Home as an Occupied Territory: intimacy, occupation, and loss in Kashmir

Guest Column: Samia 

Collage created by Mariyeh Mushtaq

Kashmir is a foreign cartographer’s unfulfilled dream. Every nation that surrounds Kashmir is eager to put its drafting scale to use, to rewrite our ethnopolitical history and claim our future as their own. A great deal of political discourse on Kashmir is driven by these nations and their colonial manoeuvrings to keep their ‘legitimacy’ over Kashmir breathing. Amid these claims and counterclaims, Kashmiri people’s imagination of home, its affective and metaphorical value under a brutal occupation seldom finds a room:

‘This is MY home’,

I must be careful with these words,

announce them only in soundproof rooms

preferably under thick blankets,

for if they escape,

and reach New Delhi

they will have verdicts freshly juiced for me –

Seditious, unholy, a foreign conspiracy.

‘This is my home’,

It exists

despite our collective lack of ‘legal vocabulary’.

Were born indifferent.

It was our land who first

– through our imagination –

gave substance to its dreams.

Landscapes and households: sites of resistance and occupation

Kashmir’s anti-colonial and anti-feudal struggle for self-determination – now truncated to merely ending human right violations – started long before India and Pakistan emerged as nation states. These historic claims and, consequently, our imagination of home are also shaped by our distinct geographical and ethnocultural realities. For Kashmiris, this distinct landscape is not only an occupied homeland, it suffers like a Kashmiri body and often has anthropomorphic aspirations in our resistance-art. The lines distinguishing public from private; body from land are blurry in Kashmir:

You say the world must isolate

our ‘radical resistance’ from the ‘timeless beauty of Kashmir’

that the loudness of our streets

shadows the warm sun in Gulmarg,[1]

hampers pashmina[2] trade.

‘All of this’, you move your fingers

over Chashm-e-Shahi,[3]

Hazratbal,[4]

Shankaracharya,[5]

and say

‘lost to fringe elements’.

The papier-mâché[6] buying tourists agree.

Go ahead then –

rip open the springs of Achabal[7]

take that shikara[8] to the bottom of the Dal

If our Zaan must exist without our Zameen,[9]

force open our doors to your neoliberal dreams.

Each naag[10] will reverberate Aazadi[11]

Every mountain yearns for Aazadi

This Zameen that swallows your JCBs

Responds only to Aazadi.

Blurring of body-land binary in the artwork of Kashmiri artist Mir Suhail. Images reproduced with permission from the artist.

Under occupation, Kashmiris’ symbolic intimacy with ‘home’ extends from personifying the landscape – Kashmir becomes an extension of our own bodies – to sustaining the resistance within households. Our resistance, violently quashed on the streets, finds easy ways and articulations in our homes. If our speech and collective memory are surveilled outside, including the digital space, inside our homes they bleed free – Azad. These age-old acts of household resistance range from frequent oral narrations of Tahreek[12] to singing songs with undertones of loss at weddings and funerals. They manifest as our collective revulsion against the Indian Cricket Team, mourning losses by restrained celebration of festivals and building tall compound walls. These intimate means of household protest seep into our routine, make space for solidarity and are a paraphernalia of Kashmiri resistance.

Thereby, to the occupier’s quest for quashing Azaadi, its varied textures and tenors, all intimate spaces that ‘qualify as home’ are spaces that ought to be occupied. It is through destroying the intimate, what feels relatively safe and rightly ours (landscape, history, or houses) that – material, psychic, corporeal, affective – are invaded. With over ten lakh Indian ‘security-forces’ in Kashmir that occupy more than 20,000 hectares of land including private buildings, the occupying state maintains a continuum of landgrab, alienating our familiar landscape. In schools we are not taught the histories of Kashmiri resistance, and public property is frequently renamed. These are only a few examples of the tactics used to misrepresent and control the Kashmiri imagination of its homeland:

Who knows where this ‘Heaven on Earth’ is?

