Who Can Stand with Kashmir?
The alternative to discipline is accountability.
In August 2019, the Indian government made extraordinary legislative changes to Kashmir’s semiautonomous status. The alterations accelerated India’s settler-colonial ambitions, angering Kashmiris on both sides of the LoC and beyond. Under India’s rule, Kashmir is being primed for complete absorption into the Indian state. The removal of the special status confirms that the nation-state remains an unjust and unreliable adjudicator of Kashmiri life. The overturn forced the conscription of Kashmiris as nothing but Indian citizens.
The long-forgotten conflict was thrust into the international spotlight overnight, with many academics raising their pens in solidarity. A range of powerful reflexive writings has emerged since, particularly from Indian scholars who have attempted to tease out their complicity with the erasures of Kashmiri life.1 Similarly, conscientious Kashmiri Pandits also raised their voices to distance themselves from India’s political maneuvering. India often justifies itself by arguing that its presence in Kashmir is not an occupation but a reparative move to restore justice to Kashmiri Hindus who, too, have faced violence in an otherwise Muslim-majority region.2
Frustrated that so many people were suddenly writing and speaking about Kashmir, some scholars pointed out that perhaps not everyone should be doing so now that it has become politically expedient to talk about Kashmir. Social media was on fire, with South Asian scholars put on the spot for co-opting Kashmiri voices, not making enough room for Kashmiri scholars on panels and discussions, and exploiting the current moment when their scholarship has been silent on Kashmir all this time.
This raised further questions regarding representation, privilege, class, and location. Kashmiris (scholars and otherwise) living in Kashmir pointed out that Kashmiri scholars established overseas do not hold a monopoly on speaking about their home—as they are the ones who do the actual living (and dying) while their elite counterparts in Western universities chase tenure. As I said before, social media was on fire.
It is crucial to note that the position of diasporic Kashmiris has been weaponized by the Indian state, pitting them against voices in Kashmir—where academics, journalists, and human rights activists are under intense scrutiny and constraint, unable to freely voice their opinions—to dismiss dissent altogether.3 In this context of silencing, the duty of truth-telling has increasingly fallen on the shoulders of Kashmiris in diasporic or exilic locations and their allies. Mohamad Junaid and Hafsa Kanjwal point out: “While the diasporic/exilic location presents its own challenges of representation, the urgency imposed by the settler colonial logics that create existential questions for Kashmiris forces reconsiderations both of political alliance building as well as scholarly frameworks.”4
The Pakistani state, which has traditionally supported Kashmiri calls for independence from India, was also animated. Local newspapers were full of editorials in solidarity with Kashmiris across the LoC. Those who pointed out Pakistan’s own violations in the portion of Kashmir under its rule were dismissed. Some academics and activists reprimanded scholars of Pakistan who, while talking about Kashmir, sought to hold the Pakistani state accountable for the erosion of life and rights within its borders. This was seen as undermining the solidarity efforts of Pakistan, which, despite its limitations, is one of the few countries willing to bring up Kashmir in international policy and security fora. Any critique leveled at Pakistan’s internal record on Kashmir or elsewhere was weaponized to justify India’s oppression of Kashmiris under its jurisdiction. Everyone was in the firing line. Yes, social media was on fire.
The Story of the Canon
As the Internet was ablaze, I noted another curious development: a desire to consolidate and canonize the scholarship on Kashmir. I mean, what else do academics do if not build disciplines?
An important reason some deemed this necessary was the citational erasure of critical Kashmir scholarship, a body of literature that has traditionally remained marginal to mainstream discourse on Kashmir because it does not connect well with the existing narrative. A generation of scholars who are Queer, feminist, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color have pointed out the political nature of academic citations. More recently, Savannah Shange has reminded us: “Citation is ceremony, and a bibliography is an altar—a literary libation invoking the ancestors of the word, honoring those who make it possible for the text to emerge.”5
Citational practices speak of desire. A desire to be accountable to one another and a desire to be in relation. A desire to be in community or an invitation to form a community where one does not exist. The trouble is that sometimes conversations on citational choice too easily mimic the carceral politics of imperial knowledge production. In the logics of the colonial academy, valuable ideas are dismissed far too readily simply because they do not pay homage to a particular thinker or do not “fit” into existing traditions. This is a challenge for decolonial scholarship, which must be allowed to exist on its own terms. How can we, as scholars and thinkers, ensure that our citational practices do not mimic the violence of the imperial academy? I wonder if, somewhere along the way, in a rush to demarcate scholarship on Kashmir, we have inadvertently reproduced the same epistemic violence that compelled us to move away in the first place.
I am also reminded of the perspectives, ideas, and knowledge from Kashmir that exist outside of the English language or do not necessarily take the form of peer-reviewed research. Weaving these into our work is an enormous challenge that must be approached carefully. Decades of decolonial thought from Kashmir force us to confront the impact of our own efforts at scholarship. Is drawing from theoretical perspectives from the so-called Global South while remaining firmly located within the epistemic demands of the imperial university as far as we are willing to go? Is subsuming these important perspectives within the folds of our work without contesting colonial knowledge production its own kind of violence? Marshall Sahlins offers a beautiful understanding of kinship: “living each other’s lives and dying each other’s deaths.”6 Can writing and thinking be considered a form of kinship above all?
