Chapter 8. Interrogating the Ordinary: Everyday Politics and the Struggle for Azadi in Kashmir

Self-writing in Tral, Kashmir

“…3 If memory of Sheikh Abdullah challenging the Indian state served once as phenomenological ground for constitution of Kashmiri identity that shaped contours of later political developments, from the 1950s to 1980s, collective memory of Kashmiris mediated between the slogans raishumaari (plebiscite) and azadi ya maut (freedom or death), critiquing what was seen as Abdullah's betrayal, constituting ground for the 1990s armed uprising. 4 The writings of those such as Prem Nath Bazaz or the painful political poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, can in this light also perhaps be seen as Kashmiri renditions of a freedom struggle -or experiences of the brutality of its suppression that contest dominant historical imaginings of Kashmiris as merely helpless victims of an unresolved conflict between its two neighbouring nations. 5 In modes not dissimilar to history-making of past decades, Kashmiri scholars and activists I met in the course of my fieldwork in the region had also made efforts to rewrite histories of contemporary events and of the repression of unarmed protests in recent years.…”