Wounded, perhaps sulking on the top of hills

where bunkers pierce through its heart

where its blood feeds the ones who are camouflaged,

too many to hide their infestation.

At school they infest my books, my history

I leaf through the dreams of my teachers,

and teachers of their teachers,

where is my history?

My history hides between the lines of your history,

weeps on empty pages,

lives in the library of haunted memories

Destruction and dispossession of homes

Kashmiris largely live private lives; weddings, festivities and social gatherings take place at home. This sentimental value attached to home in Kashmir is also by virtue of ‘safeguarding’. The boundaries of homes guard us from the vulnerabilities engendered by harsh winters, heavy militarisation, and other covert aggressions of occupation. Kashmiris ergo spend lifetimes building and maintaining homes. It is also this vulnerability that is exploited when draconian tactics such as CASO (Cordon and Search Operation), CADO (Cordon and Destroy Operation) and encounter operations are used as means of intimidation and to vindicate the widespread blasting of homes. This looming possibility of losing the material (and affective) home induces fear and vulnerability associated with loss even before the actual destruction of a house takes place – evidence of which are alarming mental health statistics in Kashmir (93 per cent of Kashmiri adults have experienced conflict-related trauma). Joronen and Griffiths (2019) identify a comparable ‘uncertain-certainty’ in Occupied Palestine and call this temporal effect of threat as ‘quasicause’: ‘a futurity with a virtual power to affect the present quasicausally’. This fear of loss is endemic to Kashmiris; a form of punishment meted out for resisting occupation. Recently, a journalist recalled asking an officer of the Indian forces their objective behind the widespread blasting of Kashmiri homes. ‘To break the will of the people’, the general replied. This state of ‘enforced homelessness’ in Kashmir is multipronged and exemplified by frequent invocations in our resistance literature.

Photo: Junaid Bhat

Kashmiri poets like Agha Shahid Ali and more recently Madhosh Balhami ­– who lost his home and thirty years of poetry in an encounter operation in 2018 – serve as witnesses to this enforced symbolic and literal loss :

‘The soldiers light it, hone the flames,

burn our world to sudden papier-mâché

Inlaid with gold, then ash.

The houses were swept about like leaves for burning’.

— Excerpts from The Country Without A Post Office, Agha Shahid Ali

‘Woh aatish-e-namroodh mera kuch begaad na sake

mera qalam na le sake,

magar mera qalaam le liya

That Nimrod’s fire could not harm me,

could not take away my pen

but stole away my poetry’.

— Madhosh Balhami

Pandemic under an Occupation

Kashmiris are not the only victims of authoritarian states that have tightened our pre-existing persecution under the pretext of the pandemic. (Take, for instance, the brutality that Kurds are subjected to in Turkey and Uighurs in China.) The ‘Stay Home Stay Safe’ crusade or security associated with ‘law and order’ has no takers in Kashmir. Seven months before the pandemic, India unilaterally stripped Kashmir of its territorial sovereignty and continues to take ‘possession of Kashmir’ by passing a wide array of laws. The pace at which these laws are cancelled and enforced; it is difficult to keep a count. It is, therefore, crucial to examine the pandemic in occupied Kashmir against the backdrop of these recent events. Changes in domicile and property laws now allow Indian settlers to buy land and apply for jobs in Kashmir, overriding local population’s consent, agency and well-being. Kashmir’s ecologically sensitive land, guarded for centuries by its communities, is opened for unchecked investment and a significant percentage of mining-rights have been transferred from locals to non-resident bidders. Vague (deliberately so) amendments to urban development and housing policies further hint towards increased military and non-Kashmiri settlements. In the absence of the pandemic, such decisions would have been countered by widespread protests and attracted international attention. Under the pandemic lockdown, the state has exploited a medical emergency to further the propaganda of Kashmir’s permanent condition of ’normalcy’ as ‘acceptance’. Incentivised by a year-long communication blackout, growing healthcare and economic challenges, the pandemic has been weaponised to catalyse the occupation of Kashmir with increased impunity.

