander, M. Jacqui 11 Arvin, Maile 9
Ali, Agha Shahid 87, 149, 183, 252 assamidars 23
All Jammu Kashmir Students Union (AJKSU) assamis 23
107–108 assemblage of Islamization process 294–299
All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC or Assmann, Aleida 209
Hurriyat) 101, 208, 385 Association of the Parents of Disappeared Persons
Alston, Philip 198 (APDP) 243
Amarnath Land transfer 128–129 Atish-e-Chinar (Sheikh Abdullah) 256
396
Index
atoot ang 357–358 Bukhari, Syed Rabia 373

Atwill, David 170 Busbridge, Rachel 350
Austin, Granville 28–29
Austin’s peasants 28–29 Cabezon, Jose 170
Axel, Brian 273 Campaign to Stop Funding Hate 391
Ayoub, Mahmoud M. 312, 313 carceral grid 6, 94, 116, 118–119, 122
Ayyangar, Gopalswami 327 castes 283–284, 295
azaadi movement 97, 101, 131, 132 Cesaire, Aime 350
Azad, Arezou 301 Chakravarti, Uma 371
Changthang region see Ladakh frontier politics
Bachelet, Michelle 335 Charlesworth, Hilary 337
Baishya, Amit R. 153–167 Chatterjee, Partha 25, 263, 283, 349
Bhan, Mona 1–11 Chatterji, Joya 230
Bakshi, Shakil 262, 263 Chinar International 388
Bald, Vivek 391 Chittisinghpora, as village of the martyred 62;
baptism by blood 287 massacre in 63–66; militarized spaces for 63–64
Barth, Frederik 130 chollo 54
Baruah, Sanjib 50 Ciobanu, Calina 161
Bashir, Khalid 256 Clinton, Bill 60
Batool, Essar 348 Cockell, John 98–99
bazaar-mosque 131 Coetzee, J. M. 161
Bazaz, Prem Nath 256 Cohen, Jeremy 311
Bearak, Barry 62–63, 65 colonial occupation, splintering 310
Bedi, B. P. L. 38 Contested Pasts (Zutshi) 2
Bedi, Freda 38 contrapuntal reading 255
begar 52 cosmopolitanism 175–176; food representations
Benford, Robert D. 97 of 179–180
Bengal Tenancy Act of 1885 23 counterinsurgency lawfair, writ of liberty and
Benjamin, Walter 146 120–121
Benvinisti, Eyal 347 counter-mapping 158–159
Beverley, John 196 Country Without a Post Office, The (Ali) 183–193;
Bhabha, Homi 255 duality examples in 186–187; introduction to
Bhan, Mona 49–50, 93–95, 154, 161, 163, 172, 183; paisley addition to 184–185; “Return to
173, 323–338, 346, 347 Harmony 3” 185–186
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) 6–7, 248, 273 cricket in Eidgah 221–231; fictional frames
Bhardwaj, Vishal 81 of young boys playing 223–227; figure of
Bhat, Sabzar Ahmad 210, 214–215 Kashmiri child and 221–223; as nationalist
Bhatt, Rohan 271 playbor 230–231; work of, in Kashmir 227–230
Bhawnani, Gaurav 120 critical indigenous studies 1, 9–11
Bhutia, Anisa 170–180 Critical Kashmir disability studies 77–78
bildungsroman 196 cross-LoC trade 134–135
Biodiversity Conservation and Livelihood cryptopolitics 89
Improvement Project (BCRLIP) 55 cultural resistance 100
biopolitics 73, 343
blinding tactics 72 Daily Mail 106
body in custody 118–119 Dar, Fayaz Ahmad 349
Bose, Purnima 154, 161 Dar, Huma 249
boundaries, manipulating to redirect trade Dar, Rouf 316
133–135 Dar, Shakoor Ahmad 105
Bouquet (Zahir-ud-Din) 262 Datta, Ankur 268–276
Bourdieu, Pierre 31 Dawes, James 196
Bourgois, Philippe 383 debility 73–74, 75
Brahmanical: caste system 261; ethics and Hindu, Deeb, Lara 243
tradition 280, 285–287, 288, 289; order De Kosnik, Abigail 230
235–236, 288; rituals 295; values 236 De Martino, Ernesto 209
Brass, Paul 65 Derrida, Jacques 157
British East India Company 7 Dev, Kapil 225
397
Index
Dhattiwala, Raheel 66 Field, Jessica 50

