Mapping children’s play and violence in Kashmir

Introduction

Children and their experiences in a Kashmiri downtown neighbourhood caught my interest when I saw a group of them talking about stone-pelting that they knew would take place once the Indian troops would start to retreat from the streets towards their bunkers. The children eagerly waited for it right before the usual stipulated time for stone-pelting, calling out to each other that the stone-pelting was about to begin.

Being a ‘native’ and yet an outsider in the neighbourhood, the children assumed that I was particularly interested in witnessing spectacular events (of violence and resistance) and began to guide me in viewing the same. Some of them came running towards me and Y (6 years old) held my hand as if taking me in some fantasy world of his.

I was surprised at the way they were readying themselves to witness the event, and more so the way they were seriously trying to assist an outsider in the tactics of viewing the event.

‘View like this from the gaps of the gate but make sure your feet are not visible to the military. They must not know that we are watching them!’, they told me

‘What will they do if they see?’ I enquired

‘When they will shoot you, then you would realize!’, came the reply

Before the stone-pelting could begin, they were shouted upon by Y’s uncle who asked everyone including me to get inside (atchev andar). To this, the children replied that they were playing, but Y’s uncle told them to immediately get inside and come back to play later. Hurriedly, the children ran helter-skelter, some of them trying to see stone-pelting (which was not intense that day), baton charges and tear gas shelling from the shut windows of their homes and other children trying to listen to the sounds outside and discussing with adults whether tear gas shells were being fired or not.

Foregrounding the everyday, this article tries to make sense of lived experiences of children in a Kashmiri neighbourhood through playing. What does playing then tell us about life in Kashmir? The focus on playing elucidates it as a meaningful socio-political category offering a potent critique of what ‘reality’ means, by establishing itself as very much a part of reality in the lives of Kashmiri children.

The history of Kashmir conflict dates back to the end of colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent, in 1947, leading to a partition and formation of two nation states, that is, India and Pakistan. The Kashmiri demand for self-determination stems from the promise of a plebiscite, based on a series of United Nations Security Council resolutions passed in 1947–1948 and reiterated through subsequent Security Council resolutions up through 1957, that has never been fulfilled (Duschinski and Ghosh, 2017; see also Bhan et al., 2018). Such denial coupled with stationing of more than 700,000 armed personnel across the territory with impunity in forms of acts like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) and J&K Public Safety Act (PSA) ¹ has led to the gravest human rights violations inflicted by the state and its military apparatus in the form of killings, arrests, torture, injuries, rapes, blinding and enforced disappearance on the people of Kashmir and over the years is met with resistance in various forms ranging from armed rebellion, stone-throwing, street protests and sit-ins, to resistance art in the form of graffiti, paintings, songs, calendars, poetry and so on. The resistance and freedom movement in Kashmir are aimed at independence from Indian rule (see Bose, 2003; Schofield, 1996).

The anthropological literature on Kashmir vis-à-vis occupation and political violence has explored the themes of militarization (Duschinski, 2009; Mathur, 2016), ‘legality’ of occupation (Duschinski and Ghosh, 2017), memory and resistance (Junaid, 2013), occupation and resistance (Duschinski et al., 2018) and military humanitarianism (Bhan, 2013; Varma, 2012, 2016). There is also work that has underscored gendered subjectivity and agency vis-à-vis occupation and patriarchy (see Mathur, 2012; Misri, 2014; Osuri, 2018; Zia, 2016, 2019).

In this article, the focus on Kashmiri children is grounded in the lack of anthropological scholarship vis-à-vis the same. While there are journalistic accounts based on the experiences and memory of children who have grown up and lived in conflict (see, for example, Manecksha, 2017), the absence of the specificity of children’s experiences from the anthropological work when children are significantly impacted and shaped by political violence thus needs to be addressed, and the article makes an attempt to do the same by explicating their everyday lived realities.