The Story of Area Studies
Scholarship on Kashmir has been primarily shaped by an area studies model, which has pushed for the nation-state as an unavoidable category of analysis. Keguro Macharia asks: What does it mean to be “area-studied”?7 It means that area is a site of data, but not theory. Area is a site of coping but not flourishing. Area is a site of breathlessness, but not breath.
South Asian studies is considered the natural home for the study of Kashmir. However, the domination of this space by Indian-centered perspectives has rendered Kashmir “subservient to Indian historiography,” denying the multiple geographical and historical imaginations that situate Kashmir beyond South Asia.8 This limitation is another reason that a dedicated intellectual space for Kashmir seems so appealing to some. One reviewer of this book, in an earlier iteration and at a very different press, had a strong reaction to the writing, demanding that the manuscript should be “brought closer to home” in systematic relation to South Asian intellectual traditions before the book could be taken seriously. But South Asia has never been a home for Kashmir. Noting the way Kashmir gets typecast within South Asian literature, I have searched quite intentionally for epistemic communities outside of South Asia altogether, such as within Indigenous scholarship and Black studies or some other mode of knowing rooted in different histories of exclusion.
Another statist legacy of area studies is the continual separation of scholarship on Indian-administered Kashmir from Pakistan-administered Kashmir. For the most part, scholarship on each region of Kashmir has failed to inform and enrich the other. In addition to blocking the flow of life, the LoC has also discouraged intellectual relations. Rather than pursuing a hyphenated portraiture of Kashmir—Indian-Kashmir, Pakistani-Kashmir—I have felt the need to refuse Kashmir’s relation with South Asia altogether.
A state-seeking nationalism has a heavy and lasting presence in the stories that are told on Kashmir.9 The plebiscite promised by the United Nations and agreed upon by India and Pakistan must be held so that Kashmiris can decide their own future. But demands for azadi do not simply stop there. The call for azadi is also a call for an open-ended horizon for a Kashmir yet to come, and this future can emerge only from experimentation and deliberation among the Kashmiri people, an opportunity long denied. Fugitive forms of azadi can emerge only if Kashmir’s placement within South Asia and its intellectual formations is contested and refused. South Asia is neither a settled space nor a bounded location nor a consolidated site of study but, at best, an intimate relation and epistemic resource.
The Story of Solidarity
The story of the university in solidarity with Kashmir is repeatedly told and oversubscribed. Mohamad Junaid and Hafsa Kanjwal ask: “What does an anti-occupation pedagogic praxis that is seeking to trace the arc of solidarity from the West to Kashmir look like for academics situated in the Western academy when knowledge production continues to remain, in many ways, tied to imperialism and colonial violence?”10
Before we can engage with Junaid and Kanjwal’s proposition, another conversation about why knowledge is so instrumentally hinged on the Western academy is needed. Western academics are not somehow better situated or differently situated outside of oppression—they are the oppression. Put more bluntly: we are the oppression. I find it difficult to separate the academic steeped in coloniality, of which disciplinary regimentation is an important story, from the colonial violence of the institution. Offers of solidarity from these corners ultimately remain bounded by colonial ways of relating and understanding.
A different story needs to be told altogether. A story that takes Kashmir outside of frames of humanity that are contingent on the recognition of others, where the academic is far less sure of their role than assumed. I can speak only for myself. I have understood my role as being rather modest. A role of telling stories and creating openings that prompt us to ask different questions and take different routes that are not hostage to the limitations of our discursive frames.
Heather Dorries and Sue Ruddick caution that reading Indigenous texts (I add Black texts) is in itself insufficient for refusing colonial frames of knowing if the intention is to make these texts compatible with colonial knowledge.11 But a reading praxis is needed that respects the sovereignty of the text and honors what the text demands from the reader, without insisting on its translation into colonial frameworks. If we take Black and Indigenous epistemology seriously, our frames of solidarity will also radically shift. The question then is not so much how we can better orient ourselves within the imperial academy for a more ethical practice on Kashmir and elsewhere, because that only suggests safety and shelter for us. Instead, the question is how we can operate in ways that warp the distance between the academy and community, expert and subject, story and theory, life and poetry.
In the context of non-Indigenous people entering into relations of solidarity with Indigenous anticolonial and decolonial movements on Turtle Island,12 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang caution: “This joining cannot be too easy, too open, too settled. Solidarity is an uneasy, reserved, and unsettled matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict.”13 Tuck and Yang reject the notion of solidarity as a relation whose rules can be anticipated in advance.