diaspora, defined 380–381 Fine, Michelle 100
diaspora mobilizations see Kashmir diaspora Fitzmaurice, Gerald 326
mobilizations Flashback (Zahir-ud-Din) 256, 262
disability justice in Kashmir, resistance and 78–79 food and memory 173–174; see also Lhasa
disability studies 72–79; Critical Kashmir 77–78; Restaurant of Srinagar
Indian 77; integrating, into critical Kashmir food crisis, peasantry and 24–26
studies 74–76; introduction to 72–73; models Foucault, Michel 73, 316, 342–343
of 73; overview of 73–74; of resistance/justice FreePressKashmir 108
in Kashmir 78–79; southern theories of 76–77 Fresh Approach to the History of Kashmir
Discovery of India (Nehru) 260 (Mohiuddin) 256, 261
Disgrace (Coetzee) 161 frontier concept, trade and 127
Dixon, Owen 329 Fruhstuck, Sabine 229
Dogra regime 3, 7, 22, 381 Funkar 388
Dogra rule, reshaping sovereignty through
343–344, 371 Gaborieau, Marc 170
Douglas, Mary 268, 276 gamuk 23
dreaming, sociality of 144–146 Gandhi 286
Drew, Frederic 51, 52 Ganie, Mohd Tahir 97–110
Dudai, Ron 198 Garland-Thomson, Rosemary 73
Dujana, Abu 213 Geelani, Syed Ali 256, 257
Duschinski, Haley 1–11, 101, 115–124, 163, 172, Geertz, Clifford 257
280, 319–321, 323–338, 345, 346, 347, 362 Geiger, Danilo 49
Genocide Watch 357
Eaton, Richard 299 Ghai, Anita 73
Economist, The 283 Ghosh, Shrimoyee Nandini 101, 115–124 –, 280,
Erevelles, Nirmala 73 325, 345, 346, 362
Ernst, Carl W 294 Ghulam Mohammad, Master 29–31
Essa, Azad 75 Gidwani, Vinay 175
Ethan Allen 383 Gigoo, Arvind 270
ethics, malleability of 284–288 Gigoo, Siddharth 270
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Barth) 130 Ginzburg, Carlo 22
ethnic identity, Kashmiri 7 Gita 286–287
European colonialism: definition of 342; elements God of Small Things, The (Roy) 195
of 342 “Going Muslim” paradigm 249
everyday acts of resistance 100 Golden Temple attack 67–68
the everyday concept, peasant consciousness and Goodall, S. K. 54
29–32 Gopinathan, Kanan 284
gowa 54
fact-finding, human rights 198 Green, Nile 2, 299
Fai, Ghulam Nabi 384, 387 groos 23
Faiz, Ahmed Faiz 83 Guha, R. 54
Falak, Uzma 146, 315 gully cricket 225
Fanon, Frantz 166, 167 gulshan 82
Farooq, Mirwaiz Maulvi 188 Gurdwara Shaheed Niwas 63
Fascism in Popular Memory (Passerini) 209 Guru, Afzal 348
“Fateh Kadal Reading Room Party” 39 Guru Foundation 388
Fazili, Gowhar 278–289
Felman, Shoshana 200 Habba Khatoon 3
feminism 367–376; global, movements habeas corpus, writ of see writ of liberty
372–375; Indian, Muslim solidarity and 360, habeas corpus courtroom judicial maneuvers
369–372; Kashmir, solidarity and 367–368; 121–124
non-solidarities with Kashmir and 372–375; hagiopolitics of repression 250
Zia critique of Indian 320 Hai, Maulvi 187–189
feminist scholarship 5; within disability studies 76; Haider (film) 81, 82–83; female sexuality and
and queer rights discourses 8; in South Asia 360 88–90; hortus interruptus and 83–88
Fewkes, H. Jacqueline 171, 177 Haines, Chad 133
398
Index
Hajjar, Lisa 346 to 341–343; military occupation and 347–349;

