An exploration of the lives of women living in conflict zones has often focussed on their experiences of victimisation, therefore giving rise to stereotypical and monolithic discourses on women which singularly label them as victims of war. At the heart of this exploration is a concern for womenâs rights fuelled by a long history of feminist inquiry. The feminist response to an increase in fatality during war is often a focussed consideration of the oppression of women. Historically, perspectives on womenâs victimisation during war overlooked the question of womenâs agency for a long time. The understanding of the lives of women living through war is further skewed in the case of Muslim women. According to Saba Mahmood, global feminism has accommodated caste, class and race, but has demonstrably failed in including religion in its broader conversation.1 The relationship between feminism and religion is clearly vexed in the case of Islam. Global feminist movements have categorically been hostile to Islam because of the belief that it is exclusively a patriarchal religion. This understanding can be considered as a derivative of the antagonistic relationship between Islamic societies and the âWestâ. The rise of Islamist reaction, particularly its violent strand, after the 9/11 attacks in the United States, further cemented the discourse of Islamâs exclusive patriarchy.
In analysing the discourses on the Westâs âWar on Terrorâ, Lila Abu-Lughod compares the Westâs need to save Muslim Afghan women from the Taliban to the archaic practice of âunveilingâ of Muslim women by the French in the colonial period. The colonial undercurrent of âsavingâ Muslim women is not lost on a keen observer. In the modern context, statist feminism attempts to fixate women to similar colonial ideas. Muslim women are thought of as docile cultural or social icons divorced from politics. Abu-Lughod further explains that presently, such inclinations within feminism have been strengthened by the misrepresentation of Muslim women as permanent victims of Islam and a complete apathy towards their socio-political and historical subjectivity.2 Thus, the view that Muslim women are victims of their own religion, is premised firstly on colonialism, then on orientalism, which misrepresents Islam and the Shariah law, and finally on Islamophobia that was perfected further after 9/11 and the rise of Islamist contestation of liberal or secular values.
The subject of Muslim women is complex when viewed in a universal context, which tapers the possibility of interpreting and understating their actions within the feminist theory. Muslim women are often reduced to being subjects of inquiry without being allowed much control over the interpretations of their actions. The complexity of this issue is manifold in the context of postcolonial India and Kashmir.3 A lack of critical understanding of the lives of Muslim women in Kashmir and their place in resistance politics is apparent. Much of the conventional feminist scholarship on Kashmir has merely reproduced the dominant narrative of Muslim women being either voiceless victims, or ideological supporters of men. They are also portrayed as victims, caught between two contesting militaristic patriarchiesâwhose primary political investment is peacebuilding.4 This understanding of Kashmiri Muslim women has further ossified because of the inherent feminist assumption that a recognisable womenâs agency is the one that resists cultural patriarchy. This assumption might be valid for societies which have a strong private-public division. However, under a pervasive and intrusive military occupation, a public-private division often collapses. Consequently, in such situations womenâs political action translates into resistance against every day brutalisation and dehumanisation to protect themselves and their families.
The aim of this book is to leave behind the miasma of confusion and move towards understanding the historical and deliberate nature of womenâs agency in the resistance politics of Kashmir, in which women are not merely accidental victims but conscientious resisters. The exploration of Muslim Kashmiri womenâs political action simultaneously brings forth the suspended local history of resistance in Kashmir.
Map 1.1
Former British princely state of Kashmir5. Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, University of Texas Library Online Catalogue. Kashmir Map. Texas, 2003
Historically, Kashmiri society is a product of an amalgamation of diverse political, spiritual and economic philosophies that made their way into the region through the ancient Silk routes of Central Asia. Geographically, Kashmir was located along important trade routes that gave its social life a fluid identity right from ancient times. Kashmirâs distant past is a mosaic of varied influences of the Buddhist-Zoroastrian Kushan Empire, the Sasanian Empire of Persia and the empire of Alexander the Great. The ancient Kashmiri society is also shaped by various Hindu Brahmin and Buddhist empires and their attendant ethos. The transformation from its ancient society to Sufi-Reshi orders in the medieval periodâinitiated by its encounter with Islamâprovides an understanding of the diverse influences on Kashmiri people since antiquity. However, historical narratives about Kashmir are often discussed only in relation to its contemporary South Asian connection.
