I think we should sort of begin now we've given people a bit of time to join in.
So I think we can start recording if that's OK. OK.
Hi everyone. Very warm. Welcome to the first of Oxford's modern South Asian studies seminars of 20 22.
I'm going to come out here. I'm the director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme here,
but here's what you need boxwood and I'm delighted to be chairing the seeds of the team of researching South Asia.
I'm good at just a few words on the thinking behind the seminar series The Start before I introduce today's incredible panellists.
So for the next eight weeks, what we're going to be doing at the seminar series is that we're going to be holding these Zoom
panels on specific teams so which would range from Kashmir to climate change to queer politics.
And we're going to do this to discuss the political, methodological and ethical challenges of working in these specific fields.
Of course, in South Asia, and we're going to do, you know,
we got to have these conversations by focussing on each family's own particular research project.
They have methodological orientations and intellectual trajectories. And what we're going to try to do in these panels is we're going to try to
set up a broader conversation between disciplines and academic orientations.
The format is going to be that we're going to have this conversation for around an hour,
I think between us and then we're going to open it up to the floor. And we'd love to get questions, comments,
any thoughts from all of you because I can see from the registrations that you've got people sign up from around the world for this.
So thank you so much for being here with us this afternoon or evening, warning that whatever, just for where you are.
OK, so without further ado, of course, to be discussing Kashmir and the very unique challenges of working on or in Kashmir,
this is of course, of a longstanding concern. But in recent years, especially after the application of Article 370 in August 2019,
the intense difficulties and sensitivities of working with Kashmir have become much more about it.
That said, it's not entirely clear that we still have the kinds of conversations that might be needed amongst academics on how one is to study
a place like Kashmir and what the complexities and ethical conundrums of such research projects may be keeping that in mind.
We have this sort of amazing panel together today.
We're going to be there. We're going to be discussing this question of what it means to research Kashmir.
And you've got to be have historians and sort just with us on the panel today.
I'm going to just quickly introduce them and then get this conversation going.
So Professor Montalban, who is the Ford Maxwell professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Syracuse.
She's a cultural anthropologist whose work explores the role of economic and infrastructural development
in counter-insurgency operations and people's resistance movements to protracted war and conflict.
Mona is the author of Counter-insurgency Development and the Politics of Identity From Warfare to Welfare, which is a 2014 book.
She is the co-author of a more recent book called Climate Without Nature, A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene.
And she was the co-editor of Resisting Occupation in Kashmir.
Then her professor, Muhammad Jennette, who was an assistant professor of anthropology at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.
Jeannette has a Ph.D. from the City University of New York with research on youth activism and political subjectivity in Kashmir.
He has written extensively on Kashmir's history and politics. And finally, we have a professor have Serkan.
QE1 was an assistant professor of South Asian history at Lafayette College.
Her current book project, Controlling Kashmir State Building under Colonial Occupation,
focuses on both Partition State Building in Indian occupied Kashmir have songs written and spoken on Kashmir for a variety of news outlets,
including The Washington Post, Al Jazeera English and the BBC.
So high. Mona Ginevan hopes to thank you so much for joining us today.
And perhaps I can begin this conversation by asking you about the trajectory of your own research and writing,
as well as your own position on abuse vis a vis your work on Kashmir. I wonder whether you would like to sort of kick off this conversation?
Sure. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining this really important session and thank you to and Indigo for organising it.
So I come to this work situated as a Kashmiri Muslim who was born in Kashmir but spent most
of my life outside of Kashmir and identified with the political struggle from a young age.
I became interested in history as a discipline because so much of how this issue gets addressed or discussed was a battle over historical narratives,
and I wanted to understand that better. So in terms of my own position naledi, my experience doing research on Kashmir has been twofold.
One is that have encountered quite a bit of Islamophobia or anti-Muslim sentiment throughout my academic career.
And it's. Ashley, in South Asian studies and to as a scholar situated in the U.S. or Western Academy,
I also acknowledge that I still am able to benefit from certain privileges and levels
of access and visibility that is simply not possible for extremity scholars elsewhere.
I think the first point is especially important, and it's not something that people feel comfortable, openly speaking about.
And of course, we can speak of the ways in which Islamophobia or anti-Muslim sentiments emerge in the academy overall.
But I will say that in South Asian studies is particularly rampant,
and this is because of the makeup of the field is largely elite for upper caste Indian scholars
who make you feel that you as a Kashmiri and the Muslim and as a female simply do not belong.
And while they reproduce their own networks of kinship and a particular type of secular liberalism,
which in the Indian context is masked for soft to the normalises India's colonial subjugation of Kashmir.
So I've often heard that my work is too political, and because I am a Kashmiri Muslim, I lack objectivity.
Which of course, is interesting because Indian scholars who work on Kashmir engage with our work are naturally seen as being objective.
Even they, even if they have been unable to come out of their own nationalist frameworks, or even if they have intimate ties to the colonial state.
That is. And so because of the toxic culture within South Asian studies, I found that many of my mentors role models are people that I'm.
I was an I am an intellectual community with tend to be outside of South Asian studies working on Palestine,
movie studies, Islamic studies, africana studies or indigenous studies.
And the second point is that despite these privileges, I do acknowledge that being despite these issues,
I do acknowledge that being in the U.S. academy gives me certain privileges access to resources,
publications, conferences and ability to teach research and write a bit more freely.
And so I do often think about how these hierarchies of knowledge production and how my work on need,
while important to me in terms of my political, ethical and moral commitments, also may eventually grant me tenure or be published in a book form.
And I understand that that's a privilege, but also comes with a responsibility to not simply extract knowledge, but also to give back.
And we can talk about that a bit later in the conversation. So, Jeanette, would you like to say thank you so much, everyone, for joining us today?
And thank you, Nancy, for organising this. So it's a little bit of a complicated answer.
I grew up in Kashmir. I was born there. I am, of course, Kashmiri Muslim, and I didn't realise that until much later.
I am in a way, sort of a product of the 1990s when India launched this long decades-long counterinsurgency war there.
I grew up in South Kashmir in a place called Islamabad. We used to call it Islamabad, and the government used to call it an Indian.
Many of my fellow students or colleagues were injured.
Some kind of disappeared during this time.
And but one of the things that I noticed early on was that there wasn't much written about that experience of the '90s.
We didn't have our intellectuals had been put out of circulation in a very colonial fashion.
There were very few journalists who were writing.
And so while we were going through all of this, there was no kind of articulation of it, except in political speeches by political leaders,
which drew me eventually in the late 1990s to to India, to North Indian universities where I began to,
first of all, feel extremely dislocated and a sense of dissonance between my experiences back in Kashmir,
back home and in North India, where life seemed intense, but also not, you know, threatening all the time.
But I became kind of aware of my Kashmiri ness and my Kashmiri Muslim ness because
of the majority of the nationalism that pervaded not only the academic spaces,
but also the, of course, public sphere. Eventually, when I started my masters, I realised I couldn't ask many questions in the period.
My chosen field of enquiry, which was international relations at the time,
was highly structured around nation states and the nationalist perspective and warmongering.
You know, all of that demonology that felt quite alien to me, and I felt like I needed to have both an academic home,
a disciplinary home to my enquiries, as well as a new academic home, which eventually by a certain kind of effort and luck.
I ended up in New York to pursue my Ph.D., and anthropology seemed like we had this two distinct traditions.
You know, one was this imperial tradition in anthropology, which was basically, you know,
anthropologists kind of going as embedded and which in general as going into these war zones
and conducting research and using these as knowledge instrumentally to support imperial power.