Haksar, Nandita 371 occupational constitutionalism and 346–347;
halqa committees 24 unprecedented siege and 349–350; violence and
Hamadani, Ali 293, 295, 299; religious/political transfer of power 344–346
power of 239, 240–241; Zia-ul-Haq and 243–246 Indian Wildlife Act 55
Hamayon, Roberte 223, 230 India-Pakistan War 6
Hamza Makhdum 241 indigeneity: defined 9; studies 9–11
Handoo, Bilal 108 indigenous peoples 10, 294–297, 342; personal
Hari Parbat 269–270 adaptive strategy and 53
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen 207 indigenous political orders 10
Hasnain, Ata Syed 103 indigenous studies 1, 9–11
Hassan, Mehdi 83 Indology 260–261
Hatina, Meir 311, 312 Indus Water Treaty (IWT) 332–333
Hebdige, Dick 230–231 integrated displacement process 54
Hegel, G. W. F. 315 intermarriage of Muslim boys and Sikh girls
Helal, Waseem 153 66–68
Hindu, The 103 international civil society organizations 334–335
History of the Struggle, The (Bazaz) 256 International Commission of Jurists (ICJ)
history writers term use 256 334–335, 357
Hiuen-Tsiang 302 International Committee of the Red Cross
Hizbul Mujahideen (Hizb) 207, 212, 309 (ICRC) 357
Ho, Engseng 389 Invention of Africa (Mudimbe) 342
Hobsbawm, Eric 25 Inverse Journal 3
home/homeland among Kashmiri Pandits Iqbal, Allama Muhammad 240
268–276; home, described 268; introduction to “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight”
268; other possibilities of 270–273; politics of (Ali) 186, 187
remembrance and 274–276; traces of 268–270; Ishaq, Munshi 256
uncertain homeland and 273–274 Islam, Tajamul 78
homelessness 268 Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) 384
Home Stays 55 Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) 384
hortus conclusus 82 Islamization of Kashmir 293–305; assemblages
hortus interruptus 81–91; alegropolitics and 82–83; and multiplicities 294–299; causes of 299;
described 82; female sexuality and 88–90; introduction to 293–294; Mongol invasions
Haider and 83–88; introduction to 81–83; and 294–295; territorializing agencies 296–297,
Mahjoor and 86–87; Peer and 85–86; Zahoor 300–303
and 89–90 itinerant territoriality, trade and 129–131
Howley, James D. 327 Itoo, Yasin 212
humanitarianism 93–95; see also youth resistance
human rights: fact-finding 198; literary genre and Jagat, Gurbachan 63
196–197 Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) 207
human rights violations, solidarity for Kashmir Jaish-e-Muhammad (Jaish) 309
and 359–361 Jalali, Pran Nath 38
Human Rights Watch 334, 348 Jaleel, Muzamil 187
Hundle, Anneeth Kaur 63 Jama’at-e-Islami 10
hunting practices 53 Jammu and Kashmir, State of: political process
Hussain, Nasser 116 of Jammu and Kashmir, annexation of 6–7;
Hussain, Shafqat 53 Department of Wildlife Protection 56;
developmentalist model 54; India’s revocation
Ignatieff, Michael 196 of 3; Muslim Conference 24; National
Imroz, Parvez 332 Conference 24; stone-throwing incidents 102;
Inder Salim 275 tasks of ruler of 43
Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir 341 Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society
Indian disability studies 77 (JKCCS) 104, 117, 222
Indian feminism, Muslim solidarity and 369–372 Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF)
Indian “postcolonialist” critics 253–255 131–132, 207, 309
Indian settler/colonial sovereignty in Kashmir Jammu Massacre 258
341–350; Dogra rule and 343–344; introduction Jan, Umer 308–316
399
Index
Jayasuriya, Sanath 225 Kashmiri Pandits 9, 40–41; home among 268–276

Jha, Prem Shankar 38 (see also home/homeland among Kashmiri Pandits)
Jihad 309–310 Kashmiri peasant: as category 22–24;
J&K People’s Conference (JKPC) 336 movement 27
Junaid, Mohamad 102, 158, 252–264, 310, Kashmiris Fight for Freedom (Saraf) 256
314, 346 Kashmiri Sultanate: period 240; saints of 239–241
Kashmiriyat 239; Indian secularism and 260;
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara 81–91, 191, 349 Lal Ded and 246–248; Modi and 248–250;
Kafer, Alison 73 solidarity for Kashmir and 358–359
Kak, Sanjay 373 Kashmir Lit 3
Kanjwal, Hafsa 46, 228–229, 235–237, 379–394 Kashmir Muslim Association of North America
kanni-jang 102; see also stone-throwing protests (KMA) 384
Kanth, Idrees 21–32 Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Advocacy
Kanth, Mir Fatimah 106 Network (KSCAN) 360–361
Kashir: Being a History of Kashmir (Sufi) 256 Kashmir Solidarity Network 3
Kashmir: trade, armed insurgency in 309–310; Kashmir Study Group (KSG) 386
as atoot ang 195; Central Asia connection 2; kashtkar 23
courts of (see writ of liberty); disabling 72–79; Kathwari, Farooq 383, 386
Dogra regime and 7; Indian State’s necropolitics Kathwari Foundation 388
in 310–311; indigeneity studies described Kaul, Nitasha 68, 348, 349, 367–376
9–11; introduction to critical studies of 1–9; Kaul, Suvir 37–47
peasantry (see peasantry); poetry and writers Kauls, Sudha 175
3; question 257; resistance/disability justice Kaur, Bhavneet 138–146
in 78–79; secular democracy in 280–283; Kaur, Deepa 62
secularism and 10–11; settler colonial studies Kaur, Geet 60–61, 62
described 9–11; solidarity for (see solidarity for Kaur, Keerat 67
Kashmir); sovereignty 7–8 (see also sovereignty Kaur, Nain 63–64
in Kashmir); stray dogs and militarized zones Kazi, Seema 348
in 154; violence/nonviolence dynamics in Kēhaulani Kauanani, J. 9–10
104–105 Khache 170–171
Kashmir American Council (KAC) 384 Khan, Amanullah 380
Kashmircorps 388 Khan, Gousia 242, 243
Kashmir diaspora mobilizations 379–394; Khan, Imran 225
introduction to 379–380; Kashmiri American Khan, Liaquat Ali 329
diaspora 389–392; Kashmiri American Muslim Khan, Mohammad Ayub 332
diaspora, history of 383–384; political advocacy, Khan, Nyla Ali 239, 246
1900s 384–389; thinking through 380–383; Khan, Sulmaan Wasif 172, 173
transnational solidarity model, building Khan, Tahira Noor 274, 275–276
392–393 Kheer Bhavani temple 269
Kashmir Earthquake Relief 388 Kikon, Dolly 174
Kashmir Education Initiative 388 Kilam, Indu 272
Kashmir: Exposing the Myth Behind the Narrative kisan committees 26–28
(Bashir) 256 Knuckey, Sarah 198
Kashmir Foundation of America 388 Kohli, Virat 225
Kashmir Game Preservation Department Kohn, Eduardo 155
(KGPD) 53 Kosambi, D. D. 286–287
Kashmir Gathering of North America Koshur indigenous language 86
(KGNA) 388 Koul, Pratush 269
Kashmiri: child (see cricket in Eidgah); ethnic Koul, Rajendra 275
identity 7; nationalism 21–32 (see also Kumar, Amit 344, 349
peasantry); self-determination movement 97 Kumar, Vijay 102
(see also youth resistance); Sikh women 60–68 kunstlerroman Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir
(see also Sikh women); youth resistance 97–110 (Sajad) 153
(see also youth resistance)
Kashmiri American diaspora 389–392 Ladakh frontier politics 49–56; Changthang
Kashmiri American Muslim diaspora, history of region 50; civil hunting practices and 53;
383–384 introduction to 49–50; pashmina trade and,
400
Index
precolonial period 51; resource conservation martyrdom: in Abrahamic religions 311–313;

