My parents always complained that my PhD took too long. In 2013, I was registered in Political Science in one of the central universities of Delhi, but my family constantly complained: "All your friends from school and college have a job but look at you. You are still studying." When I finally submitted my dissertation, it was under great stress; they weren't sure I would complete it.
I worked on the gendered contours of militarized control in Kashmir, the specific ways in which women face violence from armed soldiers, and multiple forms of their resistance embedded in the everyday. For me, this was a personal-political commitment. I am a Kashmiri woman born in 1989, the year when armed conflict with popular support erupted in the valley against Indian rule. To grow up in Kashmir is to be raised in a situation devoid of normalcy; extra-judicial killings and brutal repression were the 'norm'. The constant military gaze defined my movement on the streets of the place I called home. Every day was a struggle between memory, institutionalised forgetfulness seeking erasure of our particular history, and the demand for a right to self-determination.
Since 1947 when the subcontinent was partitioned, Kashmir has found itself subservient to the post-colonial nation-building processes in South Asia, so much so that the focus on territoriality has almost always subsumed the centrality of Kashmiris to the conflict. Post 1980s when an armed struggle against India’s military occupation took hold in Kashmir, the response was a brutal counter-insurgency operation where people’s very homes and bodies were converted into a battlefield. Human rights groups note that 70000 to 100,000 people were killed and over 8000 subjected to enforced disappearance. Home then has been a fragmented story of killings, torture, enforced disappearances, mass blinding and sexual violence, with people rejecting Indian State control over their territory, their spaces, and their bodies.