If one talks about the political representations of Kashmiri children, it often takes the form of a binary. Children especially in the Indian state and media discourses are talked about from the perspectives of socialization where those visibly resisting the state violence via stone-pelting or other means of protest are tagged as ‘deviant’ and ‘out of control’, ensuing from wrong socialization or wrong influences, and often instructions are given to parents to keep a check on their children so as to ‘bring them back’ or there are even suggestions to send children to ‘de-radicalization’ camps. ² If one pays attention to Operation Sadhbhavna (Goodwill) that was introduced by Indian army and officially designed for ‘winning hearts and minds’ of people, it has initiatives pertaining to children’s education and recreation, including Goodwill schools, residential schools, sports competitions, recreational tours and so on. This is officially meant to imbibe in them ‘values and ethics of good citizenship’ (see Bhan, 2013) and thus ‘integrate’ them firmly into the national fabric. However, these ‘humanitarian’ policies have been critiqued (see Bhan, 2013; Zia, 2019) as violence of compassion born out of India’s counterinsurgency operations that normalize extensive militarization and contain dissension (Bhan, 2013) and as a strategy to make inroads into daily lives of people (Zia, 2019).

Contradicting the narrative of ‘unruly and deviant’ children, the local Kashmiri media and civil society discourses talk about ‘lost childhood’ in Kashmir, explicating the suffering and victimization of children based on direct violence of killing, blinding, becoming orphans or half-orphans, and the feeling of fear and insecurity that children experience on an everyday basis. A report brought out by The Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) ³ in March 2018 discusses how children in Kashmir have been at the receiving end of targeted state violence (Mehraj et al., 2018). The violence has resulted from losing their parents and becoming orphans affecting their physical and psychological health and also impeding their access to education and healthcare. Other than this, there are sociological work and psychological work which talk about physical and socioeconomic violence (see Dabla, 2007, 2011) and psychosocial trauma (see Khan, 2016) that Kashmiri children face on an ongoing basis due to militarization. ⁴

While violence directly impacts children in terms of getting killed, injured, blinded, arrested and orphaned, as well as harming their psychosocial well-being, it also becomes imperative to talk about the invisibilized, non-publicized and non-reported aspects of violence and the way it shapes the lives of children in Kashmir. The article does the same by taking a departure from the dominant political representations of Kashmiri children as being ‘radicalized’ or being ‘passive victims’ and instead foregrounds their everyday to bring out the way a researcher can make sense of violence and children’s negotiations with it through their everyday playing. Blurring the lines between spectacular and mundane, and actual and virtual/imaginary, playing is established as a reality in the lives of children, giving them the power to negotiate the daily experiences of violence and the dominant political representations of children in Kashmir.

Fieldwork in violence

The ethnographic fieldwork for this article was conducted in two phases in 2017 and 2018 in one of the downtown neighbourhoods in the summer capital Srinagar. ⁵ It is a neighbourhood located around 5 km from the city centre Lal-chowk and has been a centre of pro-freedom politics (Tahreek) and protests in the form of stone-pelting.

The anthropological literature on fieldwork in violence talks about the encounters of violence in the field that make fieldwork difficult and dangerous, exposing the dilemmas of the researchers (see Ghassem-Fachandi, 2009; Nordstrom and Robben, 1995). On the contrary, scholars have explored violence as a social and creative force explicating the ways in which it fashions subjectivities, offering not only constraints but also possibilities (see Arif, 2016; Das, 1995, 2007). In their respective field sites, the latter group of anthropologists have looked at the aftermaths of the eventful violence tracing its predicaments and potential in the everyday. Taking a departure from works that move from the violent event to everyday, I instead foreground the everyday to see how mundane and ordinary inform us about the violence. The article shall focus on the everyday of children to explore the different ways in which violence is experienced, felt and negotiated by children.

