Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Gowhar Fazili
(Sociologist, Ambedkar University, Delhi)
Familial Grief, Resistance and the Political Imaginary in Kashmir
Date & Time: October 17, 2019 (Thursday), 11am
Venue:CSSS Committee Room (No: 13), SSS-II
Abstract: In this paper I undertake ethnographic exploration of the textures of familial grief in Kashmir. By drawing a contrast between the articulation of grief by a woman and a man within familial context, I pay attention to possible gendered differences in how they work with the language of grief. By corroborating these articulations with the wider exploration of familial and public grieving in Kashmir, I examine the role played by the various languages of grief in the making of political resistance in Kashmir. The familial narratives give us access to the affective circulations of grief that run alongside the overtly public and political performances and appropriations of grief. Public performances of grief in the form of protests as portrayed by the media and archived through the processes of law have increasingly come to define the political in Kashmir. Paying close attention to familial narratives of grief, especially those of women, allows us access to intimate details about the dead person, making it possible to individuate him/her rather than think about them simply as statistics, martyrs or terrorists. The narratives also give us clues as to how the circulation of familial grief informs and is appropriated by the 'political struggle' as is popularly understood by the expression, and to what extent it remains subversively autonomous and open to other possibilities. Demonstrating its relative autonomy from abstract collectives, I propose familial grief as one of the powerful moments that can potentially help us to re-imagine the political in more intimate and less destructive ways than are prevalent in Kashmir at the moment.
Bio: Gowhar Fazili teaches Sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi. His PhD is an ethnographic exploration of political subjectivity in Kashmir. The current paper is a fragment drawn out of his thesis.