But there was also this critical tradition in anthropology, which had kind of flinched away from this imperial tradition.
And I just felt instantly attached to the fact that this second tradition, this critical anthropological tradition.
And I know you realised that, you know, I could ask so many questions that had been left unasked.
And that's really to me, that's what drew me to my research.
I was working with young people in Kashmir, but I call them youth activists, but they were actually quite old.
You know, they were like people who had been fighting against colonialism in Kashmir for, like 60 70 years.
But somehow, I ended up calling the young young activists because the Indians did always use the term young as a way,
you know, to call them immature or not fully developed.
And so I kind of wanted to invert that, Tom in my research.
And that's what has brought me to my field of enquiry.
But it is really the politics and ethics of anthropology that has attracted me to it.
And kitchenette, Mona. I thank you, Medica, for this very important panel.
Really happy to be here. So, yeah, again, I'm in a complicated question for me as well.
I am a Christian ponder that I was born in Kashmir, bonded family and Kashmir.
It's the kind of politics the community on the on the whole has had towards Kashmir has been,
as many of you might know, deeply problematic because there is this belief that in the Kashmir and.
Self-determination is unfounded, or this claim to self-determination by Kashmiri Muslims is unfounded.
So I didn't grow up in a household, but at the same time would complicated my intellectual.
My ethical political commitments to Kashmir was the fact that my grandfather was a very integral
part of the Kashmiri movement for self-determination from the nineteen forties onwards.
So in some ways, I grew up in a very contradictory setting.
On the one hand, I had this, you know,
this role model and my grandfather who stood up for rights and justice and felt very strongly that self determination Fukushima was for all Kashmiris,
not just for lost limbs, and it was not a concession.
It was a right and people should stand up for it regardless of what their religious affiliation or ethnic affiliation might be.
And on the other hand, I had deeply conservative family members, so I came across fighting and and struggling with these contradictions beyond.
So for me, in many ways, this this notion of Kashmir as a peaceful paradise before the 1980s never really existed and that its formative.
Well, this was not a peaceful space that was inherently problematic with how India had been treating Kashmir and deceiving Kashmiris all along.
So for me in the 1990s when I turned to anthropology, which is a much longer story and I'll spare you that part.
But when I turned to anthropology, I immediately wanted to work in in in Kashmir blood and flew.
So time as we know, so I ended up going to Ladakh, and this is not necessarily this,
but I think at the time my thinking was Ladakh and Kashmir have the,
you know, the way they have become divided politically, socially, I think ethnically.
He in long has had long lasting implications for how we understand the Kashmir issue.
So for me, a part of it was to recognise and understand Ladakh as a space and historic sites,
Ladakh as a space and historic site as this relationship between Ladakh and Kashmir.
And I recognised early on in the film about how the scholarship on Kashmir unfortunately
replicated the way the state wanted to see the region of Jammu and Kashmir as India,
as a divided space, as a fragmented space. As you know, Kashmir issue being only limited to the Kashmir Valley and so forth.
And I realise what happens also announced policy, unfortunately,
because we get so committed to a space whose sense of this larger history, larger politics.
And that's something I have to my work tried to respond to or tried to, you know, engage with.
Is this idea deal not to divide and rule policy? And it all then replicated in scholarship because we tend to see the dark as
completely separate from Kashmir rather than seeing the the issues that Ladki,
for example, suffer being on the Line of Control, living on the Line of Control. How those?
Not long a struggle for cash meteorites, because meteorites and when I use bushmeat,
I use Kashmiri as a very broad canvas, so essentially that I'm growing up, it was this eternity of the border.
This the freezing of lines of whether these are religious land mines.
These are linguistic ethnic lines, religious lines.
I wanted to contest those because as I said, I had seen those lines really creating rifts within families within my own family.
So that's what kind of brought me to both an apology, but also to Kashmir in a very particular kind of way.
So, yeah, as a as a Jewish people going back to this question of privilege.
So he has on in so many ways as a Brahmin, I'm sure I didn't realise I was a Brahmin in Kashmir, right?
That's how caste operated in Kashmir. It was, as it does everywhere.
And for Brahmins, they don't realise they have a class. So it was very much along those lines.
When I was in Kashmir, I didn't realise I had a cost until I got to jungle over.
The cost is more predominantly or it's more sort of palpable. I don't know.
But at the same time, it was also Bradman who belongs to a family that was,
you know, rallied for being Pakistani because many pundits, given my own history,
thought there was a lot of this yes privilege and also a lot of pushback against the kinds of politics that our family and me later on stood for.
So yeah, that's that's what brought me to an apology.
Going back to what Janet said, I feel an apology really allowed for this kind of this contradiction.
I could live with contradictions. I could drive my identity through those contradictions.
I didn't have to fix things. I didn't have to discipline my being in order to live and exist.
Glenn's apology happened. Fareed, thank you so much.
You know, I'm going to come to this question of in.
Not in a minute, but perhaps before we come to that. I wonder what I could ask you.
You know, now that also if you've been sort of upfront about your position, sanity and your own trajectory as to your research.
I mean, if you could just tell us a bit about what? What is it like to do research on Kashmir?
The foods that you faced or that you think that differently, please, researchers go through and perhaps Jeanette could ask you to to begin.
Yeah, sure. Well, if you are first of all, if you are a Kashmiri Muslim researcher,
there are so many spaces that are by default for close to you are not allowed in those spaces.
In fact, the Indians to see in Kashmiri Muslim intellectual, well, appropriate story in Kashmir.
So there is this variant can do as. Then there are, of course, institutional controls on Kashmir University, which is our main interest in Kashmir.
I have seen the struggles of the scholars and they are bright scholars, brilliant scholars who would thrive elsewhere if they had.
They had some degree of freedom to explore the kind of questions they want to explore.
But for this discussion, University's chief patron is the governor and the governor of the state.
He spoke and has to keep tabs on what is going on in Kashmir University.
So I have come across many scholars in Kashmir who have to modulate change, you know,
find different ways to ask questions of women, simple sociological anthropological questions,
you know, to pursue research and once they get into get a Ph.D. or something,
even afterwards, you know, there's really little avenue to ask critical questions.
I remember one interaction I had. I was teaching at a university in Kashmir for a year in 2007 2008,
and I remember somehow the governor came to the university and we were asked to kind of meet and greet.
So hesitantly, I went and sat around the table. And so I don't know why.
In this Chomsky moment, I asked him what is the role of the university in a moment because there was protests going on in 2008?
You know, at the time, and I remember what he said.
He said that the university must do.
The best thing we must do is like this can do is do research on animal husbandry, handicraft and, you know, things like that were totally insane.
It made no sense. But so what I'm trying to say is that research is extremely difficult.
I mean, you know, it is when you talk about doing research on Kashmir position, Allotey is super important.
Yeah, you know, Kashmiri Muslim researcher is like the opposite of privilege.
It's really sort of a heightened category of inquirer.
And well, now would you like to? Sure.
You know, I and I sort of want to approach this question, not not differently,
but I want to expand this category of research and talk about expression, any kind of expression.
Be it political, social, cultural.
And I think that is what is at stake for most Kashmiris who dare to think, who dared to ask questions, who they do, right?
And it's this this issue applies as much to researchers as it does to journalists, as it does to other activists and advocates.
I mean, we know some of you might know the current purveyors who is one of the most well-known human rights defenders and
advocates moving against GoFundMe because you see us is in prison right now and we don't even have the charge sheet filed.
But that case sort of represents what is happening on the ground right now.