When I earlier envisaged my doctoral research project, it was to look at the everyday formations and reformations of social practices and social relations in militarized Kashmir with no particular interest in the experiences and narratives of children per se. Guided by pre-conceived notions and priorities, I sometimes even tried to ignore or brush aside their comments or sayings as silly nothings. However, the way they made sense of violence – through their reactions, reflections and negotiations – eventually made them an inevitable part of the research.

The fieldwork for this article particularly involved spending time with children, talking to them and participant observation while children would be playing games in courtyards, playgrounds and on computers/phones. In the beginning when I did not specifically aim to document their experiences, they would (especially the younger ones) come to me giving information about everything under the sun asking me to write it in my book (assuming that I was writing a book). They would constantly share the details and their own understanding of violent events, resistance and azadi (freedom). By the time I understood their significance for my work, we were fairly acquainted with each other’s presence, so they did not mind me being around when they would play games. I took extra care in documenting their experiences – so when I would talk to them or ask them questions, I would make it a point to take notes on the spot especially with the younger children, which made them realize that their words are being taken seriously, but on the other hand when I would observe them play games, I would appear to be engrossed in my phone or laptop giving them the impression that I was not specifically noticing them so that they would not invent or innovate based on my watching and documenting them.

As a researcher, living and documenting life in a place overwhelmed with violence entails enormous pressure which is hard to escape, and the experience of fieldwork with children which seemed pleasant and enjoyable in the beginning also became painful and burdensome over the course of time. While it was delightful to spend time with children, talk to them, see them play and in the process actively shape the research, it was also excruciating to see childhood here subsumed under violence. They were not just children but children of conflict where childhood consciously or unconsciously had appropriated aspects of violence in observable and subtle ways.

For the article, I am looking at individuals below 18 years of age. Furthermore, based on the data that were gathered when playing two games – that is, Military-Mujahid and PUBG (Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds) – it was found that younger children aged 4–12 years mostly played Military-Mujahid and older children in the age bracket of 10–17 years mostly played PUBG, which means that children in the age bracket of 10–12 years in my field site played both the games.

Political socialization of children

The children under discussion here, that is, 4–17 years old, have never really seen any peaceful time in Kashmir. Their familiarity with the peaceful times when eventful or spectacular violence was not this prevalent is from the stories and conversations they have with the elders, mostly parents and grandparents. Therefore, Hirsch’s (2012) use of the term postmemory, that is, those traumatic collective experiences that one does not face directly but are passed from the generation that came before, applies differently in the case of Kashmir, where memories of comparatively peaceful times are passed from the older generations to children.

Schools in Kashmir, as agents of socialization, have always shunned from speaking about the Kashmir conflict, and as Junaid (2018) points out in his work, schools adhere to the government-approved curriculum with extensive reference to India’s freedom struggle but no mention of Kashmir’s own struggle for freedom (p. 265). Even then, with regard to political violence in an everyday setting, there is no difference vis-à-vis information dissemination to audiences of different age groups in Kashmir, eliminating the barriers between children and adults. Even if the episode of spectacular violence takes place away from one’s vicinity, in no time the news spreads through the Internet and social media. Men, women and children all receive the news, reflect upon it and react to it in their own ways. Even if a child as small as 4 years does not get to hear or watch the news of violence directly from the phone or TV, the ‘talk about the violence’ which is reverberating in every household informs and impacts even the youngest of minds. The realization here is therefore not of violent times but simply of times which are ‘normally violent’ and where ‘peace’ would be an aberration.

