“Politics of emotion”: Everyday affective circulation of women’s resistance and grief in Kashmir

Introduction: “Political experiences” of women

When I entered the tiny courtyard of their Battamaloo home, ¹ Ruksana’s hands were lathered with soap from the clothes she was washing. She was not expecting a stranger to break the monotony of her morning chores with questions about Nasir. She stood near the frothy bucket full of clothes, silently, perhaps ruminating what memories of Nasir should she recount: those from when he was alive or those that tormented her after he was killed. Ruksana rummaged through the oft-repeated details, stoically: “her brother Nasir Iqbal Shah, roll number card for 1^st year exams, Nawakadal degree college, Battamaloo bus stop, bomb blast, dead body in their ‘sehen’, ² 1^st May 1991, Wednesday and a pheran ³ ” (27^th June 2016). These were details that were chiseled into her heart, she just had to read them aloud and get back to washing clothes. The simultaneous acts of remembering her dead brother and washing clothes offered an insight into how the tragic weaves itself into the everyday life in Kashmir. Unlike her mother who refrained from saying anything during this conversation, Ruksana seemed to have a fascination for the human capacity for word-making, for articulating into speech the grief she has suffered for years. In contrast, even when her mother did not have the vocabulary for loss, her grief was palpable because memory is both: a silence and a storm. Memory moves, sticks, slides, and opens up emotions that are shaped by contact with objects (Ahmed, 2004: 18). For Ruksana’s mother, that particular object was Nisar’s pheran (cloak) that became the only available anchor of remembrance for her to register the death of her violently killed young son.

It was a Wednesday morning. Since then, for last 26 years, our mother remembers him from the hour of ‘fazr’ prayer in the morning to ‘isha namaaz’ at night. She has replaced the jai-namaaz ⁴ with Nisar’s pheran. He was wearing this pheran when he was killed and when he was last brought to this courtyard. My mother considers this pheran as an artifact of her dead son’s palpable life: to be preserved, to be nurtured, to be prayed on (Ruksana, 27 June 2016)

Through this ethnographic unfolding of remembrance, the question that I keep revisiting persistently in this article is: can we read these lived and endured experiences of grief as registers through which the idea of the political can be re-inscribed and re-imagined in Kashmir? The conventional understanding of political implies a contestation or a relentless power relation between the state and its people in which the state claims the monopoly of legitimate use of physical force or “the state is seen as the sole grantor of the ‘right’ to physical force” (Weber, ⁵ 1965: 136). In this asymmetrical negotiation of power between the state and its people, there has been a foregrounding of only forms of the political that are explicit, evental or sayable in nature such as formation of political parties, or staging of political rallies. Therefore, the idea of political has always been inevitably associated with and marked by an action or the force of a sensational event. However, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a conflict zone such as Kashmir wherein traumatic experiences of unabated political violence saturate the everyday, this conventional notion of the political is too limited as it does not capture the non-sensational: the sensory, the emotive and everyday experiences that circulate in a violent political space. Serematakis (1996) in her work on perception and memory examines that,

the sensory sphere is experienced in such a manner that profound transformations occurring in it or imposed on it are rendered imperceptible to the individual eye. This is precisely why everyday life in modernity has become the site for far-reaching historical transformations … This sensory structure of the everyday life is experienced as naturalized, almost cosmic time over and against which eruptive, “sensational events” … are profiled. But the narrativity of the sensational event is itself made possible by a relation of foreground and background. (p. 19, emphasis added)

In this article, I make similar inquiries by subverting the meaning traditionally imposed on these dialectically opposing categories of foreground/background, political/apolitical, public/private, and street/home by claiming and illustrating ethnographically through my work in Kashmir that the background and the lives embedded therein are fundamentally political. In saying so, I am not limiting the domain of women’s political struggles to only the everyday, but on the contrary, I am arguing that the complex history of the resistance movement in Kashmir cannot be fully comprehended without examining and acknowledging the lives of women whose everyday practices of survival and endurance have been relegated to the background of the political struggle. I posit that apart from underscoring the presence of women in the political foreground, it is in the subverted background of everyday life from where I am visibilizing the “political experiences” of women in Kashmir because they remain, as mentioned above, “unmarked, unvoiced and unattended to”.

I borrow the phrase “political experience” from Aretxaga (1997) in her work on the Nationalist struggle in Northern Ireland and the location of Irish women therein. She argues that the nationalist women who lived under the military occupation of British colonialism “explicitly blend their lived experience into a political view of social relations, into what I call ‘political experience’, the experience of an engagement to change the world in which they live from a particular social position” (1997: 8, emphasis added). This foregrounding of experiences of nationalist women that remain socially unrecognized or excluded from public discourse, she asserts, is necessarily a political act. Similarly, the foregrounding that is being performed in this article attempts to demonstrate that in a conflict militarized zone, the very composition of the social, the sensory, the everyday in itself is political as discussed through the work of Serematakis (1996). I propose that within this understanding of the political, what comes to be the anthropological meaning of resistance is perhaps constitutive of almost everything: resistance most simply is the shape taken by people’s memories or resistance is about enduring the political conflict or as Heimo and Pettonen (2003) say in the context of Finnish Civil War, “for the way in which people remember and speak those memories” (p. 43).