policies and 55–56; res system and 52; graveyards 314; in India-controlled Kashmir
scholarship on 49–50; spatial control and, 313–315; in Quran 312
postcolonial period 53–55; trade expansion Martyrs Day 344
and, colonial period 52–53 Mashaemit Gharrih-the forgotten homes
Lal Ded 3, 191, 239, 240; Kashmiriyat and (multimodal digital project) 274–276
246–248 mass blinding 72
Lamb, Alastair 326–327 Mbembe, Achille 130, 158, 308, 310, 343
The Lancet 357 McGranahan, Carole 173
Lander, Shira 311 Medicins Sans Frontiers 357
“Land of Lalla-Ded” (Khan) 246 Meekosha, Helen 76–77
land reforms 22; see also peasantry Mehta, Pratab Bhanu 253, 283
Langan, Celeste 75 memory, food and 173–174; see also Lhasa
Lashkar-e-Taiba (Lashkar) 309 Restaurant of Srinagar
Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) 62, 65, 207, 213 memory concept 209–210; reconstructing
last/final calls 315 (see Tehreek history-writing)
Laub, Dori 200 militancy: oppression and 215; peer influence
lawfare 118; counterinsurgency, writ of liberty and 216; as phenomenon 208; religiosity and
and 120–121 215–216
Les Lieux de Memoire (Nora) 209 militancy narratives in Kashmir 207–218; Bhat
Levy, Adrian 103 narrative 214–215; introduction to 207–208;
Levy, Yagil 311 learnings from sketches 215–218; memory
Lhasa Restaurant of Srinagar 170–180; and history 208–210; methodology explained
cosmopolitanism and 175–176; food 210–211; Naikoo narrative 212–213; study
representations of cosmopolitanism 179–180; findings 218; Zargar narrative 213–214
insider/outsider dilemma 177–178; militant groups, Kashmiri 207
introduction to 170–172; journey of 172; militarism 93–95; see also youth resistance
Kashmiri identity and 176; memories of, Military-Mujahid games 226
in Kashmir 172–173; menu and trajectories military occupation practices 347–349
173–174; multiculturalism and interiors of Ministry of Utmost Happiness, The (Roy) 195–204;
178–179; new menu of 174–175; outer garden genre and human rights significance explained
of 176–177 196–197; human rights report 197–199;
liberal elite, described 279 introduction to 195–196; as magical realism
Line of Control (LoC) 127–128; Simla Agreement 202–204; testimony 200–202
and 334; trade and 129, 134–135 Mir, Firdous Ahmad 314
Loidolt, Hermann 334 Mir, Ghulam Nabi 383
Lone, Fozia 333, 345 Mir, Shafqat 122–123
Lone, Sajjad 336 Mir Sayyid 235, 293, 295, 298
Los Angeles Review of Books 202 Mishra, Pankaj 348–349
Ludden, David 27, 30 Misri, Deepti 1–11, 72–79, 149–151, 173,
249, 348
Madan, T. N. 298 mobility disability 75
Madhok, Balraj 334 mobilized generation 97, 105
magical realism 202–204; defined 202 Modi, Narendra 6, 239, 248–250, 335
Mahmood, Saba 62 Mohammad Maqbool Damnoo vs. State of Jammu and
Mahmud, Ershad 155 Kashmir (1972) 331
Majhoor, Ghulam Rasool 86 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade 373
Majid, Iymon 10 Mohiuddin, Akhtar 3, 256, 261, 263
Malhotra, Khushdeep Kaur 60–68 moral economy 129
Malik, Aatina Nisar 226 Moscaliuc, Mihaela 186
Malik, Inshah 78, 105, 309, 343, 344, 348, 370 Mudimbe, Valentin Y. 342
Malik, Ishfaq Ahmad 314 Mufti, Aamir 260
Malik, Yasin 385 Mufti, Mehbooba 221
Manto, Saadat Hasan 153–167; see also “Tetwal ka Mukhtar, Omar 132
Kutta” (Manto) multiplicity of Islamization process 294–299
marketplace see trade Mumlikat Kay Aakhri Din (Rasool) 256
Marsden, Magnus 171–172 Musharraf, Pervez 99
401
Index
Mushtaq, Samreen 349, 373 Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) 385

