Contribution short abstract:

Can we even speak of a decolonized Kashmir when the very arrangements of our narrations remain . . . so colonial? Experimenting with a fragmentary approach to writing gleaned from diaries maintained during fieldwork, I try to imagine a world where empire is bracketed.

Contribution long abstract:

I attempt to articulate Kashmir outside of its placement at the geopolitical edges of empire. To do so, I revisit fragments from diaries I maintained during research in the mountainous Neelum Valley, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, between 2014 and 2022. I approach these fragments as overlaps between aesthetics and analysis, politics and ethics, theory and methodology, as opposed to simply “data,” “field notes,” or “ethnography.”

Fragments—in notes, conversations, pictures—destabilize the expectation of providing coherent narratives often expected of scholarly writing. Fragments may be chaotic and inconclusive, but in their haptic indeterminacy, they raise the possibility of new forms of knowledge where the temporal and incomplete are viewed as totalities in themselves with their own symbolic value.

The fragments convey how Kashmir is constituted and reconstituted within the relationships and ethical decisions enacted in the “field” and how the social is imagined and related in these encounters. I gesture towards Kashmir as an interstitial and relational terrain where the failures, small victories, and confusions of encounter take primacy, directing attention to the flows and ebbs of life that unfold as expressed in dedications to each other, such as the care taken to prepare a meal or time made for a guest. To dislodge Kashmir from its colonial fixity, risks must be taken in the way we listen, think, speak, and write about Kashmir and its people. Otherwise, our efforts at decolonial world-building will remain incomplete and impoverished.