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- Convenors:
-
Rafiq Ahmad
(Sopore College, University of Kashmir)
Dibyesh Anand (University of Westminster)
Ather Zia (University of Northern Colorado, Gender and Anthropology)
- Location:
- Room 215
- Start time:
- 30 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
Kashmir as place, community, and territory has largely been subsumed under 'South Asian' historical tradition, wherein Kashmir is naturalized into either Indian or Pakistani entities. This Panel re-thinks this subsumption through re-evaluation of notions of 'territory', 'identity', and 'resistance.'
Long Abstract:
The region of Kashmir has largely been presented as a matter of territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.The study of Kashmir is caught in an analytic gridlock with many scholars peddling increasingly unhelpful maps of past through circulation of presentist categories such as 'indigeneity,' 'syncretism,' 'belonging,' 'Islamization,' 'sacred geography,' 'paradise' and so on. Kashmir's historical and narrative tradition - and by extension the idea of Kashmir as a place, community, and a political territory - has subsequently been subsumed under a 'South Asian' historical tradition which has paved way for the naturalization of these categories into 'stable' entities, wherein Kashmir became either Indian or Pakistani. The Panel will re-think this becoming, à la Bergson, by exploring to decouple these categories from their localized and ideological moorings.
This panel will challenge conventional epistemologies of writing and thinking Kashmir through re-evaluation of the commonsensical notions of 'territory', 'identity', and 'resistance' as an effect of structural relations of power in the context of governmentality, occupation, and institutionalized denial of justice. We aim to re-think Kashmir as interstitiality - not simply a borderland across the Line of Control between India and Pakistan - between Western, Central and Southern Asia. By drawing upon multi-disciplinary contributions this panel will focus on longue durée processes of Kashmir-making, to be conceived as a matter of embodied practices and réalités de transaction that shape identities and enable resistance.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
Arguing against the centrality of 'text' and ´archive´ to the writing of Kashmir I propose extending our study to its material cultural flows by examining practices of circulation and translation of peoples, artifacts, texts and textual traditions that connected Kashmir across Eurasia.
Paper long abstract:
Both the 'authoritative text' and the 'archive' on Kashmir write/read it typically as a distinct mulk and a 'sacred paradise' within a 'South Asian' historical entity, maintained through the rise and fall of its various ruling dynasties. Such a reading/writing of Kashmir indices an imperial reading back of Dogra-State cartography into Kashmir's past, which in turn facilitates subsumption of 'idea of Kashmir' into 'idea of India'. The centrality accorded to 'authoritative text' in the writing of Kashmir by nationalist histories, which treat Rajatarangini as an embodiment of the Kashmir's historiographical consciousness, rends it asunder from its Persianate historiographic traditions.There is a need therefore to reconfigure the 'Kashmir archive' that has largely remained confined to Orientalist and nationalist corpus . An important step in this direction would be to extend our epistemological lens to the material cultural flows; re-imagining Kashmir as an interstitiality shaped by circulation,displacement and translation of peoples, languages, artifacts, texts and textual traditions across its Eurasian networks.
Emphasizing routes, rather than roots, of Kashmir-making I shall highlight the epistemological violence brought to Kashmir studies in the form of essentialisms (e.g., indigenous, territory, Islamization and syncretism). Working toward this objective I propose revisiting Kashmir studies in terms of a cultural hermeneutic, informed by dynamic processes of trastornée with its connotations of simultaneous movement across and within, that demonstrates that cultural formations (such as indigenous and vernacular) are 'always already hybrid,' and in the process of becoming, marked by self-differentiation in time.
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues for an analytic shift from postcolonial categories of colonialism and postcoloniality toward contemporary practices of state sovereignty. This shift might point toward a different cartography of contemporary colonial geopolitics in relation to India/Israel and Kashmir/Palestine.
Paper long abstract:
In the last two decades since the Oslo agreement (1993) regarding Israel's occupation of Palestine, India has been signing military treaties with Israel. The latest move in this alliance is the Indian state's plan to buy armed drones. India has already been using Israeli-made UAVs (Unarmed Aerial Vehicles) for use of surveillance in Kashmir and at the 'borders' of India and Pakistan (Migliani 2015). In the context of academic scholarship, studies regarding India continue to draw on analytic categories instituted by postcolonial studies, which emphasises a history of European colonialism and its postcolonial legacies. Yet, the circular logic of colonialism, postcolonialism, neocolonialism and decoloniality becomes difficult to sustain as it continually reinvigorates the binary between the 'west' and the 'rest'. Whilst not entirely rejecting postcolonial scholarship, with regard to the manner in which colonial political and legal infrastructures are being used by the Indian state for its occupation of Kashmir, this paper argues for an analytic shift toward thinking through contemporary practices of state sovereignty. This shift might point toward a different cartography of contemporary colonial geopolitics.
The military alliance between India and Israel is also inseparable from dominant secular/religious nationalisms in those nation-states in relation to Palestine and Kashmir. In such a context, this paper argues for a diagnosis of the practices of state sovereignty, which characterize the Israel - India alliance, and in doing so argues for remapping contemporary zones of occupation, which may yield a more contemporary cartography of colonialism.
