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Paper short abstract

Kashmir’s road and rail boom is marketed as development but functions as colonial infrastructure: governing movement, enabling securitised access, and remaking land relations. I trace how residents rework, evade, and contest this “connectivity” in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

Rapid road-widening and rail expansion in Kashmir are publicly narrated as “connectivity” and development. This paper examines these projects as colonial infrastructure: material systems designed to govern movement, consolidate territorial control, and reorganise land into a governable and extractable surface. Rather than treating displacement solely as eviction, the paper traces how developmental rule produces everyday forms of geographical and material displacement through checkpoints, sudden closures, rerouted routes, roadside demolitions, and the gradual unmaking of local land-based economies.

Using a street-first perspective, the paper foregrounds how these infrastructures reshape the rhythms of daily life by regulating movement, delay, visibility, and exposure. Developmental spectacle reframes coercive spatial control as welfare, progress, and integration, while obscuring how infrastructure separates a resisting population from land as a social, economic, and political resource.

At the same time, residents do not merely endure these remappings of space. Intellectual, policy-based, and material displacement are contested through vernacular spatial practices: tactical route-making, informal crossings, collective warning networks, and everyday negotiations with infrastructure that rework “connectivity” on lived terms. These practices do not necessarily appear as overt resistance but constitute forms of spatial survival and refusal embedded in ordinary life.

Foregrounding a feminist lens attentive to embodiment, safety, and social reproduction, the paper shows how infrastructural governance is unevenly lived across gender, class, and age, and how everyday mobility becomes a site of political negotiation under developmental rule in Kashmir.