You know, Dina's restatement that the frontier of war now you said that for the India, it was not just Kashmir.
But I think what we have to recognise is the implications of something like that, Fukushima.
This is compounded obviously by the fact that there are these institutions of juridical,
legal military that have made it impossible and educational going back to June and find
that have made it impossible for a Kashmiris to think and write and express and disclose,
of course, back to the 1940s and the kind of surveillance machinery, the kind of set up to scuttle voices,
to silence them, to criminalise any form of dissent has had a very long history in that region and.
It's it's only become worse since 2019. Just recently, I mean, yes, day before yesterday, the press club of Kashmir was shut down.
And that, to many was sort of the last bastions of the bastion of, you know, some freedom of expression, if you will.
So what's happened? And a friend of mine, I was just speaking with him the other day.
So there are two projects right of the Indian government in Kashmir right now.
One is dismantling, the other one is in Asia, right? And those two are happening at a force that we can't even envision sitting here.
So I just want to make sure we recognise this larger context within which research is happening or not happening.
We're not allowed to happen for a lot of us sitting here today.
So you never know. It's not even a question of reserves.
The fundamental question that we're faced with in this moment is whether we're going to in return, forget the question of research.
Can we go back and see our family members who we haven't seen in years?
So I think these are existential questions for us.
These are not questions simply about research and where we are in our careers, in our professional capacities.
So that that's that is what is essentially at stake. Having said that, you know, having an idea as a Kashmiri woman, which is also again,
I'm calling myself that only because that is something I have to I have to own.
I have to claim that. And I was just telling my friends the other day, You know,
this is an identity I have tried to distance myself from for the longest time
because for the longest time I've been wanting to renounce this identity. But now I actually want to embrace it.
And I'll tell you why in a second, it's because now the community is trying to disown you, right?
And what they want to do is they want you to not have your name, the Bohan name, the last name,
obfuscate this clean need narrative of Kashmir abundant victimisation in Kashmir.
Right? So for me, therefore, to own that identity even more strongly now and to make make sure that my voice is registered not simply as a Kashmiri,
but as a Christian and one that is become a critical intervention in and of itself.
So in any case, and going back to this question of research and what does it mean to do research,
it is also not simply about your identity anymore, it's also about how publicly visible you are.
So it could be that in the 1990s,
when I started my work in the that I could work in my bag because nobody I could google you and find what your opinions were.
But now it's next to impossible for me to visit places along the Line of Control and do the things that I did in the past.
Having said that, you know, and in the past, I did those things.
I was able to actually speak with the military in Ladakh, and I and I could do it only because I was a woman and it was a cash refund,
had had been a Kashmiri Muslim woman or a Kashmiri Muslim man. There was just no way that work would have been at all possible.
Having said that, I was in a relationship with the Kashmiri Muslim and the military knew it.
And that just the fact that I was in a relationship with someone or not someone but extreme Muslim became the reason why I was
kicked out of the village because there were there were these stories and there were these charges against me for being a spy,
for being an ISI, operated for the longest time and so on and so forth.
Again, a much longer story there.
But what I want to say here is that the military in Kashmir has been part of this project of disciplining bodies for the longest time,
and they discipline different bodies differently. Right?
So as a Kashmiri pundit party or female body, the disciplining that happened was through overt and covert messages about.
You know, making sure that I was not marrying somebody that could create problems for me in the future.
So they were literally married and choices that they were invested in as well.
And that, of course we know is part of this, you know, the way the state works to make sure you're toeing the line right?
The other thing, the other issue with a research that I have found in my own work is working in villages in North Kashmir,
for example, where I did work on dams and counterinsurgency was extremely difficult.
And this is in part because these villages along the Line of Control have been, you know,
purposefully fragmented by the military because of the kind of counterinsurgency networks that
they have set up to turn one person against the other to turn one religion against the other.
So when you walking into these villages, you're not walking into these, you know, you're not walking to pure spaces of resistance, either.
You are walking into extremely difficult situations.
It's a minefield of issues, right?
And so you have to be very, very cautious about where you present.
Even so, you might not even you might not actually be asking questions.
The very presence, the very fact that you present there can lead to problems for a lot of people in environmentally or inadvertently.
And I think we need to be very mindful of how the state works, how counterinsurgency state works,
how a military occupation works in order for us to one pick the issues that we do and then decide whether our presence,
whether or not we sing something or not, can create a lot of issues for people.
And you know, this is really difficult for anthropologists where we privilege people always privileged access.
We were always privileged notions of, you know, rapport, establishment or getting people to speak to us.
You know, in some cases, as I realise over over the years, it's better not to be present,
it's better not to have access and it's better to just not be.
Yeah, fine. I think we just have to come to terms with that. Thanks for actually raising those two points about just sometimes presents
itself can be so harmful and anthropologists have just not thought about that.
And also, I think the point you made before about how actually these are not just questions of struggles of research,
but these existential questions, as you put it, that if you go back home,
if you damage your family again, I mean, you know, these are enormously disturbing questions that we need to really think about,
which often not thought about when people talk about other spaces in the world. So thank you for raising them up, sir.
Yeah. So I wanted to say a bit about my own research, but also share some insights from Kashmiri colleagues currently based in Kashmir.
So I did my archival work in 2013 to 2014, and my research is on a building,
so I needed to access bureaucratic documents of the Kashmir state, as well as the Indian government's communications with the Kashmir state.
So I wanted to get access to the Srinagar state archives at the time, but it was very,
very difficult to obtain any materials from I'm actually from the National Archives of India.
So most of the requested materials came back non-transferable.
So just on a very broad level, you're dealing with institutional restrictions on scholarship, on bushmeat.
And then of course, there's a day to day of going or doing research under constant uncertainty due to strikes
and curfews and the kinds of mental emotional challenges that exist for people in bushmeat.
You know, you're also cognisant of that as well.
And then in terms of the experiences of bushmeat scholars, you mentioned, university life industry isn't like elsewhere.
There's no student unions. Talks or symposiums are subject to official approvals.
And there's institutional limitations to the type of research scholars can undertake.
And in particular, since 2019, many scholars have felt increasingly vulnerable.
The level of surveillance is immense, including on social media, and scholarship is being criminalised and subject to anti-terror laws like the UAP,
which has already been used on various members of the media civil society.
Many academics are being visited by a state intelligence and asked information about their work, who they know and so on.
Colleagues have told me that they're constantly deleting their field notes or information from their phones and laptops.
They don't keep a record of their work because of regular checkpoints, frisking and raids,
and they also fear approaching potential interlocutors in case they may extend the surveillance grade grid on them.
And even travel within bushmeat is tricky for field work, as one colleague told me.
For years now, police and other state forces have looked at Inter Town and Inter Village Travel or stay with suspicion and bushmeat.
For example, if a person is travelling to a certain village, he becomes the first suspect.
During the numerous daily security check ups on the roads, the night stay is increasingly becoming difficult.
The guest is the first suspect in the cordon and search operation, and the state doesn't allow.
Some bushmeat is to leave bushmeat for work or study. They have been placed on a no fly list and many bushmeat is.
As we mentioned before, we're currently outside, are afraid to go home in case they may not be allowed to travel again.
So these are the kinds of dilemmas and calculations that students, researchers and scholars have to consider.
Everything is set up in a manner to completely clamp down on scholarship and to silence people.
So all of this really begs the question how the scholarship even happened in conditions of settler colonisation.
Thank you. Thank you so much, sir. And that's a really sort of important point.
You sort of agree it's how do you even have something like scholarship here?