Although political violence in Kashmir is ongoing from the past 30 years, in 2016 with the killing of a popular militant and Hizbul Mujahideen commander, Burhan Wani, the state violence has escalated further. His killing was followed by curfew that lasted for months and was accompanied by Internet blockade, turning the entire Kashmir valley into a prison. Schools were shut for months. So, even if schools do not teach the history of Kashmir, children deeply get a sense of kharaab halaat (literally translates to bad situation, but is a dominant way to talk about state violence in Kashmir) when schools or tuition centres remain shut for days and even months. After Burhan Wani’s killing, armed rebellion was pumped with fresh life with more and more young men joining the militancy. The cordon and search operations (CASO) by the military to hunt the militants were on the rise with more and more militants getting killed in gunfights and even more joining the cadres. It also led to persistent incidents of stone-pelting across the valley and recurrent hartals (strike) as a mark of protest against the killing of militants. The call for hartals in Kashmir is given by pro-freedom groups and entails closure of shops, business, offices, schools and tuitions, again reifying kharaab halaat for children making words like pathrav/kanni-jung (stone-throwing), encounter, CASO, ambush and so on a part of their vocabularies.

Scholars like Osofsky (2003) in the context of domestic violence argue that when children witness violence at home, it challenges the role of parents as providers of secure and protected world exposing children to harmful and unwanted information, thus breaking the safety valve. In Kashmir, with ongoing violence and the way the mundane is oriented vis-à-vis the same, the safety valve stands broken, proliferating and even normalizing a different childhood ensuing from kharaab halaat. Children’s understanding of kharaab halaat thus not only stems from everyday episodes of violence like killing, blinding or arrests, and so on but also from the way violence is talked about, discussed, responded to and survived in the mundane and ordinary, making the everyday a site to both gauge and negotiate violence.

Locating play and reality in a theoretical paradigm

Even with the anthropological shift towards the study of the unmarked and the everyday and a simultaneous poststructuralist focus on practice, everyday experience, improvisation and strategic agency that conceive individuals as active agents who constitute, manipulate, interpret and invent culture, children are rarely viewed from this same agentive perspective (Sawyer, 2002: 148). However, there is scholarship that elucidates children’s agency and contribution to their communities, bringing out the ways children accept, appropriate or challenge the power structures, constructing and operationalizing their own identities (Cheney, 2005; James and Prout, 1997; Marshall, 2013; Mayall, 1996; Scheper-Hughes and Sargent, 1998; Schwartzman, 2001).

Strandell argues that play is thought of as a separate activity away from the real adult world. In play, children are just seen imitating or simulating the real actions or relationships between people, without studying its relation to the immediate reality surrounding it (Strandell, 1997: 447). Play when coupled with children connotes triviality (Throne, 1993: 5). However, Schwartzman (1979) has criticized the imitative view of play arguing that if children’s play is considered just an imitation of the adult world, then why would anyone be interested in it? (p. 240).

Play has, however, been studied to explore children’s agency and politics in relation to imposed control and boundaries that limit their use of time and space, and how children engage in creative ways of finding time and space to play (see Katz, 2004; Lester, 2013; Marshall, 2013; Punch, 2001). Further play and games have been explored as contradicting the socializing or social-ordering activities that in ways challenge and reverse the social order or dominant structures (see discussion on the work of Sutton-Smith, 1972, 1974 in Schwartzman, 1978: 125–133).

In the context of war and political violence, there has been exploration of connections between warfare, children and play (see Povrzanovic, 1997; Seriff, 2017; Trawick, 2007). Trawick in her work in Sri Lanka argues how warfare and childhood ensuing from a certain cosmopolitan, universalist and fundamentally Western mind-set are kept separate (Trawick, 2007: 6). She argues that when warfare and children mix – like when children play war games – they are often stopped as it reflects violent fantasies that the child may reproduce in real life too. In the context of Croatia, Povrzanovic’s (1997) work brings out how young children play games of war, mimicking and elaborating on what they have seen and experienced. Here, adults do not attempt to prohibit these games, as they are thought to be natural continuation of events that the children are confronted with. Seriff (2017) traces the continuity of Holocaust trauma in Holocaust-themed games that children continue to play, making trauma and persecution of a particular group recurring and ongoing.

