A Kashmiri Woman Stuck in Crossfire: Exploring the Impact of Militarisation on Everyday Lives in Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring

Abstract

Political conflict has plagued Kashmir, a Muslim-majority region of Hindu-majority India, ever since the partition. The crisis worsened by the end of the 1980s and has continued to disrupt peace in the valley to date. The conflict arguably entered a new phase as the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was elected to power in 2014, which also joined the ruling coalition of the Jammu and Kashmir state in 2015 for the first time. Over this period, Kashmir’s resistance evolved into subtler forms, including cultural expressions like memoirs. Published in 2021, Farah Bashir’s debut work, Rumours of Spring, is a deeply personal yet undeniably political exploration of the crisis in Kashmir from its aggravated phase in the beginning of the 1990s. This paper argues that the nuanced depiction of the crisis in the memoir demands an intersectional reading of the traumatising impact of militarisation and militarism on Kashmir’s everyday life, especially given the subject position of the narrator as a Muslim woman. The works on militarisation by Jacklyn Cock, as employed by Samreen Mushtaq to analyse the situation in Kashmir, provide theoretical insights for this reading. Set in Kashmir’s identitarian conflict, the Muslim identity is central to the narrative. We argue that in Bashir’s memoir, religion finds a complex representation, with the Qur’an and Kashmiri folklore serving as respites in times of crisis, even as the fundamentalist factions contribute to their oppressive reality. Bashir’s work openly engages with the experience of being a Muslim in Hindu India. The paper also attempts to place the work in a larger corpus of life-writing by women in conflict zones, comparing the work with Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries (2003), a Palestinian memoir by Suad Amiry.

1. Introduction

Kashmir, an area of conflict following its accession to India in 1947, has been a site of clashes between the security forces and insurgents since. With violence erupting in the Kashmir valley in 1987, the insurgents were accused of rapes, kidnappings, and killings of security personnel and innocent civilians. In 1991, Human Rights Watch1 (HRW) stated that Kashmir is under de-facto “siege” (Human Rights Watch 1991). While the 1993 report by HRW accused the Indian forces of “massive human rights violations, including extrajudicial executions, rape, torture, and deliberate assaults on health care workers,” their 2023 report hardly shows any significant improvement in the human rights situation in Kashmir. With the crisis worsening, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published two reports on Kashmir in 2018 and 2019, stressing the excessive use of force and denial of justice by Indian authorities. In 2023, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders stated that “Indian authorities appear to be intensifying the long-standing repression of Kashmiri civil society”. Kashmir remains a graveyard of human rights, and the stories of its suffering deserve to be heard since they depict the voices of a politically and historically suppressed people.

Memoirs from Kashmir such as Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir (2008), reveal the trauma of a region trapped in a constant siege. Published in 2021, Farah Bashir’s debut work, Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir, is a recent addition to the corpus of life-writing from the region. The memoir borrows its title from Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001), the Indian English poet who famously portrayed both the beauty and suffering of Kashmir in his poetry collections such as The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), and Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003). As was Ali’s poetry, Bashir’s memoir is committed to bringing out the agony of Kashmir, a land locked between the armed forces and militants. Rumours of Spring is less about the spring that never arrived and more about the long winter of unrest that never really ended. Featuring the psychological effects of the conflict in all its intensity, as experienced as a Muslim and as a woman, the memoir is an account of the doubly marginalised in Kashmir. While reading works on conflict zones such as Kashmir, it is imperative to adopt an intersectional framework that takes multiple layers of oppression into consideration. This paper intends to employ theorisations of militarisation and its effect on everyday lives to read the memoir as an account of a life in conflict. We argue that Bashir’s work is a nuanced commentary on the crisis in Kashmir from a deeply personal, yet undeniably political, point of view. While many fictional and academically rigorous works have addressed the crisis in Kashmir from a multitude of viewpoints, notably with the help of postcolonial and post-structuralist theories, Bashir’s memoir stands out as an affecting narration of the condition of Kashmiri Muslim women. Rumours is an utterly readable literary and biographical expression of Kashmir, which is moving in both senses of the word, revealing its significance in contemporary India where the prevailing public discourse on Kashmir is unsympathetic, if not apathetic.

