Resisting Disappearance: Army Occupation and Ladies’s Activism in Kashmir (Decolonizing Feminisms)

In Kashmir’s frigid winter a girl leaves her door cracked open, ready for the return of her solely son. Each month in a public park in Srinagar, a toddler remembers her father as she joins her mom in collective mourning. The activist ladies who type the Affiliation of the Dad and mom of the Disappeared Individuals (APDP) maintain public consideration targeted on the 8,000 to 10,000 Kashmiri males disappeared by the Indian authorities forces since 1989. Surrounded by Indian troops, worldwide photojournalists, and curious onlookers, the APDP activists cry, lament, and sing whereas holding images and information documenting the lives of their disappeared family members. On this radical departure from historically non-public rituals of mourning, they create a spectacle of mourning that combats the federal government’s threatening silence in regards to the fates of their sons, husbands, and fathers.

Drawn from Ather Zia’s ten years of engagement with the APDP as an anthropologist and fellow Kashmiri activist, Resisting Disappearance follows moms and “half-widows” as they step boldly into courts, army camps, and morgues in the hunt for their disappeared kin. By means of an amalgam of ethnography, poetry, and pictures, Zia illuminates how dynamics of gender and trauma in Kashmir have been remodeled within the face of South Asia’s longest-running battle, offering profound perception into how Kashmiri men and women nurture a politics of resistance whereas dealing with rising army violence beneath India.