While writing this article, the dilemma I grappled with the most was why does it become critical to look at the particularities of women’s experiences in a conflict zone? In an attempt to redress the absence of women’s lives and experiences from what is traditionally understood as “political”, I argue that what has happened in Kashmir is that images and narratives of women’s victimization have become the symbolic representation of conflict, thus framing them as almost reified passive receivers of suffering; “used in particular to convey the depth of atrocities” (Jacobs, 2004: 234). However, in this article, I intend to re-shuffle this frame and look at those narratives and images of the everyday that have been voiced, embodied, performed, and affected by women. In doing so I undo the narrative which looks at a grieving mother or wife as a reified passive receiver of suffering and I ask: can grief be politicizing? And is women’s interrogation of suffering political? (Butler, 2004).

However, the challenge of this article is to foreground the re-imagined understanding of the political which is intricately braided with the intimate enduring lives of the research informants. In the context of Kashmir where there is no tangible end to the continuing political violence, imposing pre-fixed notions of resistance or establishing a “standing-language” (Segal, 2016: 6) of grief can be constricting because the gendered practices of surviving the everyday will always fall outside these limits. Therefore, I attempt to look at the ways in which emotional and sensory responses to everyday militarized life create an affective circulation of resistance (and grief) in the social world of Kashmir and I call this the “politics of emotion” (Ahmed, 2004). In the ethnographic vignette of Nisar’s violent and untimely killing, discussed in the beginning of the article, an attempt is being made to delineate that even after 28 years of his killing his mother and sister have distinct practices of remembering the painful event. Their remembrance acquires a temporality in which grief exceeds the duration of the event, 1^st May 1991, and is constantly re-actualized and circulated in the everyday as a wound or an affect that is manifested through narratives, through objects (such as pheran) and through silence alike. The attempt here is to “attend to the different ways in which ‘wounds’ enter politics” (Ahmed, 2004: 32).

The ethnographic vignettes in this article are located within the complex political history of tehreek, the ongoing movement for self-determination in Kashmir. While tehreek can be genealogically traced to the demand for political sovereignty among the masses that started with an uprising against the Dogra rulers in 1931, it was during and after the Partition of India in 1947 that the movement acquired a more sustained political form. A temporary Instrument of Accession was signed between the Indian government and the then Dogra ruler, Hari Singh, on 27th October 1947. When the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, took the Kashmir issue to United Nations, Kashmir was recognized as an international dispute mediated by the United Nations Security Council in 1948 that called for an immediate cease-fire line and a plebiscite. However, the promise of a plebiscite or the right to self-determination was never upheld by the Indian state and while the two nation states fought three wars over Kashmir, the local tehreek (movement) in Kashmir kept acquiring different voices, forms, and practices ranging from political negotiations with the government of India from 1947 to early 1970s, an indigenous armed insurgency against the Indian state from late 1980s onwards, and a civilian uprising from 2008 onwards. Through these various configurations of the political movement for azadi (freedom) there has been a constant making and unmaking of the social wherein it was the site of peoples’ everyday lives that was subjected to extreme forms of vulnerabilities. The slow erosion of the constitutional right to a UN mandated plebiscite, the dense militarization ⁷ of the landscape and a brutal counter-insurgency equipped with an architecture of impunity has killed more than 80,000 people, subjected 8000 people to Enforced Disappearances, and resulted in mass blinding and disabilities over the course of the long protracted conflict. However, while this remains the broader context, I delve into the making of an everyday life in a militarized space “where violence, betrayal and fear are actualized” (Segal, 2016: 17) and where “what is most violent about the situation … is that it continues without end” (2016: 16). The ethnographic narratives for this article were collected over the course of a long-term field engagement in different districts of Kashmir Valley from 2011 onwards wherein I looked at disparate political experiences and practices of women that emanate from the everyday but weave a politics of emotion, an effect of grief that transcends the personal and becomes the re-imagined political.

Identifying the threshold: Where does resistance start?

To understand the political experiences of women in Kashmir, the central question remains: how have women been resisting the violence and coerciveness of the Indian state in Kashmir? These gendered practices of contestations and remembrance in a militarized space have extended the threshold of resistance and this can be delineated in two broad mutually interacting patterns:

One: resistance as a conscious act of subversion, the foreground. Here I attempt to position women, along with men, as the frontrunners of tehreek, the movement for self-determination. In this form, resistance acquires a sensational and evental nature wherein women actively participate in events that are considered conventionally political and public. From becoming camouflaged carriers of arms from one checkpoint to another to documenting crackdowns with a camera under their veil; from housing-feeding militants, and beating tin roofs during night vigils against the army, to embodying operational code-names like militants, women have provided a political anchorage for the movement. It is this form of resistance that is conventionally understood as political.