If we could just sort of come back to this, what we were briefly touching upon earlier,
which is about different disciplines, you know, so would you need them?
When I talked a bit about anthropology, you've talked about access to state archives is extraordinary.
And I wondered, you know, thinking about those who can still sort of continue to do research on Kashmir,
though, as all of you sort of pointed out, that space is really shrinking dramatically.
Pretty much by the minute. What kind of sort of ethical guidelines do you think people should consider?
And I want to think this through, particularly through a disciplinary lens, right?
So a political scientist might have a slight position on that, Trump said.
Anthropologist. And when I wonder whether you have any thoughts on this to just begin?
Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right, I mean, I think that that's the thing.
Different fields come at it, come at this question of ethics very differently.
And that's in part why there's been so much harm already caused by a lot of scholars and academics in English.
And you know, part of it is the Kashmiri community takes it for granted.
And this includes, you know, my own work in the region, for example, is in was seen as a spy for the most, you know, at least in the beginning.
And you have to understand it's not a personal attack,
it's a structural position that you occupy as somebody who comes from a very particular kind of a community
and is trying to do research in these extremely remote code and code and heavily securitised spaces.
So part of it is, I think, recognising that there's nothing personal about these issues,
and recognising your structural location is is supremely important.
And sometimes I really do feel, you know, if you have things thin skinned, then then maybe Kashmir is not the place for you because,
you know, people have suffered so much over the years that they are ruthless about their scrutiny of who you are.
And I appreciated that. You know, in hindsight, I actually think back to the villagers and I appreciated the kinds of questions I was asked every day,
you know, by a 10-Year-Old kid who would come up to me and say, I've heard you have a hidden microphone in your bag.
You know, it was my tape recorder, and at the moment I'd get really peeved.
But this a little kid. But now I do appreciate the concern and the kid and the anxiety that people have vis-a-vis the state.
So I think that's part of it is to recognise your structural location. It's it's supremely important you do that.
And of course, you know, and policies, a feel is trying so hard to move away from these predatory extractive model of doing fieldwork.
And also, you know, this is this is where I feel we really need to make a headway and it's here.
I'm in reasonably good, though, for example, where, you know, tremendous talk, a little blase about decolonising anthropology.
And I really appreciate the points he was making about how we need this racial reckoning.
And that's happening. In those were his words that have happened in the field, and we've seen Dalit scholars have pushed for a cost reckoning as well.
I feel, you know, the Kashmir reckoning has not happened in South Asian studies or, for that matter, anthology.
And I think that's what we need. We need a moment of Kashmir reckoning, whatever that means.
And however, we want to engage with it.
So one way I think of, you know this, there's this norming, there are multiple norming practises that happen when,
for example, you you, you see Kashmir, perhaps as an Indian scholar, as a non Kashmiri scholar and those norming practises.
I feel that's what we need to unsettle. So for example, the way I think about it is Siegrist commute as a frontier,
and it's this frontier ization of Kashmir that happens through anthropology,
where you have this intrepid anthropologist, you know, and Kashmiri becomes a stomping ground for Intrepid and.
I really think that that's something we need to challenge. APPLAUSE.
Guess what? You know, that is a space as any, as any other space, of course.
But Kashmir in particular has a demented history of oppression and structural violence and sustained violence.
And the defence secrets, state violence. We just need to reckon with that.
Especially, I think, as a scholar, whether even for me, I'm not even I mean, as a Kashmiri pandits,
I have to constantly justify my politics, to my Kashmiri interlocutors, to my Kashmiri colleagues.
I am responsible for that. I cannot take trust for granted ever.
I have to constantly work to cultivate that trust every moment of my existence.
And I take that as a responsibility. I don't take that as a burden.
And that's something I feel we need to recognise.
There's also, yeah, so that that's part of it. And I feel television Asian studies more broadly is also absolutely failed.
You know, so while we talk about anthropology and the challenge of the challenge that.
Or the fact that we need to challenge your centrism.
But there is this Indian centrism in South Asian studies, right, that I know people have talked about challenging,
but how do we challenge it if you do not challenge the settler colonial models of scholarship that Southern Studies is founded on?
Right. What I feel we need to move away from is this idea of India as a democracy to the India of to the idea of India as a settler colonial power,
an empire, an aspirational empire that has expense expansionary ambitions.
And part of that ambition is to control Kashmir.
If we do not recognise that foundational fact about India's relationship with Kashmir,
I don't think any work that we do in that region is going to be ethical, critical or radical in any sense of the word.
So yes, that's for me, and I love that of the concept of Kashmir reckoning.
And you know, the very interesting ways in which it sort of ties into this whole idea of British reckoning and strengthening.
And maybe we'll come back to that as well as the point you made about the complete feeling of South Asian studies.
But Jeannette, as an anthropologist on the panel, if I could get your thoughts on the discussion.
Yeah, I think, of course, Muller laid out quite well.
I mean, the recognition has to be from within anthropology,
but what kind of place Kashmir is and is becoming, you know, or what India has made out of Kashmir?
I think that settler colonialism produces its own sort of field effect that that has a sort of like a history that needs to be recognised,
especially, you know, when we go back to this question of position, naledi under such, you know,
recognition of where one comes from means recognising certain things that are not available to everyone or that isn't that accountability is in a way.
In some cases, more responsibility of certain kinds of people where they come from.
The second, of course, thing is that there are some basic anthropological things that I think more and more I realised that research
on Kashmir is now is dropping some of the even traditional ethical ideas like learning the language.
You know, in 2014, while I was kind of like doing some research and there was this massive flood in Kashmir and I was in south Kashmir,
which is like what I grew up.
And they were like journalists, Kashmiri journalists, unfortunately, who would like come up to the villagers and ask them questions in Hindi.
I mean, of course, they were reporting for for Indian news channels and come and talk about their suffering.
And what was quite interesting and heartbreaking to me was the way these, you know,
Kashmiris, we would respond to them, like, call them, say yes, sir or yes, ma'am.
But when the Kashmiri journalists would speak in Kashmiri, that sir and ma'am would go away, what he told me was that there is a language of command.
You know, Hindi is the language of command. And actually,
we are very well aware of how the military speaks and sometimes the researchers who
may come from outside or who are journalists who may come from outside or Kashmiris,
who kind of like, take on that mode.
Occasionally, they speak like military generals or military officers and which evokes a certain kind of response from Kashmiris.
There's so this is one sort of effect that this not learning the language creates.
Second is the idea of, for instance, that there is an entire, you know, experience of Kashmir and then Kashmiri culture,
society history that is deeply ingrained and very complex and complicated, much like, you know,
histories of other people, which remains opaque when you do not speak the language of the people.
And I think that that is I'm not trying to say that, you know, you cannot do a research there.
What if you are not speaking the language of the people there?
But I think it demands additional accountability and like, you know,
a recognition of that and knowing that you are what you are, what you're finding is inadequate.
You know that Kashmir kind of remains that of people's experiences remain opaque to you because this language of command also produces the
saviour mentality amongst many researchers who might go from outside and try to translate their own idea of suffering onto Kashmiris projected.
And so because we couldn't have learnt also, many of them have learnt to speak the same language,
you know, so it just becomes this repetitive process where the complexity of our people, of our culture,
our society and languages is like completely erased, flattened to just like suit the agenda of the researcher as the saviour,
you know, so so the recognition of these things is quite important.
I think on that Kashmir is fragmented, but I know the settler colonialism has sought to fragment Kashmir.
It is fragmented Kashmir. But there is also a lot of resilience amongst people.