“Muslim Life and Rituals: A Case-Study of Major Orientalism (Said) 208
Shrines of Kashmir” (Khan) 242 Osuri, Goldie 341–350, 373
Muslim solidarity and Indian feminism 369–372 Out of Sight in Kashmir (film) 75
Musurillo, Herbert 312
Mutua, Makau 201–202 paisley 184–185
Muzamil, Ghazi 108 Palestine 259; acts of protest 78; memory
representation in 140–141; solidarity crisis and
Nadim, Dina Nath 3 362, 373; United Nations Security Council and
Nagari, Akhilesh 274, 275 323, 355
Naikoo, Asadullah 212 Palestine (Sacco) 166
Naikoo, Riyaz 207, 210, 212–213 palimpsestic time 11
namtich tehreek 138, 140, 141 Pandit, Huzaifa 106, 183–193
Napolitano, Valentina 269 Panun Kashmir (Our Kashmir) 273–274
Naqshbandi, Suhail 75 paperwork warfare 116
Narayan, Kirin 177 Parikh, Crystal 196
National Agricultural Council 44 Parrey, Arif Ayaz 153
National Assembly 43 Parrikar, Manohar 103
National Conference 22; kisan committees and Parthasarathy, Malini 103
26–28 Parvez, Khurram 117
National Economic Plan: areas addressed in 44; pashmina trade in Changthang frontier 51;
Naya Kashmir and 43–46; Peasant’s Charter see also Ladakh frontier politics
44–45; Women’s Charter 45–46; Worker’s Passerini, Luisa 209
Charter 45 “A Pastoral” (Ali) 87
National Hydroelectric Power Corporation Patil, Patibha 106
(NHPC) 332 peasantry 21–32; Austin’s peasants 28–29; as
nation-building 229 category 22–24; everyday peasant 29–32;
Nawroz-i-sabha (Rahi) 87 food crisis and 24–26; introduction to 21–22;
Naya Kashmir 25, 37–47; Constitution of State as Kashmiri nationalism 21; kisan committees
and Nation in 40–42; governance compromises and 26–28
and 46–47; introduction to 37–39; National The Peasant’s Charter 44–45
Assembly 43; National Economic Plan 43–46; Peer, Basharat 81, 85–87
relevance of, today 39–40 peer influence, militancy and 216
Nayar, Pramod K. 196 Pe’nd Online 3
Nayeem, Hameeda 187 People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) 361
nazarana 23 perpetuity of grief 140
NDTV Dialogues (TV program) 103 persistence 10, 268
necropolitics 308, 343; see also sacred necropolitics personal adaptive strategy 53
Nehru, Jawaharlal 132, 187, 259, 282–283, Peteet, Julie 381
329, 332 Physicians for Human Rights on Kashmir 348
“New Kashmir” plan 25, 26 Pirzada, Rafiq A. 293–305
new political generation 97 pirzadas 24
New York Times 106 playbor (play-labor) 230–231
Nida-e-Haq (Ishaq) 256 Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) 226
Noorani, A. G. 283 Plebiscite Front 282
Nora, Pierre 209 political advocacy, 1900s Kashmir diaspora and
Notar, Beth E. 171 384–389
Nund Rishi 3, 239, 240 political process of Jammu and Kashmir 278–289;
ethics malleability and 284–288; Indian
occupation 93–95; see also youth resistance liberal class outrage 283–284; introduction to
occupational constitutionalism 101, 280, 278–280; secular democracy and 280–283
346–347, 362 Polycarp 312
O’Connor, W. F. 52 Prashad, Vijay 375
“Of the Dog Days in Kashmir” (Zia) 154 Prem Nath Koul vs. State of Jammu and Kashmir
One Room Tenements (ORT) 270–271 (1959) 331
Operation Bluestar 67 Preventative Detention Act, 1954 346
oppression, militancy and 215 Progressive Writers’ Movement 3
402
Index
Puar, Jasbir 6, 73–74, 75, 78, 343 Sād, Bam 301

