Showing humanity: violence and visuality in Kashmir

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the burst of visual production that emerged from and around Indian-occupied Kashmir in July 2016, when the Indian paramilitary and police began to implement for the first time a tactic of mass blinding as a way of quelling surging protests against the Indian state. I consider a selection of visual texts that intervene in the optical regime undergirding the Indian occupation, one that has arguably elicited Indian support in part via a systematic erasure of the humanity of Kashmiris who favour self-determination (or ‘azadi’). In the face of this optical regime, I examine the visual and narrative tactics through which pro-azadi Kashmiris stake claims to humanity – by putting wounded Kashmiri bodies on spectacular display, graphically foregrounding Kashmiri bodily vulnerability in acts of public grieving, and seeking to interpellate a global political community through an appeal to a shared humanity. As these urgent claims to a larger human community are voiced, this paper asks what it means for Kashmiris to take on the burden of ‘performing humanity’ in these ways, especially given the explicit cautions in visual studies and human rights scholarship around spectacular exhibitions of vulnerability. Rather than assume that showcasing vulnerability can never incite transformation, I closely examine the possibilities of particular visual forms—photojournalism and digital activism—in relaying vulnerability and attempting to claim and recraft humanity.

KEYWORDS:

• Kashmir
• South Asia
• violence
• visuality
• humanity
• human rights

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks to Dia Da Costa, Alex Da Costa, Shaista Patel, Mona Bhan and Suvir Kaul for their engaged feedback and commentary at various stages of this piece. I am also thankful to all participants at the Reimagining Creative Economy workshop at the University of Edmonton, as well as my fellow members of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective. Needless to say, all remaining flaws are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Deepti Misri is Associate Professor of women and gender studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She’s also a founding member of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, a feminist scholarly collective whose work focuses on Indian militarized occupation in Kashmir. Most recently, she is the co-editor of a special issue of the journal WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, on ‘PROTEST’.

Notes

1. The ‘new militancy’ describes a new generation of Kashmiri militants primarily from South Kashmir. Like Burhan, many of these young men are from educated families, social media-savvy, and are willing to appear with their faces exposed in the photographs and videos they upload, in contrast to a previous generation of militants invested in publicly concealing their identities.

2. For one overview of modern state formation in Jammu and Kashmir, see Kaul (2011). Kaul names the Indian state in Kashmir an ‘empire’ with neocolonial ambitions, one that has elicited an explicitly anticolonial vocabulary from the Kashmiri resistance. He also notes that ‘many of the political and ideological features of classic 20th century anti-colonial movements are in place in the Kashmiri struggle for self-determination’ (p. 67). These include a popular historical accounting of Kashmir as having been perpetually colonized by Mughal, Afghan, Sikh, Dogra, and now Indian rule; and of course, the language of azadi itself. In a recent volume, scholars belonging to the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective argue for the importance of naming the Indian occupation as such. ‘This practice of naming the brutal modalities of power in Kashmir as occupation is a political and moral choice, a commitment to exposing the Indian performance of democracy, human rights, and citizenship that has continually undermined the basic rights and freedoms of Kashmiris’ (Bhan et al. 2018, p. 35).

3. The performative counting up of deaths and injuries has become a significant act of public grieving in an environment where Kashmiri grief and mourning presents a deep threat to the state, a dangerous ‘anti-national’ affect that emerges frequently at funerals. As Nitasha Kaul (2016a) writes: ‘What is the difference between a funeral and a demonstration? In Kashmir, there is none […] [I]n Kashmir, every funeral is a demonstration and every demonstration is a funeral.’

4. Although Butler’s articulation of ‘grievability’ as a benchmark of the human offers a vocabulary that I have found useful here, it should be noted that Butler’s theoretical frameworks are connected to a longer genealogy of theorizing the human that has gone largely unacknowledged in her own work. For instance, the work of Black feminist Sylvia Wynter has been instrumental in not only problematizing the racialized construction of the human, but also insisting upon a reinvention—rather than a rejection—of the human, a category that Wynter argues has been colonized by the figure of ‘Man’ at the heart of Enlightenment humanism. For more, see Weheliye (2014, p. 22). I thank Shaista Patel for reminding me to register these genealogies.

5. In Butler’s elaboration of performatives as speech acts, ‘performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act’, but, rather as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.’ (1993, p. 2)

6. Kashmiri social media users were of course using a variety of platforms during this time—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr, to name just a few. I largely tracked images circulating on Facebook throughout July 2016. The images examined here provide by no means an all-inclusive catalogue. Australian artist Alana Hunt (2016) has published online an extensive (though again, as she emphasizes, not exhaustive) compilation of the image-production appearing on her social media feed in the months following the killing of Burhan Wani along with her analyses. This compilation offers a fuller canvas of visual production during this time.

