This special issue inaugurates a scholarly and creative conversation that seeks to detach the future of Kashmir from the narrative, aesthetic, and political frames of powerful nation-states that have sought to keep Kashmiris confined to a long and seemingly enduring colonial present. It seeks, moreover, to inspire radical imaginations of possible futures in danger of foreclosure by occupying states, and asks us to think about occupation as a temporal as well as spatial regime.

“Kashmiri Futures: A Beginning.” Special Issue: Kashmiri Futures. English Language and Notes, Ed. Mohamad Junaid, Deepti Misri, Ather Zia. 61:2 (2023): 1-13. DOI 10.1215/00138282-10782010

Interview featuring Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal and Mohamad Junaid

“Researching Kashmir: Power, Position, Ethics.” Interview. With Mona Bhan, Mohamad Junaid, Hafsa Kanjwal. In English Language and Notes, Special Issue: Kashmiri Futures, eds. M. Junaid, D. Misri, A. Zia. 61:2 (2023): 104-122. DOI 10.1215/00138282-10782110

This essay draws upon the works of “Tehreek history writers” and reads them against the grain of dominant Indian narratives on Kashmir. It traces the anti-colonial themes in Tehreek history writings as their authors seek to retell Kashmir’s past and present. As activist-writers broadly aligned with the self-determination movement, Tehreek history writers see Indian historiography as an ideological scaffolding for Indian control over Kashmir. Accordingly, they question its foundational claims on Kashmir. Though shaped in varied ways by the experience of living under a regime of military occupation, the essay argues that the emergence of Tehreek history writers and their work can be fully understood only by reading them as oppositional logics to the “official” Indian historiography, yet in themselves they represent acts of anti-colonial memory and form a reservoir of critical knowledge.

“Tehreek history writers of Kashmir: reconstructing memory at the margins of postcolonial empire” (book chapter) Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies. Eds. Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, and Deepti Misri, pp. 252-267 (2022). London and NY: Routledge.

(Co-written with Hafsa Kanjwal). In the aftermath of the Indian government’s decision to change the status of Jammu and Kashmir on 5 August 2019, activism for the right to self-determination in Kashmir came under tremendous pressure. An intense crackdown in Kashmir, including a complete communication blackout and internet blockade, meant the only Kashmiri and dissenting voices left were located in diasporic spaces. As two Kashmiri scholar–activists involved in advocacy work on Kashmir, we examine the challenges of decolonial activism and transnational solidarity building, especially in Western academic spaces. For both of us, Kashmir has been a home and is a place where our scholarly ethos is entwined with intimate knowledge. While the diasporic/exilic location presents its own challenges of representation, the urgency imposed by the settler colonial logics that create existential questions for Kashmiris forces reconsiderations both of political alliance building as well as scholarly frameworks. In this article, we explore the emergent contours of a pedagogy of solidarity that centers Indigenous perspectives in relation to Kashmiri diasporic activism. We examine how our solidarity work takes shape in the neoliberal academy, grassroots progressive spaces, and transnational media.

“Contesting Settler Colonial Logics in Kashmir as Pedagogical Praxis.” (Co-written with Hafsa Kanjwal), Curriculum Inquiry. 52:3, 373-384 (2022), DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2022.2072666.

This essay reflects on how the dominant US framing of the events of 9/11 was appropriated by dominant states to repress struggles for freedom and justice in the name of “global war on terror.” Focusing on India’s counterinsurgency war in Kashmir, the essay argues that the India government, led by the rightwing BJP, systematically used the “global war on terror” to advance its anti-Muslim rhetoric, crushing of dissent, and settler-colonial policies in Kashmir.