You know, we hold together as a people because there is a much longer history of Kashmir.
Have you know that unites Kashmiris? That kind of like makes them a people then than what the self colonialism kind of seeks to achieve?
Know so recognising that it's quite important know really important points about, you know,
what Joel Robin has called the suffering subject and how the suffering subjects and explodes in certain places.
But I think that's a really important point to raise Janette about language.
And, you know, something that has distinguished anthropology, at least in the past, is this capacity to learn languages.
And, you know, as you're saying, the language of the people. But if they even abandoning that, the logical project even more complex in Kashmir,
perhaps you could move on to thinking about history, though, or yeah.
Yeah. So I think I would start off by saying that the structure of the neoliberal academy is such that it makes it very easy for these
ethical breaches to emerge and from and for scholars from the global north to exploit the power differentials that exist,
especially with the if they work on the global south. So I think a complete rethinking of knowledge production needs to happen alongside
ensuring that our existing practises are held to a higher ethical standards.
And this is especially true for a colonised or occupied spaces in history.
And this may sound bizarre, and I only mention it because it happens. It's important not to steal or take away archival material with you.
And this has happened in bushmeat. So on one on one level, I mean, forget different kinds of ethics and thinking about your position finality.
People are doing something as extractive as taking material with them.
But then there are broader questions of research ethics that all researchers must consider.
There's a tendency for researchers to simply mind their research subjects or the area for information and data.
I think it's important for ethical research to give back through mentorship workshops, helping others and speaking out in solidarity.
They're also models of collaborative scholarship that can be followed, especially when working with researchers in bushmeat.
Are they being paid adequately? Are we understanding their limitations and not imposing our own standards on them?
And are we also allowing them to define the contours of the research instead of imposing our our research practises on them?
And then I think just broadly, people need to ask what kinds of connexions are they using to access the research site?
What are their connexions to the state? What are their connexions to the bureaucracy? Are they being trans?
Those methods and those and those connexions are there snakes?
I mean, if you are a researcher in bushmeat and you're looking. They are then that is really problematic to begin with.
Thanks so much, you have some shocking archival like robberies, but yeah, I'm not that surprised, unfortunately.
Just don't pick up.
You know this question of what are the stakes of doing research in Kashmir, as well as questions of access and board and privilege in the field?
You know, what's been really interesting and sort of actually very,
very influenced to listen to in a way is to hear the you be so honest about your position,
oddities to talk about or, you know, the difficulties of it. But also, you know the way, for instance,
whereas be honest about the kind of privileges that might come from a long debated Lacoste grouping, et cetera, right?
As well as this question of access that you want sort of that you've just touched upon right now of sir.
And I wonder would then go back to this point that, you know, to follow on from what actually, Gupta said,
it is really the presidential speech or whatever the speech that he gave on the racial reckoning and what one as recasting as the Kashmir reckoning.
I wonder whether, you know, this doesn't open up a question that is now being asked in anthropology,
but not just not in the social sciences more generally about who has the right to study who, right?
Like whether this is upper caste people studying ballots, whether this is white people studying Modi is in New Zealand or it is, for instance,
privileged Indians going and working in Kashmir because the stakes of that project, as you were just talking about, are so completely different.
And this brings to mind, I mean,
I've I can't not mention it because it's also been part of a conversation that anthropologists have been having for the past few months.
The Indian anthropologist,
who wrote a book on Kashmir and then it was only subsequent to the publication of the book that I think many of us found out.
Most of us found out that she actually had claws, has had process in relations with the security state,
and that has opened up as we know this very big debate within the discipline,
but within South Asian studies as well on conditionality, ethics, stakes of research, cetera.
So just keeping that in mind, I wonder, you know, what would the three of you say about Indians who work on Kashmir?
And you know, the question of, you know, how do we think about what this Kashmiri reckoning might be?
Because the stakes for me, for instance, as an upper caste privilege, Indian with, you know,
with very close relations to the Indian state myself are completely different from,
say, you know, have say your position with an inch or two and a half years.
And so I wonder whether this is a kind of conversation that I really do think we should be having, right?
And we are having to ask, what did you get in the social sciences on different topics?
But we haven't, as far as I know quite how to do the same thing on Kashmir quite yet.
And I wondered whether any of you had any particular thoughts on this.
And I wonder whether I could begin by asking you to perhaps comment on it.
Right. Thanks. No, I think that's that's a really another important question.
You know, I do want to preface my answer by saying that Kashmiris.
And this is this is a stereotype about meetings, but it's also largely true that Kashmiris are actually they love inviting people to their homes.
They are, in that sense, a very inclusive community.
And this is something I've learnt from people on the ground, people who, you know, human rights advocates, political activists who will say this,
you know, we want to invite Indians to go to this place because that's the only way they can see for themselves.
You know, what is wrong? What is it that the Indian state has been doing for all these years?
So I want to say that it's not that anybody can decide who is going to work in Kashmir and who is not.
I know that there is the sense that there is some kind of a gatekeeper and that to me, sounds the most thought up.
Single. I don't think realise even how Gabe kept.
We are that we can't even visit our homes, let alone have the power to decide who can visit Kashmir and work there.
That, to me, is something we first have to acknowledge is that the gatekeeping powers are not with good meetings.
Had that been the case, this would not have been a settler colonial context.
The gatekeeping powers are somewhere else, and those are the powers that we need to challenge and question.
And I think that's what Indian scholars can do as a as a gesture of true solidarity.
Radical expression of solidarity is the question is to challenge the structures of power that they're embedded in.
Or even if they're not necessarily embedded in those structures of power, but might benefit from them one way or the other.
I think that kind of a radical honesty and that's coming from a lot of indigenous scholars, for example,
who will say to white scholars that it's not that we don't want white scholars to work with us,
but we do need some basic commitment to radical honesty.
What might that radical honesty look like in particular cases is obviously going to be different?
And that brings me to the second important point I wanted to bring in Jim in my head is that there is no blanket way of suggesting that no,
no Indian scholar can ever want to come Kashmir, right?
Because we've had some wonderful allies, Indian scholars, Indian allies who have worked alongside Kashmiris,
who have worked to amplify the voices of Kashmiris in ways that is very respectful of Kashmiri aspirations and their voice of having.
So that's why I think being very specific about cases is important in this in this regard.
I also want to say, you know,
the other critique sometimes is and I've heard this now within this case that you you mention a lot of things have been said about,
you know, but everybody has access to some kind of a governmental power in Kashmir.
And you know, that's how things get done in Kashmir. If I were to go to the airport, for example, I need to figure out a way to contact the DC,
right, so that my my passage to the airport becomes a little easier.
If I need a mobile cell phone connexion or a SIM, I need to figure out how to contact somebody in the bureaucracy so that I can get things done,
because that is the power of the state over your names, you need to rely on the state to survive.
A lot of people, you know, even elections happen in large part when people vote because.
They have a disappeared son. They're trying to find in Indian jails.
And the only way they can find that son is by voting.
So then voting is not necessarily, you know, a gesture of support or legitimacy for the Indian government.
It's a it's a it's a sign of survival and it's a sign of the struggle for survival.
So what am I trying to say then, is the fact that you cannot equate train all forms of reliance on the government with power,
with the state or your kind of comfort with the state.
There's a difference between survival and and and benefit if if that makes sense, right?
There's a difference between being embedded being part of the state apparatus and then.
Once in a while, getting benefited from some random distant connexion that you might have with this state or in the bureaucracy.
So I think that those are nuances we have to keep in mind. We cannot issue and we are no one's to issue a blanket statement.
