Description
Over the decades of its military occupation of Kashmir, the Indian state has constructed the spectacle of a “killable Kashmiri body” to consolidate a unified national imaginary and concretize its “irrefutable sovereignty” over Kashmir (Zia, 2018: 103). This spectacle is manufactured through the hyper-visual imagery of charred, burnt, bloodied militant bodies and homes razed to rubble for sheltering militants. The preoccupation with the spectacular has also been seen through security-centric scholarship that primarily looks at Kashmir as a territorial dispute and a nuclear flashpoint between ‘postcolonial’ states of India and Pakistan. There is a stark disjuncture between such hyper-narratives centering the nation state and the everyday political (dis)order experienced by Kashmiris.
This paper seeks to move away from the preoccupation with the spectacular to focus on the gendered forms of violence that are experienced and negotiated in the everyday. What forms of violence remain unseen and unintelligible against more spectacular violence? How do we make sense of everyday life through a reading of routine and rupture? In examining these questions, the paper uses the frame of dissonance to understand how “normalcy involves the movement between and through the spectacular and the ordinary” (Calis, 2017: 74). In Kashmir, this dissonance is witnessed in the taken-for-granted ways of control on the one end, seen as part of the ‘ordinary’, and the unpredictability of military intrusions on the other end, seen as jarring and out of ordinary. The paper builds on the author’s ethnographic work in Kashmir as well as auto-ethnographic narrations derived from lived experience as a Kashmiri Muslim woman. It centres a decolonial feminist framework to visibilise the “slow” operations of violence through 'gradual wounding', to challenge dominant narratives around what is public, spectacular, and newsworthy.