“From a distant shore to the war at home: 9/11 and Kashmir.” South Asian Review, (2021) DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2021.1899523

The discourse of loyalty produces tense predicaments for those living under counterinsurgency regimes. The essay explores this theme by analyzing the case of a Kashmiri woman who found herself in a political drama when she accepted “blood money” from the person accused of causing her husband's death. The woman's decision accompanied moral turmoil in her village, and rumors of her “betrayal” circulated. However, the turmoil threatened to go beyond this localized setting. It brought to fore the fraught implications of “loyalty” shaped by India's occupation in Kashmir, its nationalist staging of Kashmiris as the subversive other, and schisms within Kashmir's historical independence movement. By tracing how rumors of individual betrayal were laced onto narratives of political treason in the case, the essay reveals the counterinsurgency as the operative context of broken intimate and intercommunity relations in which the personal is always at the threshold of becoming intensely public.

“The price of blood: state, precarity, and the moral discourse of loyalty in Kashmir.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East. (2020) 40 (1): 166–179.

In 2004, news spread in Kashmiri villages along the India-Pakistan border, ominously called the Line of Control, that “Divided Kashmiris” were gathering across the banks of Neelam river that runs almost parallel to the border. A ceasefire in the years-old pattern of artillery exchanges between Indian and Pakistani forces had unexpectedly opened this moment. With the roaring river between them, dozens of families looked across earnestly trying to identify their long-separated kin. But they were nervous, for things could quickly take an ugly turn. As one of the world’s most militarized borders—which, for all practical purposes, is a 460-mile-long zone of impunious killing—a simple misunderstanding between the militaries closely watching from their bunkers could trigger a massacre. Yet, for these families—traumatized by a history of ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and incessant Indian military assaults—this moment to see each other, even from a distance, had arrived after too many years to be missed.

“The Expelled and the Excluded: Kashmiris Under India’s New Citizenship Laws.” The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, Issue 29, May-June, 2020.

This article examines practices of resistance that thwart Indian state’s control over everyday life in Kashmir. The state frequently uses ‘curfew’ to dominate public space, shut down ordinary mobility, and suppress pro-independence politics. Curfews are enforced through punitive prohibitions and by activating the militarised infrastructure built to reinforce Indian rule over the region since 1947. Yet, Kashmiris are not passive objects of this control. Through overt and hidden practices of resistance and disobedience, like sangbāzi and, what I call, counter-mapping, they keep their aspirations for independence alive, while rebuilding a semblance of everydayness under the occupation. Desire to walk freely becomes the key metaphor for freedom from military control. Based on ethnographic and theoretical material, the article makes a case that in spaces under long-term military occupations political subjectivity is primarily expressed and enacted as a bodily demand to become visible in public space.

“Counter-maps of the Ordinary: Occupation, subjectivity, and Walking under Curfew in Kashmir.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. (2020) 27:3, 302-320. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2019.1633115

In 1992, Indian soldiers stationed inside a bunker in my hometown in Kashmir shot dead a teenage boy from my school. I did not witness the event, but I vividly remember how his death was described. Bilal was a year or two older to me and had been suffering from mental illness. His condition sometimes caused him visual hallucinations and other forms of sensory misperception, not to mention acute pain. During moments when his pain would become unbearable, he would run out of his parents’ home and wander the streets. The evening he was shot, Bilal had walked deliriously and come close to the perimeter of the bunker. Later that night, a few townspeople gathered and quietly carried his limp body back to his home. The next morning at school, we heard several accounts of the killing. People were angry with the callous way soldiers had shot Bilal, but beyond privately simmering in impotent rage, no one knew what to do. Many indirectly blamed Bilal’s grieving parents for not restraining him.

“Disobedient Bodies, Defiant Objects: Occupation, Necropolitics, and the Resistance in Kashmir.” The Funambulist: Politics of Space and Bodies, Issue 21, January-February, 2019.