This article locates children’s agency through playing at the intersection of ‘becomings’ and ‘beings’, that is, children’s subjectivities and agency are no doubt shaped by the process of socio-spatial processes of subjectification, but children do not passively follow it but are social actors in their own right, actively taking part in matters that affect and interest them (see Kallio and Hakli, 2011). And as Gambetti (2007) argues, children’s political selves shaped via subjectification are not fixed or hollow but fluid in a similar way as the social worlds that only exist through the subjects who enact them. The social order for Kashmiri children emanates from the cycle of state violence, on one hand, and a counterorder via resistance, on the other hand. How does one then make sense of children’s playing in Kashmir?

Military-Mujahid

A group of children from four households are playing in the courtyard (aangan) that is roughly located in between these houses. The courtyard is mostly used by wazas (male master-chefs) to cook feasts using firewood during weddings, and the leftover firewood from the previous wedding is kept in one corner in three stacks, and children use it for playing games. There is a lot of chaos as I sit in one corner working on my laptop. I do not give children an impression that I was specifically watching them, so I decide to not look at them appearing too engrossed in my own work. The children aged between 4 and 12 years, six boys and four girls, indulge in group making: seven in the military group and three in the militant group. It seemed everyone wanted to be in the militant group as they were giving each other’s names in the military group. When the youngest in the lot (two boys) are put in the military group, they resent saying that they are always put in the military camp. The eldest of them – a girl of 12 years – tries to explain that those who play military in this round would get to be in the militant group in the next rounds. After the group making is over, the members of the militant group quickly hide themselves. Then the military group imagines getting information about the presence of militants in a particular location and rush to the location immediately, asking the militants to surrender. The militants are hiding behind one of the firewood stacks and the military takes position behind another. Each one of them had already taken pieces of wood from the firewood stacks that qualified as a gun. Some had taken the longer pieces of wood which became AK-47s and the others had taken shorter, wider pieces qualifying as pistols. Children role-playing the military shouted ‘surrender and you shall not be harmed in any way’ and the ones role-playing militants shouted ‘azadi’ (freedom) slogans and bullets in return. The give and take of fire shots continued for nearly 10 minutes, with each side strategizing and finding ways to defeat the opponents. The deal is that one member from each group has to make herself or himself visible for some time, and the one who points the gun towards the opponent first simultaneously making a bullet sound kills the opponent. The side that has the last alive member in the end wins, or specifically if the militants manage to escape that setting without being seen, they win.

In the first round of the game, the military group won and teased the militant group by saying, ‘if you fight like this, then you are not getting azadi’. In the next round, the three children from the military group now play the militants and the two young boys who wanted to be militants finally got their chance, and cheered. Although they had won the last game as military, they were excited to play the militants and were happily taking the names of militants and picking their favorites for role-play.

The game went on for another 15 minutes, and the military group won again.

Here, an inclination towards the militants is vivid as children cheerfully and in excitement take their name and want to play them. This was quite different when they were in the military group and took no names and perhaps showed no excitement or interest in role-playing the otherwise mighty military that was more in number and had more ammunition. Winning or losing is decided in the moment – the stronger team with more presence of mind and making use of more strategic tactics wins, which imbued play with indeterminancy and open-endedness of the everyday life showing how playing games has the same kind of unpredictability and constraints that saturate our experiences elsewhere (see Malaby, 2009: 208). However, the desire to be in the militants’ group, familiarity with their names, and feeling sad and dejected for their loss convey children’s strong identification with them. Unlike individuality and familiarity that are attributed to militants, the military is imagined as a collective – to be fought. These children have never met the militants unlike military which they encounter physically in the lanes right outside their homes, and yet there was an affinity towards the militants.

The militants’ popularity can be attributed to their images and videos circulated online, and the talks and discussions pertaining to them at homes, schools and so on. This virtuality through images and videos makes the absent present not only in their lifetime but also after their deaths. It is through online circulation of images/videos/speeches and so on and the talk around them that they find a place in the imagination of children, which they then perform through playing. The military, on the other hand, is imagined as the ‘other’ – that is, known to shoot bullets and pellets, maim and kill Kashmiris, so even with their everyday presence right in the vicinity of children, the children do not identify with them and hence try to avoid taking up their roles while playing or take up roles just for the sake of playing. And even when they have to play the military, they try to maintain a distance with militants whom they are seen imitating in ways that blurs the boundaries between them and militants, and between actual and imaginary.