Public Safety Act (PSA) 94–95, 115, 215, Sahib, Hamza Makhdum 239–240
222, 259 Said, Edward 208–209, 254–255, 263
“Pundit Manto’s First Letter to Pundit Nehru” saints of Kashmiri Sultanate 239–241; popular life
(Manto) 155 of 242–243; shrines of 242
Puranlal Lakhanpal v. President of India (1961) 331 Sajad, Malik 75, 153
Puri, Hardeep 103 Sampat Prakash vs. State of Jammu and Kashmir
(1968) 331
Qadiri, Jalib 200 sanctioned ignorance concept 355–356; see also
Qasim, Abu 213 solidarity for Kashmir
Qayoom, Mian 115, 120 Sara (Kashmir University student) 106–107
Quit Kashmir movement 259, 344 Sarabhai, Mridula 371
Saraf, Aditi 127–136
Rafique, Mohammad 225 Saraf, Sanjay 78
Rahi, Rahman 87 Saraf, Yusuf 256
Rai, Mridu 191–192, 260, 343, 371 sarkaer historians 252
Raina, Ajay 272 Schmitt, Carl 342
Raposo-Quintana, Paula 210 Scholz, Trebor 230
Rasool, P. G. 256 Schonberg, Jeffrey 383
Rau, Benegal 330 ScoopWhoop 103
reconstructing memory see Tehreek Scott, J. C. 52
history-writing secular democracy in Kashmir 280–283
Red Cross 357 secularism: Kashmir and 10–11; Nehru and Indian
Red for Kashmir campaign 379 259–260
Rehman, Abdur 105 Segal, Lotte Buch 140–141
religiosity 211, 215–216 Selected Subaltern Studies (Said) 254
religious/political power in Kashmir 239–250; self-determination 345; conceptions of 324–325;
Hamadani and Zia-ul-Haq 243–246; movement 97; trade and 128–129
introduction to 239; Lal Ded and Kashmiriyat Sengupta, Indra 209
246–248; Modi’s Kashmiriyat 248–250; popular sensory remembrance 138–146; artifacts as sacred
life of saints 242–243; saints of Kashmiri memory forms 141–143; described 140–141;
Sultanate 239–241 dreaming, sociality of 144–146; introduction to
replicas 269–270 138–140; purpose of exploring 140
resistance and disability justice in Kashmir 78–79 Seremetakis, Nadia 141
resistance themes 100 Serpents Under My Veil (Zahoor) 81
resource conservation policies, Changthang settler colonialism 117, 342, 361; and
frontier 55–56 demographic engineering 310–311; Indian
res system 52 77–78; Kashmiri saints and 239, 250; in
Revive Kashmir 388 Kashmir studies 5–6, 8–11; political/legal
Reynolds, John 116, 124 changes following siege and 349–350; upper
the right to maim 343 caste-class imagination and 229
Rishī, Shaykh Nūruddīn 293, 297–299 settler colonial sovereignty 349–350
Rizwaan College of Education 187–188 settler colonial studies 9–11
Rizwan, Rakhshan 175, 195–204 Shah, Faiz 172; see also Lhasa Restaurant of
Rowe, Aimee Carrillo 11 Srinagar
Roy, Arundhati 195–204, 348–349; see also Shahadat 310; see also martyrdom
Ministry of Utmost Happiness, The (Roy) shaheedan da pind (village of the martyred) 62
Rudad-e-Qafas (Geelani) 256, 257 Shaheed Mordguzars 314
Sabharwal, Alka 49–56 Shahid 312
Shāh Mīr dynasty 295
sacred necropolitics 308–316; armed insurgency Shami, Seteney 171–172
in Kashmir and 309–310; described 309, Shanin, Teodor 25
315; Indian State’s, in Kashmir 310–311; Sharma, Sarbani 221–231
introduction to 308–309; martyrdom in Sharma, Varad 270
Abrahamic religions and 311–313; martyrdom Shawl Baf Tehreek 344
in India-controlled Kashmir and 313–315 Shimla Agreement 6
sacred-secular Indic complex 260 Sikhs 7, 39, 240, 269, 343
403
Index
Sikh women 18, 60–68; intermarriage threat Sufi, G. M. D. 256