A Kashmiri next to the rubble a house blasted by Indian forces in Sopore on 12 July 2020. Photo: Junaid Bhat

Thereby, Kashmiri homes are in charge of the fight against both the occupation and the virus. Blasting of homes and civilian properties continues in the pandemic and has left hundreds of Kashmiris with no place to go. I must reiterate these operations were carried out before as well, but, even a public health crisis of such magnitude did not put off the Indian state. On the contrary, ‘anti-militancy operations’ have intensified during the pandemic. Across districts, installation of concertina wires and semi-permanent metal barricades coerce and control Kashmir’s population, distorting its local geography. Tariq Mir writes, ‘It’s as if the virus is a tangible being and there is a hunt underway to catch it. Once they catch it, perhaps they would haul it to one of the torture chambers and make it disappear there, as the authorities have done with many locals’.

For Kashmiris then, this loss of homes in pandemic unfurls an array of precarities, like increased exposure to the virus or the inability to rebuild homes in the economic crisis – both contoured by the militarised pandemic. I am particularly reminded of Daaniyal Hassan’s poem:

‘Since the military Curfew

is the only language of lockdown

in Kashmir

there are more guns

to stop corona virus

than doctors.

If you have been to Infected

parts of India recently

the Indian soldier

shakes off your germs

with the butt of his rifle’.

These manifold policies aimed at slowly weakening local livelihoods and controlling land – enforced under the cover of pandemic – steadily march towards an incremental genocide. In this context, the virus has become the carrier of both – the disease and a neoliberal colonial agenda.

These persistent attempts to erase Kashmir’s autonomy and alter its demography have left the Kashmiri indigenous communities with little wherewithal to determine Kashmir’s stature. In a recent conversation, my masi (mother’s sister) who lives by a mountain mentioned that these days the mountains feel paraye (alien) ‘objects that are no longer intimate’ or that ‘belong’ to her. Grief of this magnitude is collective; it has swelled up over the years into profound suffering, it seeps into our land, flows with rivers, sits atop trees, and floods our days with sorrow that seems to have always lived here for centuries:

What is the shelf-life of this suffering?

Where does this sadness stem from?

Who stitches its shadows to the face of this city?

From which shrine, which fountain does this sorrow flow?

But it is also this collective grief that sustains our resistance. It is a dwelling ground for support and solidarity. Our resistance against the erasure of our identity banks upon this collective imagination – an Azad home where all its communities live with agency and without fear. We sing of it, send prayers to it, and mourn obstructions in its path. It fuels our resolve and enables us to keep our fight alive against successive occupiers.

References

Ali, Agha Shahid, 2013. The Country Without a Post Office. New Delhi: Penguin Random House India

Joronen, Mikkoo and Griffiths, Mark, 2019. The affective politics of precarity: Home demolitions in occupied Palestine. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37:3, 561-576. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263775818824341

Kashmiri/Urdu Glossary

[1] A Kashmiri hill station

[2] Cashmere wool

[3] A Mughal garden in Kashmir

[4] A revered Kashmiri mosque

[5] A Temple in Srinagar

[6] A craft introduced in Kashmir by Sufi-mystic- Syed Ali Hamdani

[7] A town in South-Kashmir

[8] A small boat

[9] Zaan and Zameen: Identity and Land

[10] Natural springs

[11] Freedom

[12] The freedom movement of Kashmir

Samia is a poet and a writer from Kashmir. Her work has appeared in Scroll, Greater Kashmir, Kashmir Lit, Hindustan Times and elsewhere. She has served as a fiction editor of The Bombay Review Magazine and was a YIF fellow at Ashoka University. At present, she’s a policy and governance fellow at the University of Chicago Trust.

This work was first published in the Feminist Review.