PUBG

PUBG is an online action game in which players have to survive by fighting each other in a depleting play zone. The game can be played as a single player or with multi-players where players hunt for weapons and ammunition, and because the size of the play zone is shrinking, they are forced to encounter and fight each other. The last player or group of players alive on the island wins the game.

Like in the rest of the world, the game is quite famous in Kashmir as well, so much so that an overall poor 12th class results were attributed to ‘addiction’ to games like PUBG by some. During my fieldwork, young boys, especially teenagers, would actively play the game whenever Internet was restored after bouts of e-curfew. ⁶ Now, why a game like PUBG became interesting for my project was due to intermingling of ‘actual’ in the ‘virtual’. In Kashmir, the youngsters often come across gunfights or news about gunfights between military and militants, which are called ‘encounters’ colloquially. Since 2016, with the killing of Burhan Wani and marked increase in militancy, gunfights leading to militants’ killings became normal in Kashmir. During the course of my fieldwork especially between September 2018 and December 2018, I would hear ‘encounter’ talks and conversations on an everyday basis– az kati chu encounter chalan? (where’s the ‘encounter’ going on today?), Dapaan kati tan-e chu goumut cordon? (heard some area has been cordoned?), Tuhend kin gova CASO? (is CASO going on in your area?), ketaya militant? (How many militants?), Militant kati karan surrender! (militants won’t surrender!), Ketaya maerikh? (how many dead?), civil gova zakhmi kah? (any civilian injured?), Army woul moouda kahn? (has any military/army man died?) and Sirf chi kasheer-e yout maraan! (only Kashmiris die!). Now when the young Kashmiri players would play PUBG, a reflection of these normalized day-to-day actual ‘encounter’ conversation verbatim would find place in the virtual game as well. Players would often use the actual ‘encounter’ talk to make sense of the happenings while playing PUBG. For example, while playing, they would utter phrases like ambush, cordon, fire haa aav (I’m shot), hie…hie…goakh aa shaheed (oh! you are martyred), army hend peth woulukh souri makaan (they dismantled the house like the army/military does) and so on.

Almost all Kashmiri players refrained from putting up an Indian flag as their mark of identification and would instead put any other country’s flag. In PUBG, players can choose to play from first-person or third-person perspective. In first-person perspective, the players relay the happenings/events of the game from their own perspective, allowing them to talk to other players as well. It so happened that when Indian players would get to know that these ‘other country players’ were actually Kashmiris which they would openly declare on asking, then the level of excitement during such games would be high entailing both verbal (shouting, cursing, etc.) and nonverbal cues (fist clenching, fist raising, beating fist against the palm, banging hands against the floor, gnashing teeth, etc.) again blurring the lines between actual and virtual. In such situations, the emotional value attached to the game would be too high, and where a win would overwhelm the Kashmiri players with happiness, a loss would deeply sadden them. It also happened that sometimes Kashmiri players chose not to play against the Indian players saying that such a game becomes ugly over the course of time. PUBG is not a game specially designed for Kashmiri players; it is an international or a global game, yet becomes meaningful for Kashmiris in ways that echoes with their local ‘abnormal normal’ that anyway is laden with gunfires and shootouts and where the persistent presence of the mighty ‘other’ has to be consistently fought. While playing the game, many players feel that the game is Kashmir only.