The upcoming section briefly introduces the historical trajectory of the crisis and its recent representations in Indian writing in English. Sections that introduce militarisation in Kashmir and elucidate it with the use of instances from the text will be followed by a critical analysis of the role of religion in the memoir. The final section will investigate how the text genders the conflict and presents a Kashmiri Muslim woman’s everyday encounters with violence, ending on a brief attempt to locate the memoir in the larger corpus of women’s writings from militarised zones across regions and periods.

2. The Kashmir Conflict and Indian English Writing2

The crisis in Kashmir, which is at least as old as the partition of India, needs to be understood from a historical point of view. The end of British rule in India in 1947 coincided with a violent partition that resulted in the formation of a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan, while the Maharaja of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, who was initially hesitant to join either, later signed a treaty of accession that made Kashmir a part of India after attacks from Pakistani tribal armies. The United Nations Security Council3, while recommending a ceasefire in the region, also demanded a referendum on the status of the territory, which never materialised. On 17 August 1949, Article 370 came into force, which conferred Kashmir with its own constitution and relative autonomy. Despite Kashmir legally remaining a part of India, Pakistani and Chinese forces retained their presence in different parts of the region, which led to multiple battles against India in the 1960s and 1970s. The contentious assembly elections in 1987 led to the rise of an insurgency in Kashmir, primarily led by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), which has continued to remain active to date. In December 1989, JKLF kidnapped Dr. Rubiya Sayeed, daughter of the then-Federal Home Minister Mufti Muhammad Saeed, setting off an intensive wave of insurgency and suppression. The year 1989 marked Kashmir’s turn to a crisis that never got entirely resolved (Desmond 2007, p. 5). Starting in 1990, the region was under the governor’s rule for a period of six years, and in 1999, India and Pakistan fought another war in Kargil. The Indian government implemented the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA)4 in the area in 1990, giving the forces the authority to make arbitrary arrests and search properties without warrants. The region witnessed an aggravated deployment of armed forces, multiple waves of widespread insurgency, and protests by civilians in the following decades5.

After the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party, formed a government at the centre in 2014, the crisis in Kashmir has worsened. The BJP also joined the ruling coalition with the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the state for the first time in 2015. In 2016, after the killing of Burhan Wani, the leader of a militant group in Kashmir, by the Indian security forces, a curfew was imposed in Kashmir, which disrupted civilian lives by closing down schools and shutting down internet facilities (The Guardian 2016). Militant activity and protests were met with frequent military interventions in 2016 and 2017. On 5 August 2019, the government of India abrogated Article 370, converting the federal state of Jammu and Kashmir into two separate union territories, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, and imposed a communication blockade that lasted for at least five months. Tens of thousands of armed forces personnel were deployed in the region, and political leaders were placed under house arrest. At least 4000 people were arrested in the two weeks that followed the abrogation (The Hindu 2019). Amit Shah, the Minister of Home Affairs, proclaimed that Article 370 was a “gateway to terrorism” and that through its abrogation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shown Pakistan its place (Jaffrelot 2021, p. 363), revealing how the region has turned into a battleground of aggressive nationalist discourse. This marks yet another episode in the blood-stained history of Kashmir, which remains troubled by massive human rights violations. In the recent parliament election (2024) that witnessed the highest voter turnout in the last 35 years (58.58%, according to the Election Commission of India), the BJP and the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference (JKNC) won two seats each out of the total five of the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Notably, the BJP did not contest any of the seats in the Kashmir valley—Srinagar, Baramulla, or Anantnag. Sheikh Abdul Rashid, an independent candidate currently imprisoned over a terror-funding case, was elected by the Baramulla constituency. Ten years after the last legislative assembly polls, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission of India to conduct elections in Jammu and Kashmir by September 2024 (TOI News Desk 2023). Kashmir remains in the headlines even after the election, as nine pilgrims were killed in an attack on a bus in the Reasi district and five army personnel were killed in Kathua (Ashiq 2024; Mishra 2024).

Observing that the nationalist political discourse is guilty of excluding Kashmir and using it to further its agenda, Mridu Rai argues that a vicious rhetoric has sprung up under the post-2014 majoritarian trend.