And, you know, we cannot be.
That's that's a that is the Antioch that that is not the feminist praxis that at least
Cushman the for and that we absolutely need to push for solidarity around Kashmir.
So that's that's kind of what I want to say. I also want to quickly come back.
Turn that critical cost on these folks, for example, are pushing for it,
which is how does how do we recognise cost as an entrenched social crisis in India, right?
It's that let's start from there for for my Indian colleagues for.
I think recognise the kind of crisis Cashman has created for the Indian psyche.
I think that's where solid decolonial work needs to happen because there's a lot of assumptions we come with,
with a lot of lot of assumptions that structure our time there, that structure, our relationships, that structure, our interactions.
And one of them is this idea. I think it's this the wounds of partition.
Then Indians come and live. But those are not wounds that Kashmiris share.
Kashmiris have different kinds of wounds. We just need to recognise those who didn't go on.
And I think that's part of where the decolonial work needs to happen.
But he also thought that I might come back to it. But yeah, those are my sort of quick thoughts.
I mean, these are really big questions of what is really followed up mean.
And you were making the point that, you know, this Kashmiris don't actually have the power to get keep.
And I have found it absurd when I've heard some statements around that myself.
But also I think the important point to made about not like flattening out provisions in between all privileged,
you know, we all get access from the state, we all use access and privilege.
We need to be nuanced and specific in each case. So thank you for that.
Dramatically, I ask you to weigh in. Yeah. I mean, I'd just like to start by saying that, you know, this whole notion of like certain places,
especially colonised spaces being murky spaces, you know, then I mean, it is true that like, you know, it's complicated.
Every society is complicated.
But to use that argument and then to kind of translate into a well ahead if the place is murky, research practise can be murky as well.
I think that we need to really question that that, you know, it is not a justification for you.
You know, this kind of projecting something from a place onto one's own identity is not a good practise, but also the second question.
And you know, the larger question that you asked earlier about South Asian studies.
My sense is that, you know, this disciplinary recognition within South Asia,
I mean, in the most sort of critical tradition so far, which have loudly disavow,
sort of like Indian nationalism continue to have mean embedded within the traditional idea of like what India is and,
you know, its territorial boundaries. And it becomes like a trap to scholarship as well.
You know, if people use the internal colonialism instead of settler colonialism in itself
shows and not only are you repeating this sort of Indian government introduced,
which isn't an internal problem, but also this idea of internal colonialism where,
you know, I mean, I remember this essay by gun binding many years ago, 2006.
I think when he was writing about the time of the late conversion,
he had used the term internal colonialism to suggest that the Dalits and Muslims in India are infinitely colonised because they have nowhere to go.
And, you know, they they feel colonialism. Yet they cannot.
They don't. They don't know where to go because they're geographically dispersed.
And the same argument was then repeated years later by by the Chatterjee.
Like Lakshmi, it is entirely colonised. My sense was that Kashmir is not internally colonised because Kashmiris are not
geographically dispersed and they have actually a deep sense of their own history,
regardless of their relationship in India, you know, regardless of their colonial relationship that India has imposed on Kashmir.
To me, when you look at these critical traditions of thought and then you realise
that they have not kind of disabuse themselves of this incipient nationalism,
you begin to realise that that sometimes they can be Indian may be quite problematic.
You know, to call yourself Indian or think like an Indian is so deeply problematic, especially when you come as an Indian to Kashmir.
I don't think that there is a possibility, you know, I mean, especially, you know,
then you mix up with other things like Kashmir's epistemic mark or a political mark.
There's not even a possibility that you can separate your Indian ness from what you're trying to achieve.
You know, you might have the best intentions in the world,
but you still remain sort of embedded in the internationalist universe one way or the other.
I mean, the third point I would just like, I think, a little of the controversy that you mentioned,
I think that one of the things that was mentioned was the whole diaspora saying that, you know, it is in a way sort of kind of like a state project.
We have heard so many times, like the J and K administration saying that the diasporic academics and intellectuals
and activists are trying to provoke Kashmiris back home in Kashmir into some kind of.
First of all, that is not true. And then they tell the communities that if you listen to them, then you know there will be costs.
First of all, I mean, of course, you know,
there's just clearly shows that Indian government is intent on suppressing all forms of protest in Kashmir and are all voices in Kashmir.
But also, this new categorisation of Kashmiris as diasporic sort of is a way to disconnect.
Like, you know, Kashmiris from might have gone abroad.
You know, it is a colonial project to take away Kashmiri intellectuals.
Already, as we have mentioned, it has happened in Kashmir where Kashmiri intellectuals are all continuously put out of circulation or suppressed.
But even those who might have some privileged space to speak, they are disconnected from Kashmir.
You know, in this anthropological head organisation of anthropologists and the native native is always imagined as
this incarcerated located person as soon as the native goes abroad and starts to do their own research.
You know, they become a problematic category.
I think that we need to recognise some of these issues that have arisen, and I think this is a moment of reflection.
That's what I was. Thanks, John.
I think that's a really important point to make about the metrological nationalism that underpins so much of the scholarship and pursuit even by,
you know, the great work done on nationalism typically.
But they're not able to escape. It comes to Kashmir, and I think that's a really important invention that we're also, you know,
seeing in the recent scholarship in which you see some of the work that you guys are doing
a pretty good Kashmiri study whose work is really making us rethink settler colonialism,
questions of occupation and rethink Kashmir as a particular kind of space. It was really important.
Have some I don't know whether you had any thoughts on this. Yeah, I think for Indian scholars to do research on me,
they have to really unpack the assumptions that they come into a region that their country maintains an active colonisation in.
So one thing to consider and this people may agree or disagree is the type of research that Indian scholars engagement.
So what are the ethics of them coming into Kashmiri communities entering their most intimate spaces to study the impact of Steve?
When, as has been mentioned before, the result of this research is an obfuscation of the primary vectors of violence or subjugation,
which is the Indian state or claims of how things are complicated and all Kashmiris are somehow compromised.
What does it mean for an Indian scholar to make those claims that they are compromised, the principles within the colonised community?
So rather than making Kashmiris their research subjects, why can't they not research their own oppressor community and understand the state ideology
and society that enables settler colonisation and India's genocidal project in between?
You just sort of moving on from anthropology,
having to think about something that all three of you also referred to previously through this conversation,
which is the field, the broader field of South Asian studies. Right. And like Mona said, that, you know, South Asian studies has failed Kashmir.
I wonder whether you could think about, you know, whether we could have a bit of a discussion here about just the sort of the trajectory of South
Asian studies or how has it engaged and traditionally or not engaged with questions of Kashmir?
And where might you know people like you were doing, you know, incredibly cutting-edge work right now in Kashmir there?
Might you see it going into the future? Jeanette, I wonder what I could ask you to respond first.
Yeah. I mean, we have, you know,
the so-called what's called Indian scholarship on Kashmir had actually started way back to the Dorada when the in cahoots with the British,
who were at the Dogra Durbar or what is called the Kashmir Darbar at the time kind of began the process of erasure of Kashmiri Muslim history,
Kashmiri Muslim identity.
And it was the colonial officials, the Brahmins in Kashmir and Indian upper caste officials who produce an enormous amount of knowledge.
I mean, what?
We have to realise that the Dogra administration has had deliberately kept Kashmiri Muslims occupied like ninety six percent of the population.
Any you know, from education? And that that's the reason one of the reason like education was a big sort of emancipatory slogan in Kashmir.