of Muslim boys and 66–68; in Kashmiri Sūfi Shaykhs 293
discourses 60–62; militarized spaces for 63–64; Summa Theologiae (Aquinas) 312
overview of 60–62; placing, in Kashmir 62–63; Sun Herald 106
post-massacre solidarity building and 65–66 Supski, Sian 177
Simla Agreement 333–334 Syeed, Sayyid 384
Simpson, Audra 10 Sylvester, Christine 374
Singh, Arpita 274
Singh, Avtar 200 Tehreek history writers 255–257
Singh, Bhagat 259 Tehreek history-writing 252–264; colonial
Singh, Chandeep 78 continuities and 259; Indian historiography,
Singh, Gulab 7, 184, 343 appropriation of Kashmir and 259–261;
Singh, Guru Gobind 67 introduction to 252–253; oppositional logics
Singh, Hari (Maharaja of Kashmir) 23, 282, 344 of 261–263; postcolonial occupation and
Singh, Manmohan 99 253–255; Tehreek term use 252–253; writers
Singh, Nanak 63, 66 255–257; year “1947” and 257–259
Singh, Rohit 170 territoriality, trade and 129–131
Singh, Veer 66–67 territorializing agencies of Islamization of Kashmir
Sivaramkrishnan, K. 175 296–297, 300–303
Slaughter, Joseph 196 testimony 200–202; defined 200
Smith, Sidonie 201 “Tetwal ka Kutta” (Manto) 153–167; afterlives
Snow, David A. 97 of 153; erasure of Tetwal/Kashmir in 153,
social justice framework of resistance 100 154–155; introduction to 153–155; kutte ki
solidarity for Kashmir 355–362; atoot ang and maut expression in, described 158; “like a dog”
357–358; feminism and 367–368; human reference in Munnu 158–162; shahid expression
rights violations and 359–361; introduction in, described 157; stray dogs represented in
to 355–357; kashmiriyat and 358–359; 153–154, 155–158; “Tamasha-e-Tetwal”
re-conquering Kashmir and crisis of 361–362 critique of Manto 162–167
South Asian Americans Leading Together Third World Approaches to International Law
(SAALT) 393 (TWAIL) 323
South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) 393 third world imperialism 323–324
southern theories of disability 76–77 This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition (Parrey
sovereignty in Kashmir 7–8, 323–338; abrogation and Helal) 153
of Article 35A and 335–336; accession to India Thomas, Claire 374
and 325–326; Indus Water Treaty and 332–333; Thompson, E. P. 129
international civil society organizations and Thorpe, Robert 344
334–335; introduction to 323–325; judicial Thum, Rian 300
dispute domestication 329–332; liberation Tibetan Cultural Revolution of 1959 172
strategic engagement 336–338; Simla Tiger, Sameer 207
Agreement and 333–334; UNMOGIP and Tiger Ladies, The (Kauls) 175
334; UN Security Council resolutions 326–329 “Tonight” (Ali) 192
spatial control, Ladakh frontier politics and 53–55 traces, anthropology of 269
Spivak, Gayatri 355 trade 127–136; cross-LOC 134–135; frontier
splintering colonial occupation 310 concept and 127; introduction to 127–128;
Stand with Kashmir (SWK) 389–390 itinerant territoriality and 129–131; Line of
Staniland, Paul 309 Control and 129; moral/political economy
State Bank of India v. Santosh Gupta (2016) 331 of 128–129; public resistance and 131–133;
Stein, Aurel 261, 303 redirecting, manipulating boundaries and
Stitch (Zahoor) 89 133–135
Stoler, Ann 141, 253, 254 trade artifacts 133
stone-throwing protests 98, 102; female transnational solidarity model, building 1, 3,
student 106 392–393
Strassler, Karen 141 Treaty of Amritsar, 1846 7, 40, 52, 184, 343
strike calendars 105 Treaty of Leh, 1842 52
Subaltern Studies 254, 255–256 Treaty of Temisgang 51
Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt 49, 55
and Society (1982 to 2005) 255 Tuck, Eve 11, 100
404
Index
UAPA 5 World Kashmir Freedom Movement (WKFM) 385

Uberoi, J. P. S. 130, 286 Writing Human Rights (Parikh) 196
ud-Dīn, Sultan Qutub 296 writ of habeas corpus see writ of liberty
United Nations Commission for India and writ of liberty 115–124; body in custody and
Pakistan (UNCIP) 328 118–119; counterinsurgency lawfair and
United Nations Human Rights Commission 120–121; courtroom judicial maneuvers
(OHCHR) 357 121–124; introduction to 115–117
United Nations intervention in Kashmir 3
United Nations Manual on Human Rights Yang, K. Wayne 100
Reporting 198 Yatu, Abdus Salam 26
United Nations Military Observer Group 357; in Younis, Waqar 225
India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) 329, 334 Yousuf, Peer 139
UN Security Council resolutions 326–329; youth development as resistance 100
forty-seven 47 328–329, 345; eighty80 329 youth resistance 97–110; failed dialogue process
unsuccessful development alternatives 55 and 99–100; introduction to 97–99; militarized
upper caste-class elite 288–289 occupation and 101–102; mobilization and 105;
New Delhi view of 103–104; policing student/
Veracini, Lorenzo 10 youth activists 107–109; political, overview of
violence/nonviolence, dynamics of 104–105 100–101; stone-throwing protests and 98, 102;
Vogel, Birtie 50 students and 106–107; violence/nonviolence
“Vwolo ha bagvano” (Mahjoor) 86–87 dynamics in Kashmir 104–105
Wagay, Mohammad Yaqoob 62 Zaanan Waanan 3

Wahid, Siddiq 2, 173 Zafar, Hanan 274, 275
Wande 3 Zahir-ud-Din, Soniya Amin 173, 256, 257, 262, 263
Wani, Aijaz Ashraf 46–47 Zahoor, Asiya 81, 82–83, 89–90
Wani, Burhan 105, 207, 212, 213, 221, 348 zamindar 22–24
Washington Post 106 Zargar, Ghulam Mohammad 213
Watson, Julia 201 Zargar, Haris 11, 207–218
Westcott, Stephen P. 328 Zargar, Majid 210, 213–214
What Happened to Governance in Kashmir? Zeid, Ra’ad Al Hussein 335
(Wani) 46–47 Zetter, Roger 274
White, Hayden 262 Zia, Ather 17–19, 68, 139, 154, 173, 243, 343,
Whitehead, Andrew 38 346, 347, 348, 349, 355–362
witnessing, martyrdom and 312–313 Zia-ul-Haq, Muhammad 239; Hamadani and
Wolfe, Patrick 8, 342 243–246
Women’s Charter 45–46 Zooneh 243
The Worker’s Charter 45 Zooni (Kashmir University student) 107
World Bank 55 Zutshi, Chitralekha 2, 174, 191
405

Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

“This crucial, timely volume not only explicates the political situation of Kashmir; it offers

“This pathbreaking interdisciplinary volume – grounded in feminist principles that are at

“This handbook is a vital intellectual contribution to Kashmir studies. It provides essential

• Territories, Homelands, Borders

Haley Duschinski is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Ohio University, USA. She is

Edited by Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski

Critical Kashmir Studies: Settler Occupations and the Persistence

1 Peasant Imaginaries and “Kashmiri Nationalism” 21

3 Closing the Frontier? Extraction, Contested Boundaries, and the

4 Kashmiri Sikh Women and Their Experiences With Conflict 60

6 Hortus Interruptus: A Time for Alegropolitics in Kashmir 81

7 Claiming the Streets: Political Resistance Among Kashmiri Youth 97

8 The Writ of Liberty in the Courts of Kashmir 115

9 Trade, Boundaries, and Self-Determination 127

10 Sensory Remembrance: Retelling the 1990s in Downtown Srinagar 138

11 Dogs of War, War Dogs: The Afterlives of Manto in Two Kashmiri

12 Cosmopolitanism, Food, and Memory: The Lhasa Restaurant

13 The Country of Privilege: Problematizing the Country Without a

14 Mixing Genre, Making Truth Claims: Human Rights Storytelling

15 Cached Resistance: The “Unheard” Narratives of Militancy in Kashmir 207

16 Playing Cricket in Eidgah: Affective Labor in Kashmiri

17 Religious and Political Power in Kashmir: Recollecting the Past

18 Tehreek History Writers of Kashmir: Reconstructing Memory

19 Remembering Home, Imagining the Future: Changing Meanings

20 Liberal Silence on Kashmir and the Malleability of Ethics in India 278

21 Territory, Identity, and Islamization in Medieval Kashmir 293

22 Examining Sacred Necropolitics as Popular Resistance in India-

23 Third World Imperialism and Kashmir’s Sovereignty Trap 323

24 The Forms and Practices of Indian Settler/Colonial Sovereignty

25 Sanctioned Ignorance and the Crisis of Solidarity for Kashmir 355

26 Kashmir, Feminisms, and Global Solidarities 367

27 Kashmir Diaspora Mobilizations: Toward Transnational Solidarity

Dean Accardi is Assistant Professor of History at Connecticut College. A historian of gender

Amit R. Baishya is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of

Gowhar Fazili is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi. Centered

Mohamad Junaid is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts College of Liberal

Suvir Kaul is A.M. Rosenthal Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is

Khushdeep Kaur Malhotra is a PhD candidate in political geography at Temple University,

Huzaifa Pandit is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Higher Education,

Aditi Saraf is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Her book

Decolonial knowledge production is a deeply collaborative endeavor. This handbook has

Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, and Deepti Misri

Although the vocabulary of settler colonialism is newly ascendant in Kashmir studies,

the understanding of maiming as a specific aim [and not a by-product] of biopolitics

The BJP has intensified counterinsurgency strategies of mass surveillance, criminalization

Pakistan by rethinking Kashmiri struggles for self-determination as independent of and anterior

Settler Colonial Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies

Pandit, Niharika. 2020. https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2020/08/05/bollywood-and-the-banality-of-

Special Issues and Edited Collections

Territories, Homelands, Borders

“Kashmiri Peasants” as a Category

Food Crisis and Peasant Consciousness

India, and was likely to be used, as in Kashmir, as an other-than-sentiment resource, a means

The “Insurgent” Kisan Committees

Austin: What do you want for Kashmir? The peasant: Freedom.

The Everyday Peasant

WE, THE PEOPLE OF JAMMU, KASHMIR, LADAKH AND THE FRONTIER

The Relevance of Naya Kashmir Today

The Constitution of a State, and of a Nation

right shall be ensured by universal compulsory elementary education, free of charge.

1 Peasant Imaginaries and “Kashmiri Nationalism” 21

4 Kashmiri Sikh Women and Their Experiences With Conflict 60

6 Hortus Interruptus: A Time for Alegropolitics in Kashmir 81

7 Claiming the Streets: Political Resistance Among Kashmiri Youth 97

8 The Writ of Liberty in the Courts of Kashmir 115

9 Trade, Boundaries, and Self-Determination 127

10 Sensory Remembrance: Retelling the 1990s in Downtown Srinagar 138

15 Cached Resistance: The “Unheard” Narratives of Militancy in Kashmir 207

20 Liberal Silence on Kashmir and the Malleability of Ethics in India 278

21 Territory, Identity, and Islamization in Medieval Kashmir 293

23 Third World Imperialism and Kashmir’s Sovereignty Trap 323

25 Sanctioned Ignorance and the Crisis of Solidarity for Kashmir 355

26 Kashmir, Feminisms, and Global Solidarities 367