The vital position that Kashmir holds in the Hindu imagination often forces a nationalistic framework on the scholarly work on Kashmir. Emanating from the experiences of the Partition, postcolonial Indiaâs popular political discourse views Kashmir valleyâs embrace of Islam in the twelfth century as a treacherous moment. In recent times, after 9/11, Islamophobia in the West has offered additional justification for the home-grown historical suspicion of Kashmirâs treacherous Muslim identity. The Indian state formulates arguments against the Kashmiri peopleâs right to self-determination by connecting their historical movement to global âterrorismâ as a means to discredit its authenticity. In Hindu nationalist imagination, Kashmir is perpetually a figurative head of a fictitious Hindu goddessâMother India. This regenerates the Kashmir question in ideological terms, casting it in a Muslim versus Hindu paradigm. Early on, the postcolonial state formation in Kashmir was interrupted by such narratives of distrust emanating through ideological posturing of the Hindu right. For the longest time, Kashmir leftist-secular forces attempted to negotiate autonomy through nursing discourses of rights. However, within modern secular Indian nationalism too, Kashmir was reduced to an inalienable or an integral part of India that further disreputes any local political contest.
The 1989 Islamicate armed uprising consolidated a counter-ideological moment, disrupting the Indian nationalist narratives about Kashmir temporarily. However, these were reasserted by the Indian state by deploying a repressive counterinsurgency network, which has since gained a life of its own. The Indian media narratives portray Kashmiris as terrorists and anti-nationals, obsessed with the âpervertedâ ideology of Jihad. While the Hindu nationalists claim that the sovereignty of the Indian state is in severe danger in Kashmir, the Indian leftists and secularists try to invoke the Indian law to hold state sovereignty accountable. However, Indiaâs political rule in Kashmir operates through a state of exception. In that exclusive state, politics is both accessible and prohibited for its majority Kashmiri subjects. The dichotomy of that subjection ruptures the Hindu nationalist narrative on Kashmir.
In secular Indian imagination, Kashmiris have lost the right to represent themselves without a reference to the Indian state. It is consistently demanded of their narratives to toe a pro-India line. The sovereignty of the Indian state is held above the rule of law. The system operates in ways that punish its unruly subjects by reserving the exclusive right about when the rule of law shall be applied and when it shall be suspended. Over the years, the systematic absence of the rule of law has been documented by local and international human rights groups. Thousands of recorded cases of human rights violation testify to the lack of justice. The cases of Kunan and Poshpor6 mass rape or the Gaew Kadel7 massacre remain deliberately not investigated, despite years of activism by local and international organisations. Laws such the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and the Public Safety Act (PSA) have been imposed to ensure impunity to the Indian Army. Thus, in the Indian political culture, a Kashmiri signifies as the one who is in a basic relationship with the state sovereignty, the one to whom the rule of law does not apply and the one whose independent political action is misguided, or is an act of terrorism (OCHR, 2018).
In postcolonial Indian feminist literature, many leading feminist writers have discussed the Kashmir conflict and its impact on Kashmiri women. Ayesha Ray (2009),8 notes that feminist writers from India as part of NGOs, or as independent researchers and journalists, have explored the deplorable victimisation of Kashmiri women. The state of victimhood of Kashmiri women is debated extensively in their work. Rita Manchanda (2001),9 notes that women have been worst affected in the war over Kashmir. Similarly, Manisha Sobhrajani10 (2014) notes:
This detached and distant observation of the lives of Kashmiri women dominated the early feminist work on Kashmir. As Rita Manchanda (1999)11 explains:For the women of Kashmir, the impact of this political tragedy has been doubly fatal; they have not just borne the wrath of the conflict, they have also been used as objects of use and amusement, both by militants and Indian security forces⊠(p. 2)
Sobhrajani and Manchanda attempt to wish away the label o...They have been killed in crossfire, shot at in public demonstrations, blown up in grenade explosions or in shelling across the Line of Control (LoC) and have been raped by the militants⊠(p. 1)