Citing 1930s that process, where the Indian state sort of sought to locate some kind of Sanskrit post in Kashmir has earlier roots.
And that continued in even so-called secular institutions like Archaeological Survey of India and other such institutions.
The the the types of kind of research grants that Indian institutions would give granting
agencies would give the researchers was really about discovering that Hindu passed in Kashmir.
And of course, you know, Kashmiris, all Kashmiris, Hindus, Muslims not aware that Kashmir has a sort of plural past.
You know, there are there is Muslim history is Hindu.
History is about experiences and which is like part of this larger sort of thing that we call the history of Kashmir.
But after 1947, when the Indian colonisation began in Kashmir, occupation began.
That process continued. I mean, except now when the Indian state sought to present Kashmir as like as an integral part of,
you know, not just simply in terms of like a territorial boundary, but civilisation.
The kind of ID alighting on all the other plural histories of Kashmir was linked to many other regions,
you know, and South Asia and Central Asia, that has kind of continued.
It has become the main substrate from which Lakshmi,
scholars or allied scholars from other places in India or in the world have sort of sought to extract Kashmir.
Like we have sought to try to argue that, you know, India cannot be the this sort of some master signifier and understanding Kashmir.
And I think even the sympathetic scholarship that has continued to exist, you know, alongside this brazen form of imperial scholarship,
sometimes kind of like, you know, adopts a sort of this so-called liberal approach where liberal nationalist approach,
which would argue, for instance,
political sciences like the probably the worst offender in this where the research is about like how to benignly control Kashmir,
how to be nice to Kashmiris, to maintain control over Kashmir.
You know, and you know, I think that this this kind of sentiment and I call it a sentiment because it is a incipient
nationalist sentiment that remains part of the South Asian studies has sort of erased Kashmir.
I mean, it may not be overtly violent, but it is so violent and epistemic terms that it has erased Kashmiri history and Kashmiri
experiences and South Asian studies has not been able to sort of overcome this.
You know, even as I said earlier, even the critical traditions of tight policies takes about two and studies.
You know, in some of the earliest writings of subaltern studies, Kashmiri history is continuously being presented as Indian history.
You know, Kashmiri texts from the past are continuously being represented as Indian texts.
And I think that erasure that is part of the settler colonial era.
It may seem overtly liberal and nice, but it is part of the larger phone erasure and which is unfortunate.
Thanks, John Edwards, have said that you went through. Yeah.
So the main thing that I would add is that there is an imposition of a liberal secular epistemology when it comes to Kashmir.
But also when it comes broadly to Islam and Muslims in South Asian studies.
So Muslim aspirations can only be legible or palatable in particular ways and not in others.
So I've had a number of senior Indian scholars tell me that they would support the
media freedom movement where it not for the Islamic nature of the resistance.
So where does one even begin to unpack that level of bigotry?
There's a lot of assumptions there that need to be challenged and what is perceived as the original sin.
The creation of the state of Pakistan also looms large in Indian framings over Kashmir,
so Pakistan is like this continuous dead horse that they like to beat,
and I'm reminded of what the legislation was passed and some of the senior Indian scholars.
All they could say was beat their chest and declare that India has become a Hindu Pakistan.
And so this is the level of analysis and complete erasure of their own history that we're dealing with,
even amongst scholars that claim to have an end to the politics. And so I think I'm doing the politics, the gun won't talk about that in a minute,
but we're not going to get your thoughts on it and then move on to just sort of echoing what's been said already.
I couldn't agree more with House's last point raised about Pakistan.
I mean, even the way we talk about Indian politics, the Taliban, the Talibanization of India.
I mean, this is so problematic because of how it is inherently Islamophobic.
There's no recognition as such of how Pakistan, as she said,
becomes kind of this horse that he keep kind of whipping in order to score points, some sort of points,
politically ideological and political points,
and to make yourself feel better about your sort of existence as an Indian quote, unquote secular polity.
Having said that, I think the other the other ways it's I sometimes feel South Asian studies needs to rescue itself from its own self.
You know, it's it's not simply just about Kashmir caged in this area studies model, but it is it does it?
Area studies framework in and of itself. That is very limiting.
That's deeply limiting. And you know, this has come up a lot. For example,
within university settings where you bring up this question and I think immediately
you shut down because funding is so related to how the U.S. is structured.
The university system, at least in the U.S., it can't speak for how it works in the UK.
But there is this sort of embedded area studies model, which is essentially what is it?
It's a surveillance intelligence gathering model. That's at least how it started.
That was its origin. And we have kind of we have continued to, you know, rely on that to reproduce that model rather than thinking of,
you know, rigorously about what alternatives we may not potentially think through.
Because I think what what does data studies model really erase, for example?
For me, it is this idea, this belief that India is a democracy, it's a vibrant democracy.
It's a it's a huge market also for the universities. And that's where I feel South Asia, South Asia,
central and South Asian studies find their kind of limits because there's only so much they can push against.
So you have centres in India, you cannot, of course, cut ties with them.
You can't question them too much.
So there are these implicit institutionalised ways in which Kashmir keeps getting folded into the larger ambit of India and Indian democracy.
So whatever happens in Kashmir is not because of Kashmir, because of Indian settler colonialism.
It is because of the failure of Indian democracy. Right?
So it's it's not because of India's expansionary empire, you know, but it's because of its expansionary aspirations.
It's because, you know, India just needs to fix certain things.
The ways it conducts elections fix the way the military operates, and then everything's going to be fine.
So I think it's this constant sort of folding of Kashmir into the Indian studies model,
into the South Asian studies model that has led to an active erasure of what can even be said.
I mean, for example, we have now we use the word occupation and we claim it to depict the context in in Kashmir.
But it is. It is. It's difficult.
And I know it's going to come up with a Hindu in the right, becoming active in the US and how that space here is going to get even more limited,
how that space is already shrinking quite a bit, not just in Kashmir, but also for us here.
I'll leave that to the to the other two to the perhaps a little question.
But, you know, I think one thing we have to recognise what South Asian studies has done is limit our understanding of how
Kashmir was became the sort of colonial political project right of first for the British and then for India,
right?
Instead of seeing it as a seam of cultural, political, economic, aesthetic relationships between South and Central Asia as sort of this ontraport,
if you will, between different regions as an active, vibrant space of trade and commerce, it became this hinterland.
It became the quote unquote border, even a de facto.
That's that's been sort of the epistemic violence that Jeanette mentioned,
but it's also led to so much political violence and so much bodily violence against Kashmiris for demanding.
A different kind of geography that would sit better with their own sense of history and their own sense of cultural ethos.
Such an important point, what if you raised about how all acknowledged production the academy area study South Asian studies,
the kind of the violence of these sort of so-called knowledge practises on Kashmir?
I feel I'm going to just ask one last question and just end with that.
I can see we've got lots of questions already in the Q&A box and I'm assuming more will come through.
And I'd like to ask to have a chance to be able to respond to at least some of them or the ones you guys would like to respond to in the Q&A books.
But perhaps I would just end by asking this question about the new Liberal Academy as well.
You've talked about the origins of media studies. We've talked about the ways in which history has been written.
We talk about mythological nationalism. But I wonder whether we could talk about the contemporary neoliberal academy,
as well as the addax and academic freedom by Hindutva forces, which we're seeing everywhere.
But that's in the UK. Or I mean, of course, we're seeing it in India. We're seeing that in the US from what I can make out.
And I wonder what this does to the study of Kashmir. And you know, I'm going to end that slip.
The last question I'll ask and I will open it up. But I have said, would you like to sort of give this a go?
