Termine
Lecture: "Kashmir: Beyond Borders, Ethnicity and Sovereignty"
23.02.2012 | 18:00 Uhr | Zentrum Moderner Orient, Kirchweg 33, Berlin
ZMO-Kolloquium 2011/2012
Not all about Islam: Current Political Conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and Asia
Kashmir: Beyond Borders, Ethnicity and Sovereignty
Lecture by Dr. Seema Kazi
Kashmir is among the modern world’s longest running conflicts.
Mainstream analyses represent the conflict as one rooted in territory
and/or ethnicity. Contesting both narratives, this paper suggests
that Kashmir is neither merely a territorial dispute between the
states of India and Pakistan; nor must it be viewed as an ‘Islamist’
rebellion against the (secular) Indian state. Rather, the suggestion
here is that that the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination has
been shaped and defined by its own specific history; in effect, this
struggle symbolises collective, secular resistance by a people who
happen to be Muslim against the contradictions produced by the
establishment of the modern nation-state in India. Drawing upon
historical studies, this paper maintains that Kashmir’s struggle for
self-determination predates partition of the sub-continent and the
moment of Indian independence, yet has, nonetheless, been subsumed
within the latter. Using a range of critical literature, and
drawing upon the author’s own research on Kashmir, the paper
highlights the resilience of a Kashmiri imagination that has persistently
resisted attempts to subsume and assimilate Kashmiri Muslim
identity within the ‘national’ narrative. Kashmir’s human rights
tragedy, the paper goes on to suggest, is the price the Kashmiris
have had to pay for nurturing dreams and longings inconsistent
with the loyal ‘national’ citizen prototype so central to the centrist,
assimilative impulse of the unitary, ‘sovereign’ nation-state India
(and Pakistan) chose to imitate. Emphasising Kashmir’s historical
and cultural significance to the world in general, and to South Asia
in particular, this paper suggests a discarding of the congealed
‘national’ ideas – that have proved to be so catastrophic for the
Kashmiris in particular – in favour of a plural, non-national political
imaginary consistent with, and respectful of, the sentiments and
aspirations of sub-national groups and minorities and, by extension,
to South Asia’s plural histories and empirical realities.
Seema Kazi has been educated in India, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She has worked with NGOs and women’s groups in the area of Muslim women and human rights, and subsequently as an independent researcher and writer on gender, conflict and governance. She is the author of In Kashmir: Gender, Militarization and the Modern Nation-state (South End, 2011). Seema has a PhD from the Gender Institute, London School of Economics, and is presently Assistant Professor, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi.