Considering identities being fluid, processual and multiple, one of the ways in which children’s identities are thus performed is through playing. Stone (1995) in her work The War of Desire and Technology argues that what we choose to reveal about ourselves and how we represent ourselves in the cyberspace tie up to our identity that is always in a flux. She talks about the dissociation and fusion of selves and bodies that may or may not be in proximity (p. 89) to shape agency. Tracing the relationship between agency and authorizing body with the coming of electronic technologies, she argues that such a relationship changes into a discursive one, eventually producing the subjectivity that could fairly unproblematically inhabit the virtual spaces of the nets (Stone, 1995: 97). This mediated presence has a reality because in this interchange the receiver as well interprets us in a certain way, and also our actions have consequences in that mediated space. She does not talk about the absence of physical body in cyberspace but talks about reconstruction of body based on its interaction with the technology. Stone (1995) suggests that selves in cyberspace, that are given body representatives, have consensual, interactive and haptic experiences. These experiences are the ones in which the boundaries between the social and the ‘natural’ as well as the biological and technological permeate. Her analysis is used by Dovey and Kennedy who argue that the

performed selves made possible by the cybernetic process of gameplay offer us the opportunity to explore alternative subjectivities and to engage in different kinds of affective experience, where embodiment and possibilities are defined by different rules to those imposed in real lives. (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006: 117)

Playing, in the case of both Military-Mujahid and PUBG, is an embodied practice where players experience emotional and affective experiences that shape their subjectivity and agency, thus contributing to their sense of identity. The ‘virtual and actual’ in terms of online and offline experiences (for PUBG), and ‘imaginary and actual’ (for both Military-Mujahid and PUBG) thus are not mutually exclusive but continuous and flowing into each other, imbued with meaningful emotions, affects and actions constituting reality in the everyday of children. In one game, children do not want to play the military and are excited to be the militants, happily taking their roles, and in the other one, they consciously use some other country’s flags as markers of identification, and are excited and nervous to team against Indian players (who become an extension of state known for its violence), thus blurring the lines between actual and virtual/imaginary.

It is evident how children import words, gestures and meanings from one context and apply them to other, redefining playing based on local contexts and merging actual with virtual and imaginary as a part of their reality. Playing in both cases is about realistic responses where participants are immersed in play-environments but never distanced from their local embodied relationships, and hence are playing Military-Mujahid and PUBG as Kashmiris. And where the actual may constrain them in some ways, the virtual and the imaginary – as a reality – offer them opportunities and potentialities to represent themselves and challenge both the order of the state and the counterorder of spectacular resistance. As Ehrmann puts it, playing cannot be defined by isolating it on the basis of its relationship to an a priori reality and culture. To define play is at the same time and in the same movement to define reality and to define culture (see Ehrmann et al., 1968: 55). Here, playing as an embodied practice, laden with meanings and emotions for the children, make permeable the boundaries between spectacular and mundane, and between actual and virtual/imaginary, consolidating playing as a part of children’s reality that allows them to perform identities and negotiate the experiences of violence, authority of the oppressive state and dominant political representations of childhood in Kashmir.

Conclusion

The article foregrounds the everyday of children through playing to show how playing becomes a site to both gauge and negotiate political violence. The article makes an attempt to look at children as actors whose agency is located at the intersection of ‘becoming’ and ‘being’. So, if living in violence shapes their subjectivities, it at the same time reifies them as actors playing games realistically. Playing thus gives them the power to negotiate – the experiences of violence, authority of the state, dominant political representation of children in Kashmir and even the spectacular modes of performing resistance.

The article traces the way state violence popularly called kharaab halaat makes sense to children through the everyday manifestations of violence through talks, conversations, shutdowns and so on and how everyday then – here through playing – also becomes an avenue to make sense of violence for the researcher and the way the experiences of violence are negotiated by the children. The focus on playing not only indicates how violence has seeped into the everyday and mundane or how playing gets shaped by violence, but alternatively how playing also becomes a site to know and locate the violence of the times in general and a way for children to perform identities and negotiate the dominance and violence of the state. Playing as a practice is thus seen to blur the boundaries between spectacular and mundane, and actual and virtual/imaginary, establishing itself as a reality in the everyday of Kashmiri children.