Since 1990, there has been a proliferation of martyrs graveyards across Kashmir, standing witness to the immense toll of Kashmiri lives lost in the uprising against Indian rule as well as memorials to what Kashmiris describe as Tehreek—the Movement. ‘Martyrdom’ is often understood as a symbolic event interpretable through an analysis of religious doctrine or the religious disposition of the ‘martyr’, yet above all martyrdom is a socio-political event. A death must be seen as martyrdom, and materially instituted as such by society. Such recognition and institution often takes place within contested political contexts. More than their religious meanings, the significance of martyrdom and martyrs graveyards lie in their role as potent elements of collective memory that constitutes a new political community. Based on analysis of the way Kashmiris understand and invoke them in their political discourses and practices, this essay will explore how martyrs graveyards memorialize significant political events in the process of the formation of a national political community in Kashmir.

“Epitaphs as Counterhistories: martyrdom, commemoration and the work of graveyards in Kashmir.” In Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (The Ethnography of Political Violence), (2018) eds. H. Duschinski, M. Bhan, A. Zia, and C. Mahmood, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

While theorizing the occupation in Kashmir, this chapter is … an imprint of the way I experienced the transformation of space under, and the violence embedded in, the military occupation of Kashmir, in my daily life as a ‘‘civilian’’—neither a citizen nor a combatant, but caught in a liminal zone where life is tenuous and death simply a statistic of protracted conflict. Agamben has described the word ‘‘witness’’ as having two meanings: first, that which signifies a person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in a position of the third party; second, that which designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end, and can therefore bear witness to it. In writing about Kashmir, which gradually became a landscape of loss, the act of witnessing is also a declaration of love and intimacy.

“Death and Life under Military Occupation: Space, Violence, and Memory in Kashmir.” In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, (2013) ed. Kamala Visweswaran, 158-190. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

For half a century, Mohiuddin carried in his writings the burden of a people denied the dignity of existence. Each year of his fifty-year career, he wrote a short story. Some were full of barely suppressed anger; some tested, with his measured calm, the patience of his outraged audience. All provoked his readers to ask new questions and push the boundaries of imagination. He was parsimonious, often furtive—a guerrilla writer—blending and defying genre conventions. But in illuminating the veiled recesses of Kashmiri social relations, his writings shone with an acute literary sensibility.

In A Desolation Called Peace: Voices from Kashmir. New Delhi: Harper-Collins.

The execution itself took place in a very 'open' manner—each detail of the act of execution was made public, including Afzal Guru's final words and emotions at the moment of his execution. Most importantly, India announced the execution to Kashmiris in the most dramatic manner possible—by putting an entire nation under a clampdown, uniting Kashmiris simultaneously in grief, mourning, and misery. Late letters, the indecency of not returning the body, the fact of not allowing his family members to meet him one last time, the February 9th of the execution (almost coinciding with Maqbool Bhat’s death anniversary on 11 February, another Kashmiri hanged in the same prison 29 years ago), all of it was made very public. Afzal's execution was meant to be a public event in India. Only in this public and brazen manner of execution, and not in any other way, could the 'national conscience' have been satisfied.

In The Hanging of Afzal Guru: and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament, ed. Arundhati Roy, 259-263. New Delhi: Penguin.

Funerals were quickly arranged and performed, after which the men went home to find women waiting in fear and anxiety. The women were rearranging upturned furniture, scattered utensils, emptied cupboards, and tossed clothes from the day’s house-to-house searches. Some reported missing jewelry, others broken appliances. Our house looked as if several dozen unruly brigands had broken in. We cooked a meal for the wailing family of the neighborhood man who had been beaten senseless.

In Of Occupation and Resistance, New Delhi: Westland. 

In this moment of suffering, our fundamental duty is toward our own people, toward those who are hit the most every time our society protests, the poor and the weak. My thoughts go to that one Kashmiri mother in a picture I saw recently who was being violently pushed around by a cop, an ignorant man, who could be her neighbor. And I still can’t get the image of a little boy weeping over the body of his dead brother out of my head. His scream of pain, draining all the blood from his face, cut through the picture and hit me like a shell. No freedom is worth an innocent life. Our occupiers tell us the same, while they continue to feed innocent Kashmiri lives to the fires of occupation.

In Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir, Chicago: Haymarket Books.