“The constructed symbol of the violent Kashmiri Muslim—for whom a ‘state of exception’ is declared, putting them beyond the pale of ordinary laws and the entitlement to human rights—has been useful for instituting a social contract among some citizens that creates India as an orderly, secular, non-violent democratic nation.”

(Rai 2019, p. 268)

The political rhetoric around Kashmir under the BJP government resorts to branding it as a dangerous land, whether it is Modi’s comment that bullets have been the norm in Kashmir (Rai 2019, p. 267), or the then-army chief General Bipin Rawat’s warning that the “local boys”, if not kept away from terrorism, will be subjected to “helter-skelter” by the forces (p. 273). Major Leetul Gogoi was accused of tying a Kashmiri youth, Farooq Ahmad Dar, to an army jeep’s bonnet and using him as a human shield, following which he was awarded the Chief of Army Staff’s Commendation (COAS) card for “sustained efforts in CI (counter insurgency) operations” (Singh 2017). It is worth noting that the use of a human shield by the army is celebrated while the insurgents have often been criticised for their alleged use of Kashmiri civilians as human shields (Qadri and Inzamam 2021), emphasising how Kashmiri lives and bodies are at the mercy of the state and the insurgents.

The plight of Kashmir has inspired volumes of fiction and non-fiction, ranging from romantic novels to accounts of brutal violence. The representation of the Kashmir conflict in popular cinema, especially Bollywood, has been highly problematic due to choosing to neglect the historicity of the context, only to resort to romanticization (Kabir 2009). Kashmir’s on-screen image as a hub of terrorism has undermined the long and sustained calls for peace and justice. Ananya Jahanara Kabir reads Roja (1994), Mission Kashmir (2000), and Yahaan (2005) as Bollywood’s post-1989 representations of Kashmir as a dangerous terrain of terrorists that demands patriotic acts of rescue (2009). Indian writings in English have engaged with the crisis in Kashmir, which has found its way into globally acclaimed works such as Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) and Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). There has been an inrush of writings related to the conflict in recent times, widening the discourse on Kashmir.

The last decade itself produced numerous fictional works in English alone, partially or wholly set in Kashmir, such as The Collaborator (2011) and The Book of Golden Leaves (2014) by Mirza Waheed, The Half Mother (2014) and Scattered Souls (2014) by Shahanaz Basheer, The Garden of Solitude (2011) by Siddhartha Gigoo, Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) by Malik Sajad, The Lamentations of a Sombre Sky (2016) by Manan Kapoor, Gul Gulshan Gulfam (2017) by Pran Kishore, The Far Field (2019) by Madhuri Vijay, A Bit of Every Thing (2020) by Sandeep Raina, and The Plague Upon Us (2020) by Shabir Ahmad Mir. Notable non-fiction works published in the same period include Kashmir: A Case of Freedom (2011) by Tariq Ali, Kashmir: The Unwritten History (2011) and Understanding Kashmir and Kashmiris (2015) by Christopher Snedden, Article 370: A Constitutional History of Jammu and Kashmir (2011) and The Kashmir Dispute 1947–2012 (2014) by A. G. Noorani, Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir (2012) by Sanjay Kak, Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir (2013) by Rahul Pandita, Do you Remember Kunan Poshpora? (2016), a collection of essays by Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Munaza Rashid, Natasha Rather, and Samreena Mushtaq, Kashmir’s Untold Story: Declassified (2019) by Iqbal Chand Malhotra, and A Desolation Called Peace: Voices from Kashmir (2019) and Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (2019) by Ather Zia. The abundance of writing on Kashmir published in English alone reveals the global readership and attention that the region continues to draw.

While Peer’s Curfewed Nights (2010) is a teenage boy’s experience of the conflict years, when he identified with the cause of insurgency and even wanted to join a separatist group at one point, Bashir’s work genders the conflict-ridden adolescent experience, focusing on how domestic spaces in particular are affected. Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots (2013) and Siddhartha Gigoo’s A Long Season of Ashes (2024) are recent memoirs that capture the horror of the 1990 exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, a Hindu Brahmin community that lived in the Kashmir valley. While these memoirs share the timeline with Rumours and also tell a chilling story of human suffering, they represent the experiences of a different community that was forced to flee the valley in the wake of the rising insurgency, militarisation, and the consequent hostilities in the region.