Yeah. So in terms of the attacks on academic freedom, many of the many of us have been targeted by Hindutva organisations in the US,
as well as more recently by the administration in bushmeat.
So colleagues and administrators at my college and others have received emails letting
them know that they have hired a terrorist supporter who wants to bring Shakira,
not Sharia law to Pennsylvania. Talks and panels of ours are regularly interrupted and disrupted, especially after 2019.
There's a series of online campaigns and dossiers that attempt to link us to extremism and so on.
And so one of the most common tactics that this lobby uses is to declare media,
academics or anyone who speaks out on Kashmir as Pakistani agents to essentially deny any sort of Kashmiri agency.
And then meanwhile, in Kashmir,
there's an increasing attempt by the police to create a category called white-collar terrorists so that the police can label academics,
journalists, human rights activists as white collar terrorists and make them subject to the same anti-terror laws.
And they're already accusing, as Judy mentioned, people abroad of inciting violence.
So, of course, the implications for research on Kashmir are huge.
I mean, there is like the fear of being removed from your job, not getting tenure and so on.
But then I think more so there's the main fear that we, you know,
our families or loved ones will be harmed and also that we won't be able to visit back or to go back.
So I think that what that means for the future of research is it's pretty frightening.
It's absolutely terrifying, utterly terrifying. Mona, did you want to add to this?
Yeah, I'm an absolutely. I think that's the thing. The number of letters you get from multiple sources and the deans, a copy and the clumsy copy it.
And there's a lot of that that's been happening, especially, I think, as you rightly pointed out after 2019,
when the Hindu writers mobilised in the US quite a bit and in very sort of systematic, deliberate ways.
So that's part of it. It is. It is this sort of felt threat.
There's list an injury list, apparently, and nobody knows what list you're on until you know you then either don't leave Kashmir or allowed to enter.
So there is a sort of a fear of being stopped, right?
And that's that's the other way research is being stopped.
It's being discouraged.
And I think what's happening also this tie up between the Hindu groups here and of course, the Indian state and the whole ministry,
you know, sometimes will be tagged in a tweet, and it's also a chance to act on that same tweet.
So there is this clear lines of clear lines of communication that are being set up where we are being
surveilled here and that has implications for our friends and colleagues and families in Kashmir.
So that's part of it. The other thing I want to say is also, unfortunately,
how our universities are not equipped at all to deal with the Hindu right and
in the US is that especially in the US and that's what I'm going to focus on.
I mean, recently there was a big event the dismantling a global Hindutva conference, for example, right?
And I know in several universities a lot was happening, but I speak to what happened here.
A bunch of five Hindu faculty from Not From the Social Sciences complained to the dean
that this conference that the accused had supported was they didn't feel safe because
this was a Hindu phobic conference and they didn't feel safe on their own campus
anymore because their own South Asia Centre was actually supporting the conference.
Now this is what's interesting that about this new liberal university and how they rely on notions of diversity and very sort of formulaic,
sweeping understandings of diversity where all you need to have is brown skin to qualify as diverse.
And I do think that's why we made a lot of strides in many regards.
But because there is no intersectional analysis or whatever city means in a
neoliberal setting or these new liberalised ideas of diversity come in the way they
shape how the deans and the administration then response to questions of freedom of
expression and how then scuttles freedom of expression for scholars such as me,
you know, who speak about Kashmir or speak about the Hindu right and the the the the intervient.
The intervention is to shut me down because somehow the Hindu are Hindus on my campus are now feeling unsafe.
You know, when they are the ones who have these structures, these megastructures supporting them,
the state apparatus, both here and in India, behind their backs.
So I do want to make and I've been sort of trying to push that narrative here, that brown imperialism is real and we need to be able to deal with it.
Just because somebody is someone is brown doesn't necessarily, you know, make them a victim.
I know it sounds very simple, but we just need to be able to embrace that fact.
One. Brown imperialism Israel Third World imperialism exists, and these are not necessarily just Third-World categories,
you know, victim countries of the global south that the U.S. has to now protect.
There are other forces at play in the U.S. also politically, socially,
culturally that these universities need to be able to recognise and grapple with and figure
out a way for people to not be scuttled because somebody is playing the victim card.
I mean, that's that's at least how I see it playing out in the context that I'm in.
Yeah, I mean, is a toxic combination of the Hindu right, neo liberal academy and, you know,
diversity discourse claims of being heard by the Hindu injury is it's that's the trope.
Yeah, you know, and it's getting, you know, it's sort of spreading quite rapidly across the globe.
Janette, did you have anything you like to add? Well.
I'll just be brief and simply say, adding on to this,
that there is an immense amount of money that is flowing from big Indian corporations into academic centres and American universities,
British universities. So there are like actual interests, material interests involved now.
I suspect that, you know, Kashmiris would have an even harder time making a case that there is brown imperialism that they
would be they would have a harder time talking about that diversity is not this flat thing.
You know, there's a lot of sort of hierarchies built into diversity.
And I mean, I think that, you know, for us right now,
and I said at the beginning that I tried to find an academic home for myself, but I couldn't pursue questions.
But I ended by saying that only to realise that, you know, there is really no home.
You know, there is no space where one could pursue research unfettered.
And, you know, you know, keeping in view the interests of the people you're working with.
Because the the long arms of the Indian Hindu Rashtra in the state now extend to American shores that they have control over social media.
We get emails from Twitter and all of that all the time. They have control over, but they not only send these letters to our departments quite often,
which are sometimes unreadable because many of our deans and stuff, they they don't even know how to process all of this.
But they do. They do are continuously threatening, you know, their their reach is immense.
They disturb our, you know, our events. I mean, have someone anywhere in Princeton in 2019,
and we had a large number of like Hindu right wing activists who just like, gathered there and disrupted our event.
And you know, so and I mean, these were like the same people who later on met Modi.
They were like, Photograph and Modi in that howdy Modi event.
So you can see how the display people who have access to India's prime minister, you know, they are coming out to disrupt our events.
So I think that, you know, the stakes have become even higher.
There's a lot existentially there for us.
I mean, every day, seriously, when we write in words and we kind of like begin to think or talk or following and stop,
it is a decision we're making because we are in no way putting not only ourselves at risk, but also people we love at home at risk, you know?
I mean, sometimes it's hard to talk about these things openly, but our family, sometimes when we get a chance to talk to them, they they hide.
Sometimes that they have been contacted because they don't want to worry us.
But we know that they are being contacted and sometimes somebody spills the beans and says, we are continuously talking.
I mean, every time I talk to my family or my computer, click in the phone that, OK,
somebody is listening in the background, so you can't even ask me to talk to them.
So I'm far from being able to do research.
It's just a basic ability to speak to your families has become challenging.
So I think that's that's just something I wonder about all the time.
Like, What do you do? And I really don't have answers.
I think so much and this has been such an important and, you know, sort of eye opening conversation, at least for me,
in terms of just the kind of intricacies difficulties, you know, ethics and morality were working on me, just the political difficulties.
It's it's kind of staggering. So thank you so much for being so honest and open.
And you know, there's a very deep sort of linkages that you're sort of going on with, which are really hard actually to immediately grasp.
And, you know, I can see that in some of the debates we've had more recently on the ethics of writing on Kashmir.
The kind of nuances three of you have teased out in this conversation are completely missing.
So I do hope that in some way we can. I mean, of course, we're recording this,
but I also hope that the summer in which the three of you can find what we are writing about this or
putting it out there because I do think this conversation is missing from the wider literature on Kashmir.
But but anyway, thank you so much for this. We have.