7. The report further detailed the primary use of the guns: ‘Shotguns were primarily designed for hunting, and can be used to kill a wide variety of animals and birds. Depending on factors such as size and distance of the quarry, cartridges with different pellet or shot size can be used from the same gun. Smaller pellets (called birdshot) have been designed to kill small animals and birds, and are denoted using numbers […] When birdshot is fired, the pellets leave the barrel as a compact group and begin to spread out after travelling a few metres. By the time they’ve covered 30–40 metres, the pellets have spread out enough to cover anything within a one-metre diameter. But within a few metres of leaving the barrel, the pellets are still in a compact group and moving at very high velocity. At this close range, birdshot is extremely lethal, enough to blow a human skull to bits’ (Singh 2016).

8. There is a risk in this rhetorical strategy, to be sure, of reinscribing an understanding of disabled life as tantamount to or even worse than death. Such a strategy may seem to chafe against disability rights approaches that seek to encode disability as valuable diversity. However, as scholars such as Nirmala Erevelles (2011) and Jasbir Puar (2017) have argued, disability rights and disability studies approaches that simply endorse empowerment and celebration of disability, while important, do not always account for the conditions under which disability is produced, or the increased risk of disablement and the impossibility of recovery faced by specific populations under conditions of war or violence. Puar asks a question that is pertinent in the context of Kashmir: ‘what material conditions of possibility are necessary for such positive reenvisionings of disability to flourish, and what happens when these conditions are not available?’ (p. xix).

9. Stories published in Indian newspapers like the Times of India consistently report on injuries experienced by security personnel, quoting officials who plead that ‘cops are human beings too’ alongside images of Kashmiri protesters throwing stones. See Chauhani (2016) for example.

10. The tenacity of the image of the Kashmiri male ‘trouble-maker’ was borne out by a short Twitter exchange between the writer, Nitasha Kaul, and another user outraged by the former’s posting of a news story about Insha’s injuries (Kaul 2016b). Tweeted the outraged Indian: ‘What was Insha doing? He [sic] was throwing stones at police. He [sic] is still better off being alive.’

11. Recent examples (2017) include the photographs of a blood-soaked Muslim man, Mohammed Naeem, begging for his life before being lynched in Jharkhand, or the image of Farooq Ahmed Dar, who was used as a human shield by the Indian army in Kashmir. In 2007, images of a young Adivasi woman who had been stripped by local businessmen in Guwahati circulated widely online and in the printed press.

12. Solidarity efforts from within Pakistan are certainly fraught, as they are caught within what Nosheen Ali (2016) calls Pakistan’s ‘savior nationalism—a nationalism that is geared towards saving a community, place or people, which is not-yet wholly part of the nation.’ Yet, as Ali maintains, solidarity from civil society actors must not be brushed off as being simply of a piece with the machinations of the Pakistani state, even if such sympathies have been ‘ironically … cultivated over decades of pro-Kashmiri solidarity in an otherwise exclusionary Pakistani nationalism’. In a recent interview, Mirza Waheed offered a reflection on the meaning of solidarity efforts like these on the part of ‘ordinary Pakistanis’ in support of Kashmir, referring in all likelihood to the very campaign under discussion here: ‘When Kashmiris were being blinded, sections of Pakistani civil society ran an interesting campaign to focus the world’s attention on such a ghastly crime. I hope they have the moral courage to run a similar campaign for the disappeared people of Balochistan’ (Adil 2017). Without discounting the need or importance of such solidarities, Waheed also issued a gentle caution to Pakistani civil society actors to attend to violent nationalism at home as well as abroad. For a more detailed analysis of Kashmiris’ relationship with Pakistan see Junaid (2016b).

13. In the gallery of worthy humans assembled by the campaign, it is noteworthy that only four out of the eleven personalities are women, all of whom are Hindu or, in the case of Sonia Gandhi, white. The campaign perhaps inadvertently registered a gendered hierarchy within the cultural category of the human, such that the most potent icons of the ‘fully human’ are largely light-skinned Hindu men.

14. This does not, of course, simply invalidate the question of whether such images circulated by Kashmiris can reproduce hierarchies of looking (the image of the blinded child Insha Malik). My intent is not to simply valorize subaltern visual production, but to consider its heterogeneous effects.