Occupying the Everyday: Militarization and Gendered Politics of Living in Kashmir

Occupying the Everyday is a feminist exploration of the everyday politics of living through militarised control in Kashmir. On 5 August 2019, when the Indian government de-operationalised Jammu and Kashmir’s nominal autonomy, integrationist and heterosexist discourses including ’Kashmir is finally integrated and will see development’ and ’Indian men can now marry fair-skinned Kashmiri women’ gained fuel. Assembling a rigorous post-2019 archive by combining ethnographic investigations and interdisciplinary gender studies, Pandit examines these narratives alongside everyday practices of violence, control, silencing and surveillance to offer a grounded theorisation of militarisation by contemporary nation-states in these times of global imperialism.

Through intersectional explorations of space, home, time, and storytelling, Pandit presents an epistemic and political account of how militarised control violently structures the everyday lives of Kashmiris through spatial, embodied, affective, temporal, and discursive capture. Yet, the resolute desire of a people to not be consumed by the overwhelming expanse of power makes the everyday a fertile ground for liberatory politics.

Niharika Pandit is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London. She co-runs Insurgent Knowledges, an anticolonial feminist political education collective and co-convenes BISA’s Colonial, Postcolonial, Decolonial working group.