Two: resistance as “enduring the everyday”, the background. In this article, I focus on this second aspect which locates women’s resistance as an affective response in the form of grief, anger, fear or endurance to an everyday negotiation with the power relations they are embedded in. In this form, resistance is an everyday and sensory circulation of emotions; a capacity developed for survival despite the violence. It is this form of women’s resistance that I am attempting to animate, to give meaning to in the article.

In doing so, I do not take away from women their spectacular struggles and their active rapturous protests confronting the Indian state as a conscious act of subversion; rather in the context of Kashmir, I suggest that understanding women’s role in the resistance struggle has to partake of the ambiguities and the rhetoric of the everyday: of the ordinary, the mundane, the scattered, and the liminal. What I emphasize is that there is a multiplicity of narratives that women live, perform, ruffle with and leave unfinished in the everyday, including grief and mourning. If one narrative is of collective euphoria of resistance, then there is a seemingly contrasting narrative that situates women in the trauma and suffering of everyday. Arguably the threshold between these two forms is porous and not strictly defined. However what I argue is that both these and other intermediate narratives of resistance, of endurance, of memory are central to an understanding of women’s predicament and positionality in a conflict zone. Therefore, I focus on what Aretxaga (1997) calls the political experience ⁸ (p. 8) of women and ask: “how does gender become a symbolic terrain wherein arguments of domination and resistance are formulated?”(p. 11). Through Ruksana and her mother’s narrative I attempt to foreground that women in Kashmir have been as much political subjects of the violent legacy of this movement as have been men and therefore the resistance struggle unequivocally belongs as much to women. But because their resistance has played out more on the terrain of the everyday, or is caught in the contested discourse of being ‘trapped victims’, there is an invisibility of women in the political process and their resistance narratives remain, what Das (2006) describes in the context of Partition memory, “very much on the surface, yet there were fences created around them” (p. 11).

To explicate this further, I cite a brief ethnographic vignette to illustrate the complex ways in which women have been positioned and implicated during the long-standing political conflict. Four months after her wedding, Zeenat’s husband Ghulam Hasan was killed by the Border Security Force during a crackdown in Battamaloo locality of Srinagar in 1993. Zeenat was two months pregnant at the time of his killing. She gave birth to a son who she named Ghulam Hasan in the memory of her husband and soon after decided to initiate a legal case against his custodial killing. The case went to the Home Ministry of India last year, but since then has been waiting for sanction. ⁹ She told me her experience of pursuing a legal battle as a young mother and the social and cultural conundrums it entailed,

political awareness mil gayi lekin mujhe nahi pata tha court kya hai. Hum kabhi gaye hi nahi. Starting main mereko sharm aati thi, main burqa laga ke jaati thi. Phir baad main mujhe 2 courts main ikhate jaana hota tha … toh gaya burqa … mujhe halaaton ne sikhaya (Zeenat)

Politics of emotion

The ethnographic narratives discussed in this article situate women traditionally in their gendered roles of a grieving mother, a widow, a woman getting her house searched by the army and a rape survivor. Their emotional expressions for violent loss have not been categorized as political or even as resistance in the contemporary understanding about Kashmir because historically women have been dismissed for “being emotional”. This “dismissability of women” on the basis of “the association of the feminine with feeling” (Campbell, 1994: 49) has had a long-standing historical ground that has been challenged by a bourgeoning feminist scholarship. In this article, I question these dichotomies by analyzing “the ways in which these terms of emotional dismissal can be put to powerful political use” (Campbell, 1994: 46). In the to and fro movement that the women in this ethnography have charted from inside the homes to outside in the streets and vice versa, it becomes imperative to ask: what makes a Kashmiri woman undertake this shift of location? How did women’s practices, conventionally understood as emotional, started acquiring new political meanings?

To answer this question on the relationship between emotion and politics, I borrow from Ahmed (2004) who builds her work along the lines of a long tradition of feminist theory of rejecting the gendered dichotomy of emotion/cognition and theoretically enquires into the potential political force of emotions. She borrows conceptually from the work of feminist scholars such as Butler (1993) ¹⁶ who have shown that “emotions ‘matter’ for politics; emotions show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well as worlds” (Ahmed, 2004: 12). In this article, where the emphasis is on the multiple forms and patterns that the word “political” takes on, absorbs, and resists, I primarily interrogate: Is grief political? or as Ahmed asks “How does pain enter politics?” (2004: 20).

Grief is political: A conclusion

“The oppressors even denied us grieving—our resistance”