Paper short abstract:

In places of long-term occupation, such as Indian-controlled Kashmir, collaboration represents the betrayal of ethical and political commitments for independence. This paper explores the psychic, social, and political costs of collaboration for Kashmiris and ethnographers.

Paper long abstract:

While collaboration is widely celebrated in academia, in places of long-term occupation, such as Indian-controlled Kashmir, it represents the betrayal of ethical and political commitments for independence. In Kashmir, approximately 150,000 'informers' or 'collaborators' have been recruited by Indian and Pakistani security agencies in Kashmir, resulting in interpersonal relations based on suspicion, fear and mistrust. Collaborators must lead shadowy existences; being revealed comes with devastating social and psychic consequences, including death, receiving intense social anger, and opening oneself to psychic distress. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a former collaborator with the Kashmir police diagnosed with schizophrenia, as well as reading a recent Kashmiri novel entitled The Collaborator, this paper explores the psychic, social, and political costs of collaboration in Kashmir. It asks: in a context of long-term political upheaval and suspicion, what does collaboration do to a person's subjectivity? Who can collaborate and under what circumstances? This paper raises questions about the relation between survival (or 'life') and acts of collaboration, including anthropological collaborations. Specifically, it reveals how ethnographic collaborations are nested within, and shaped by, larger milieus of mistrust and suspicion in Kashmir. In so doing, it explores collaboration as a strategy for survival for both anthropologists and Kashmiris.