Paper short abstract:
This paper tries to argue that the nature of colonialism in Kashmir unlike what most South Asian histories argue was not simply negative. Rather the paper argues that colonialism due to the specific conditions of Kashmir worked in a completely different way than various other parts of South Asia.
Paper long abstract:
The history of Modern South Asian history is dotted by the 'colonial'- the colonial state, the colonial ideology, the colonial capital - and the list goes on. One after another, Modern South Asian historians try to count the disastrous consequences that these different 'colonial's' had on the South Asian economy and society - not only during the colonial rule but even in the 'post-colonial world'. If socio-economic impact was not enough, many scholars - influenced by Fanon - added the domain of psychology as being completely transformed by colonialism. It in fact seems that Modern South Asian history has found itself in a limbo - where it wants to get rid of colonial, but the colonial survives through different 'reminders'- of economic exploitation, the loss of the colonial self, the deformed modernity.
This paper will try to complicate this simplistic picture of the horrors or positives of colonialism by focusing on the society and economy of Kashmir. Between the extremes of Imperial and liberal Nationalist histories of South Asia this paper seeks to argue that colonialism was not a simple top down approach, but it worked and was worked upon by various forces on ground. In a bizarre coincidence of things, colonialism seems favorably titled towards the subaltern Kashmiris. In establishing this fact, this paper will try to position itself in opposition to many voices of Liberal nationalism, Marxism, Subalternism in South Asia. It will try to locate Kashmir in its own context by delinking it with the dominant historiography of South Asia.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyzes the relationship between river infrastructures and border and state making in Indian controlled Kashmir.
Paper long abstract:
In 2010, India's Hindustan Construction Company (HCC) bought a Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) from Italy's underground excavation company, SELI to bore a 14.5-mile long tunnel in the Himalayas in order to speed up the construction of the 330 MW hydroelectric dam on the Kishanganga river in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Designed especially for the difficult geology of the Himalayas, the tunnel embodied the hopes and aspirations of a nation competing zealously with its neighbor, Pakistan, for the waters of the Kishanganga River. The tunnel assumed significant geopolitical dimensions in a context where the early completion of the dam either by India and Pakistan could secure their first rights over the waters of the Kishanganga. The TBM also fueled anxieties about massive displacements among riverfront communities who feared the machine's devastating impacts on the local ecology. I analyze how tunnels as technosocial assemblages might help us understand the ways in which border politics is constituted and assumes particular infrastructural forms along the contested India-Pakistan border? How might such infrastructures represent fundamental transformations in the ways land and waterscapes are being repurposed for defense, economics, and territorial integration? If infrastructures are "built forms around which publics thicken," I ask what forms of publics are constituted around the tunnel and why (Harvey and Knox 2015)? What do infrastructural interventions in Kashmir's border areas convey about the nature and ambitions of Indian territoriality and alternately, how might infrastructures also become sites around which new and creative modes of resistance take form?
Paper short abstract:
The paper will argue that Indian rule over Kashmir is best understood as a colonial occupation.
Paper long abstract:
Colonialism and colonisation involve systemic and structural dominance and subservience, asymmetrical relations between the coloniser and the colonised, political rule by a foreign power, control over narrative through which the rule is perceived and experienced, economic exploitation, militarisation, differential value of lives, development as a means of control, cultural transformation, denial of rights, surveillance, and everyday epistemic and corporeal violence. I would argue that all these aspects of colonialism are evident when we look at Indian rule over Kashmiris. Yet, scholars have tended to focus mostly on Kashmir issue as a dispute between India and Pakistan. The dominant territorial conflict lens that denies political agency to Kashmiris while valorising and reifying the existing nation-states elides the question of how the conflict is experienced by Kashmiris.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the complex geographies of law and power under militarized occupation in Kashmir Valley, with special attention to contestations over memory, identity, and territory, and how these contestations play out across the landscape.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the complex geographies of law and power under militarized occupation in Kashmir Valley, with special attention to contestations over memory, identity, and territory, and how these contestations play out across the landscape. Recognizing cartography as a form of legal and political discourse, the paper examines the spatial plotting of the state's legal and political claims to existence and validity on maps, and considers how these cartographic representations constitute an apparatus of occupation. It also considers alternative popular mappings that employ and embody counter-hegemonic legal and political claims and thus challenge the cartographic power of state law. The paper considers what von Benda Beckmann et all call the "insurrectionist character" of these maps and the memories they inscribe across the landscape. How do legal and political frameworks, concepts and institutions shape the production, consolidation, and dissemination of collective knowledge about the past? How do variously-positioned community actors leverage memory as part of broader processes of legal claim-making and struggles for rights and justice? How do transnational networks and processes shape these dynamics of mobilization and memorialization in particular social and political contexts? And how are these movements mapped across territories, attaching and advancing alternative meanings associated with localities, homelands, and territories? In considering these questions, the paper points towards the emancipatory potential of alternative legal and political claims and their spatial geographies, as legal frameworks, conceptualizations, and mobilizations shape how communities imagine solidarity and sovereignty, locality and homeland, history and truth, and hope and aspiration.