The talk traced women’s narratives of the political struggle in Kashmir through the realm of ordinary, scattered and everyday practices of resistance. It tried undoing the narrative that overlooks the complexity of women’s lives in the face of ongoing violent political conflict; and argued that women in Kashmir escape easy categorization into victimhood. This talk was embedded in the idea that there is something spectacular in the everydayness of lives embedded in violence; that the everyday is ruptured and layered like the memory of its people. In Kashmir, which is a historically and politically complex quagmire of violent protests, morbid silence and killable lives, it is through the barbed spaces of the everyday we see varied surging affects: of loss, of pain, of anger, of endurance, of fear and of silence.
The speaker located women as the protagonists of these circulating affects, inscribing new meanings to the ‘political’ through the politics of emotion.
Bhavneet Kaur is a research student at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics. Her work is on people’s practices of remembrance of the freedom movement in Kashmir. Some of her research and literary work has been published in Kindle, Wande Magazine and Greater Kashmir.