Sites of Power Differentials in Kashmir: Self-Determination as Anti-Colonial Resistance Under Un-/polic/e/y-ed Genocidal Colonial Social Order

"This photo essay consists of a sample of photographs I took, highlighting dimensions of life in Indian occupied Kashmir — a war zone where an anti-colonial resistance movement for self-determination by an Indigenous people (Ahmed 2016, Ahmed 2018a, Ahmed 2018b; Ahmed 2019b) is being violently repressed by an occupying, genocidal colonial Indian regime. [...] Whereas the popular narratives and representations about Kashmiris is that they are powerless people, what I offer instead in this essay is a complex visual and analytical look at power and control in contemporary Kashmir. In this photo essay, I employ a qualitative Indigenous Anishnaabe symbol-based reflection method (Lavallée 2009), similar to a photo voice approach, where I display a series of frames of photographs I took in September 2018 in Kashmir to present critical knowledges about community issues that involve how public spaces, places, and gazes intersect to construct as well as produce distinct dimensions of genocidal colonial social order and control in a militarized Indigenous peoples homeland." 

"What is implicit in this reflection essay is that the restrictions and permissions that produce the social order are a result of formal and informal policy regulations in place. When I employ the term ‘policy regulations’ that exercise power, I am referring to three types of social order policy practices: those policy practices that stem from the state’s administration and control of space as well as people; those policy practices that stem from self-determining community as subaltern practices, transcending the state, embodied in people as a collective; and last but not least, those practices which once again transcend the state, and are rooted in a type of individual power, located in human and non-human lives/bodies. What I offer in this essay are complex representations of power in Kashmir as a war zone, where an Indigenous nation asserts nuanced modalities of self-determination as anti-colonial resistance via public spaces, places, and gazes, in spite of the violent repression by the genocidal settler colonial Indian state. The captions of the photographs should be read as a critical, questioning/inquiring, analytical, ethnographic, poetic voice of a Kashmiri woman."

The above are a sample of descriptive excerpts from the Introduction by the author, Binish Ahmed.