A CONVERSATION WITH HAFSA KANJWAL
This conversation between Shivangi Mariam Raj and Hafsa Kanjwal focuses on affects and mythologies deployed by India to condense Kashmir into a landscape of desire and a territory of control. Hafsa’s latest book Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation allows their discussion to examine slow and invisibilized forms of violence embedded in infrastructures of assimilation as well as complex forms of statecrafting under successive client regimes that have contributed to strengthening India’s settler-colonial project in Kashmir today. They further reflect on the resistance practices of the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir, connecting these with the global landscape of postcolonial colonialism.
Shivangi Mariam Raj: The demand for Azadi (liberation) has routinely been pathologized across the ideological spectrum in India, with Kashmiris being labeled as “ill,” “impractical,” “sentimental,” “ungrateful,” “stubborn,” “deviant,” or “terror threats.” There is also the infantilizing trope deployed by the right and the left-liberal forces in equal measure, with the former claiming that Kashmiris are children who deserve to be punished, while the latter insists that Kashmiris are children who need to be loved and brought “back home.” I am also thinking about how the term “atoot ang” (integral part) combines anatomy with cartographic anxieties. Could you tell us how the project of the Indian nation-state has depended on such vocabularies to establish and sustain itself over the last seven decades?