Paper short abstract:

Food can illuminate the inner workings of violence; how people refuse and resist systems of domination. Eating, cooking, foraging can be thought of as subtle invitations towards more collaborative worldmaking, where knowledge is speculative and the fleeting and ephemeral holds analytical promise.

Paper long abstract:

What can foraging, cooking, and eating reveal about the conflict in Kashmir? Can they be considered a mode of study? In this essay, through the entanglements of food (and a bloated stomach), I offer a relational praxis that is deeply felt, savoured, corporeal. Food—its preparation, eating, sharing—provides a different scale for intercepting the conflict in Kashmir, a disputed territory shaped by securitised geopolitical narratives. Small, evanescent stories structured around food offer glimpses of the worlds that take root during violence in the longue durée. These affective swirls illuminate the saturating of violence, its ineffable textures and tonalities, which are difficult to approximate otherwise. Within the push and pull of food lie traces of everyday acts of sovereignty and refusal that do not readily map onto a syntax of action. Telling different stories about Kashmir, such as through food, can offer new understandings of what is at stake while allowing us to feel coherent with the world as encountered.