3. Everyday Forms of Violence: The Militarisation of Kashmir

Under the indefinite standstill that could be termed a prolonged “state of exception”, where a crisis is always imminent, Kashmiris are never allowed to step outside the limits set by the state and its armed forces and are coerced into leading “bare lives”, a condition where human beings survive without basic rights (Agamben 1998). The 2022 annual report on internet shutdowns across the world by Surfshark noted that Kashmir has been “facing unprecedented internet restrictions since 2019”. The 42 shutdowns in the Jammu and Kashmir region alone in 2022 were found to be more than in any other nation (Sharma 2023). The fiction and non-fiction works from Kashmir discuss the ground reality of Kashmir’s dire crisis, which also involves identitarian conflict. The change in Kashmir’s political landscape in the late 1980s that led to at least a decade of clashes has, allegedly, caused an increase in militancy among Kashmiri youth and the aggressive deployment of armed forces in the area, equipped with both ammunition and relative impunity. AFSPA empowers the forces with the right to raid homes and arrest citizens over suspicion of involvement in militancy (Ministry of Home Affairs 1958). This has opened doors for gross human rights violations on the military’s part.

AFSPA is the legal component of the larger threat that Kashmir’s social life was facing—militarisation. The popular image of Kashmir as a hub of “terrorism” that needs to be controlled (Pal 2021, p. 4) helps opinions sway the state’s way without much consideration to the complications of its geopolitics. Military practices thus overlap with, if not entirely engulf, the day-to-day lives of people under the conditions of prolonged warfare. Allia Anjum observes the effects of “militarisation” and “militarism” on the people of Kashmir in the context of conflict-related sexual violence (Anjum 2018). While militarisation denotes the expansion of military interventions, militarism privileges the military system over “civilian life”. Militarisation, as Cock (1989, p. 51) argues, denotes the organisation of “social relationships around war”, a system that “legitimates state violence as the solution to conflict”, and the penetration of the military into “more and more social arenas”. As the conflict gets longer, military interventions in everyday lives become normalised. Frequent violence leads to further militarisation and makes the military a constant presence in both the private and social affairs of Kashmiris. Mushtaq argues that according to IPTK-APDP6 report, militarisation aims to “attain an even stronger presence in the everyday lives of people by having access to their social spheres, setting the standards of the services they receive, and, in certain cases, even restricting or directing their choices of employment (Mushtaq 55)”

It is impossible to overlook the effects of militarisation on Kashmiris while reading works that discuss the conflict in the area. The concept of militarisation aids us in understanding the impact of conflict-related restrictions on the lives of Kashmiris and serves as a framework that facilitates inquiries into the narratives of people in the region. In conflict zones, as Mushtaq (2018, p. 56) argues, lines between home and outside are blurred, and the idea of “home” is dissociated from its connotation of a “safe space”. As it entered its phase of militarisation by the beginning of 1990s following the disputed assembly elections in 1987, Kashmir’s homes became prone to unannounced raids. The fact that the sense of security that we tend to associate with the idea of “home” ceases to exist illustrates how far the violent conflict intervenes in the everyday reality of Kashmir. When the home–outside binary is no longer applicable, it “makes gendered constructs of identity especially prominent” (Mushtaq 2018, p. 54). Different authors have addressed the plight of women in conflict zones with the use of the intersectional framework, parts of which are applicable in the case of Kashmir as well (Mushtaq 2018, p. 55). Intersectional approaches investigate the relations of power associated with different socio–political identities and disclose different layers of oppression, rather than limiting experiences to singular, definitive identities.

The idea of surfacing gender in the analysis of discourses surrounding warfare is applicable in the case of Kashmir. Giles and Hyndman (2004) observed how gender relations are exploited to “incite, exacerbate, and fuel violence” (as cited in Mushtaq 2018, p. 54). Cynthia Enloe (2014) remarked that men living in dangerous worlds are assumed to be protectors, while women are to be protected and kept safe at home (Mushtaq 2018, p. 55). The crisis of women in Kashmir can only be understood in relation to their religious identity, making an intersectional analysis relevant. For example, a Kashmiri Muslim woman’s experiences in the conflict zone differ from those of someone from the Kashmiri Pandit community, given the character of the conflict.