The story of the scholar in the imperial institution is less a story of ethical adjustments or accommodations of existing practice but that of disruption, anxiety, and explosion. Institutional and disciplinary careers do not naturally lead to anti-imperial solidarity. I suggest we pause and dwell on this relation a little longer—that is, the relation of the disciplined academic in the imperial institution with oppression. Solidarity without decolonization looks a lot like violence; another “settler move to innocence.”14
The Story of Stolen Territories
I wrote this book as an uninvited guest on unceded (stolen), traditional, and ancestral territories. That is the land of the xʷmǝθkʷǝỷǝm (Musqueam), Huron-Wendat, Seneca, Mississaugas of the Credit, lǝќʷǝŋǝn, Songhees, Esquimalt, and ZSÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. These are just sites of the universities I have been affiliated with; if I count all the other spots where I have lived and worked, the list will be longer. I moved to Canada from Pakistan, initially as an international student and later as a naturalized citizen. All this time, I have been so caught up in my own struggles with racism, immigration, and institutional exclusion that I have forgotten how my history was displacing a much longer history of dispossession and erasure. Over the many years of being in/around/outside the university, I have not had any Indigenous scholars as mentors, friends, or colleagues. This is a striking example of how universities and institutions invisibilize Indigenous bodies while benefiting from their resources, knowledge, and scholarship.
This book, a manuscript about colonized peoples and colonized lands, was written on occupied lands elsewhere. My choice to draw upon Indigenous scholarship in my work is an attempt to make this location visible. The foregrounding of my entanglements with the various people I have met in the pahars—the exuberance of our relationships but also their ups and downs—is another attempt to show that the work of decolonization begins in the realm of daily interactions. This everyday labor is far too readily dismissed, as decolonization is seen as only taking place in public spaces and on a much grander scale, an observation shared by Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes.15
The Story of Accountability
Luce Irigaray writes: “If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story. Begin the same stories all over again. Don’t you feel it?”16 I am inclined to abandon the framing of solidarity altogether in favor of a frame of accountability that puts us on the spot, implicating us here and now, helping us decipher the “I” from the “we.” For accountability to mean anything, we must think more granularly and materially about how each one of us is placed within the relations that enable knowledge production. These are not just abstract and intellectual networks but bonds of blood, sweat, and breath. While there is growing language on activism and anthropology or anthropology as activism,17 what about anthropology as accountability?
The story of solidarity is a story of accountability. Who are we accountable to? The discipline, the profession, the institution, our relations? What if they collide, as they often do? And who sets the standards and holds us to them when institutionalized accountability is too self-interested or self-absorbed, or feeble and insufficient, even absent?
Each one of us will likely answer these questions differently. For me, accountability means creating breathing room within academic practice to allow the stories of those to whom I am in relation to saturate the discipline(s), institution(s), and practice(s) I embody. Forcing myself to think more granularly, I find myself failing many of my relations. I can think of how when Baba was under treatment in an overcrowded, understaffed hospital in Rawalpindi, a loved one was receiving care in my presence in a state-of-the-art, private facility not too far away. And today, while I am completing this portion of the epilogue, floods have returned to much of Pakistan, and many of my interlocutors are once again frantically evacuating their homes in fear. Then there is crippling inflation to deal with. There are just too many examples. The story of accountability is overwhelming. I feel it. But it also reminds me that the stakes are much higher, leaving me less alone as a scholar and writer.
Heartwork is hard work—but we already know that.
What Is “Your” Work?
As someone who writes on Kashmir but is not Kashmiri, I have not understood my work as that of defining azadi, providing expert commentary, or imposing concepts on a life already constrained. My task, as I understand it, is to enlarge and expand the frames of legibility of Kashmir, to stretch the relation between possibility and desire, and to prod and poke the realisms of imperial cartographies, borders, and boundaries. In Atmospheric Violence, I have attempted to decouple Kashmiri + pahari futurities from the paucity of available language and the closures of disciplinary knowledge, offering different scholarly, political, and ethical routes. In my theoretical choices, I have tried to prevent Kashmir’s reincarceration within the foreclosures of South Asia. Similarly, I have attempted to refuse teleological framings, such as those of “crisis,” “disaster,” “emergency,” that operate as a “blind spot for the production of knowledge” on the region.18 For too long such framings have “minimize[d] choices and dissent and narrow[ed] the space of the future, producing a present without alternatives.”19
The work for Kashmir’s sovereignty will most likely outlive our generation—our strengths, commitments, loyalties, and imaginations. The LoC does not signal the closure of Kashmir’s forms and futures. It is a site of potentiality for a Kashmir yet to come. This Kashmir would not be held back by the paucity of our imagination or the lack of available language. It would be a Kashmir where Kashmiris can freely choose living, laughter, and learning.
Let’s try this again: “Who are you as a scholar? What is your location?”
It varies: some days I am a feminist, some days I am Queer, some days I am a storyteller, some days I am an agitator, some days I am an ally, some days I am a poser, some days I am an appropriator, some days I am a contrarian, some days I just stay in bed all day long.
Let’s try this again: “Who are you as a scholar? What is your location?”
Today, I cannot decide.
Let’s try this again: “Who are you as a scholar? What is your location?”
Must you ask this question?
Let’s try this again: “Who are you as a scholar? What is your location?”
I think a lot about the shoe.