Embodying Azadi: Conscious and Unconscious Womanhood in Indian occupied Kashmir (original) (raw)

This personal essay documents an intimate process of self-examination triggered by the 2019 annexation of Jammu & Kashmir through the removal of Article 370 of the Indian constitution by India’s Modi-led government. Drawing on Carl Jung’s analytical psychology as explored in his 1916 work on the psychology of the unconscious, I engage in an exploration of self by connecting it to the Kashmiri collective unconscious. Informed by Sufism (Islamic mysticism), daleel wanen (story-telling), Zindagi hund tajrube (lived experiences), and Zindagi hinz dastan (life narratives), I show how the collective unconscious of Kashmir holds embodied refusals and reclamations. Exploring the “unconscious” offers insights into what Jung calls the common “bond of desire and longing.” For Jung, these deep-rooted aspects of human nature connect individuals at a profound level, crafting a collective unconscious of humanity—containing memories, experiences, and symbols common to all humans across time and cultures. In this essay, I do not look at his work strictly from a psychological perspective, but I aim to explore the notion of bodily refusals. What role does the unconscious play in reclaiming coherent self-knowledge under cataclysmic political upheavals? Do such events induce “non-being” through undemocratic imperial statecraft, violent militarization, and extermination? What does such induced “non-being” mean for a Kashmiri feminist political theorist rooted in such an inheritance? Living far from Kashmir, I piece together memories triggered by the 2019 annexation and how it blurred lines between home and academic study. I grew up in the political community of downtown Srinagar, the heartland of rebellion against Indian rule. I explore my own self-construction by relaying and reviewing the lives of kin and community members who embodied, performed, and improvised womanhood. I reflect on my childhood and adolescence during different political periods, in different contexts, and intergenerationally, to explore how Kashmiri womanhood is entangled with the collective unconscious to reveal a site of decolonial praxis and knowledge generation. I review the inter-relational life of my mother (mae), my maternal grandmother (Bobe), and especially my paternal grandmother (Raje or Dadi) as templates of womanhood in the Muslim matriarchal cultures of Kashmir. I also map manhood relationally, as depicted by encounters with men in my life—my father (Abu), brother (Boi), a medic (Muzafer), various counterinsurgents and Indian Army soldiers. As figures, each offers a relational understanding of self, morality, and virtues that shaped my character. Exploring these daleels (stories), I underscore the violence of “nonbeing” and show how it is being resisted through the dialectical experience of Kashmiri womanhood.