“As Asia Watch (1993: 1) notes women have been subjected to physical violence, including torture and beating, for accusations of links to militants or during crackdowns. Women have also been subjected to psychological violence in terms of constant threats to their lives and dignity in a militarised environment. This is in addition to the exacerbated economic deprivation faced by them in such a system”.

(Mushtaq 2018, p. 56)

The idea of militarisation and how it turns homes into frontiers, transforms every part of Kashmir’s social and private life, and affects women in particular could be useful in understanding writings on Kashmir in general and memoirs in particular. Since a “memoir can be a repository for witnesses’ accounts of historical events in a way that fiction, for all of its range and power, cannot” (Couser 2012, p. 21), it is possible to read Bashir’s memoir, which speaks about her engagement with the crisis in Kashmir, using this framework.

4. The Impossibility of Life: Curfew and Childhood

Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir is an account of adolescence during the region’s tumultuous years of conflict and presents a microcosm of suffering from a young girl’s perspective. Many works, including Peer’s Curfewed Night, have attempted deeply personal retellings of the Kashmiri experience. Farah Bashir, a former photojournalist with Reuters who currently works as a communications consultant, was born and raised in Kashmir amidst its crisis. Bashir’s debut book tells how the changes in the region rocked the lives of ordinary Kashmiri Muslims by recounting events from her own life. The publisher’s website calls the book an “unforgettable account of Bashir’s adolescence spent in Srinagar in the 1990s” (HarperCollins India n.d.). Divided into six chapters that include a set of vignettes, her mournful narrative retains continuity. The book was released when Kashmir returned to the headlines following the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir by the Union government. With restrictions imposed on movement and communication, the media discourse on Kashmir saw a surge by the end of the last decade (Philipose 2023). Fictional and non-fictional works that discuss the crisis also found avid readership in these years, as mentioned above. Several fictional works written in English and set in Kashmir have been published recently, as shown above, disclosing the growing relevance of the literature based on the region.

Rumours is about the “ordinariness” of violence in Kashmir and how violence has become a feature of the everyday. The entire narrative pans across chapters named after different hours of the day, starting from “evening” and ending curiously in “afterlife”, alluding to the adaptation of the Makhdoom Mohiuddin7 ghazal by Agha Shahid Ali that it is named after.

“Rumours of spring—they last from dawn till dusk”.

(Ali 2009, p. 228)

The narrator tries to gather bits of memories when faced with the death of her grandmother, Bobeh—of how everything used to be and was profoundly transformed after the clashes started off in the valley in 1989. Her reminiscence at a funeral is more about the demise of peace in Kashmir than the literal demise of Bobeh. It is about how every aspect of Kashmiri life was affected by the conflict, and how the mere act of moving around one’s house turned into a dangerous act that put one’s life on the line. It is also about how a woman feels in a conflict zone, where violence metamorphoses into everyday forms. Bashir refuses to present the narrative as the diary of a mourner but delves into the sensibilities of a young girl and explores love, tradition, and politics, even when shackled by political oppression. It is a coming-of-age memoir that narrates her experiences as an adolescent girl in Kashmir, only in unbelievably crude circumstances.

In the memoir, upon her grandmother’s demise, a girl in Kashmir ponders over the curfew-ridden decade. She lives in a world where anyone could go missing, be attacked, or be killed at any time: “Firing of tear gas had become the norm” (p. 4). One had to take curfew passes to leave their homes, and return was not guaranteed, for there could be a shoot-at-sight order prevalent. “It felt like a miracle” (p. 35) when their phone lines worked, but whenever it did, there was panic in the air over the possible sad news. People had to move cautiously behind closed windows, even inside their homes, wary of bullets and shells. Houses with bunkers were occupied by the army, and forced evictions and detentions were common. Their public spaces, the streets, were occupied by the army, and their private spaces, the houses, were not safe from danger either. A raid or fire always seemed likely, a threat to life imminent. For the people of the valley who were denied social life, security, and peace and lived in constant fear, there was no escape from the conflict, physically or psychologically.

“We put up heavy crewel curtains with thick linings and added a layer of woollen blankets on the latticed wooden windows, but even that did not stop the unwanted entry of those steps which pushed further, inch upon inch, into our kitchen which overlooked the street. From there, they stomped on our temples and finally entered our heads. The marching seeped into our silences, punctuated our conversations with pauses, which, in turn, jumbled our thoughts and our language.”

(p. 35)

They remained shocked in the face of the crisis. Unlike the soldiers and the militants, they were not trained to handle such situations. They doubted their routines, persistently wondering if any of them had violated the curfew rules. In one instance, a shootout throws the narrator into a stream of anxiety and numbs her. She wonders how to respond—whether to duck or run away. In the end, she stands frozen, unable to react.

The impossibility of life in the region is especially evident in the part where the narrator talks about her romantic affair with Vaseem. In the absurdity of violence, what kills her love is the conflict itself—a burnt post office. In a chapter that, again, alludes to a poem by Agha Shahid Ali, “The Country Without a Post Office”, the narrator reveals how her communication with Vaseem through letters was disrupted by the bombing of the nearby post office (p. 60).

“Only silence can now trace my letters to him.

Or in a dead office, the dark panes”.

(Ali 2000, p. 26)

The trauma of the conflict haunts Kashmiris in various forms. On sleepless nights, the narrator would start plucking her hair out (p. 12). As a kid, to escape the eeriness of the circumstances, she engaged in what sounds like an act of self-harm. The trauma of constantly encountering violence in everyday life affected her psychologically, leading to this abnormal act. The memoir narrates heartbreaking events where people got murdered in the streets, went missing, or got tortured, such as that of Affi Bhaiyya (p. 139), Rabia’s father (p. 162), or Naseer and Nasreen (p. 168). Anecdotes of terror have, thus, become their modern folklore, and even the games their children play are war-related, with guns, arresting, and kidnapping involved, revealing how violent conflicts damage a region and its people culturally, resulting in long-lasting consequences. As the narration goes on to tell us about more and more deaths, the numbness of the storyteller gets to us as well. In the narrative world, the reader is conditioned to treat the details of unfathomable violence as ordinary occurrences. The frequency of injustice is conveyed with chilling simplicity. This ordinariness in style makes the reader realise the harshness of the reality thrust upon the people of Kashmir—the recurrence and senselessness of brutality from which no escape was possible.

The narrative presents an account of Kashmir’s militarisation. The military becomes the most dominant social institution that dictates the lives of people in the narrative. Soldiers enter and raid houses without warrants and make arbitrary arrests. With the military value system prevalent, dissent and protests are suppressed. This value system also entirely engulfs the everyday lives of the people, as illustrated by the events in the memoir. With shootouts and searches normalised, home no longer feels like a safe space and turns into nothing short of a frontier. The descriptions of the narrator’s fear of and hesitation for movement inside her own house resemble the crisis of a non-combatant on an actual battlefield. This reveals the severity of militarisation in the region and its impact on the lives of people.

Analyses of fictional works have revealed the underlying necropolitics of the crisis (Morton 2013; Ghosh 2018), leaning on Achille Mbembé’s theorisation of “death-worlds”, where “vast populations are subjected to the conditions of life, conferring upon them the status of living-dead” (Mbembé 2003, p. 40). In militarised spaces, Mbembé observed a permanent condition of “living in pain”. The struggle of Kashmiris has, arguably, transcended the realm of biopolitics to that of necropolitics (Ghosh 2018). In 2009, in a shocking finding that exposed the necropower’s “maximal economy” of destruction in Kashmir (Mbembé 2003, p. 34), “the investigations of the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (IPTK) uncovered 2700 unmarked graves and over 2943 unidentified bodies from fifty-five villages across the Valley”, many of which were of local Kashmiris who were subjected to extra-judicial killings or forced disappearances by Indian security forces (Rai 2019, p. 260).

With the presence of AFSPA, Kashmir is automatically deemed a “disturbed area”, perhaps a statist way of declaring a “state of exception” (Morton 2013, p. 24), where “forms of biopower and necropower fuse in peculiarly situated ways to construct the postcolonial sovereign power” (Ghosh 2018, p. 45). In Rumours, the narrator comes back from school to find a commotion outside her school, and she immediately assumes that a shootout must have occurred, causing the death of a kin. She anticipates turning into “collateral damage” (p. 120), a term that explains the loss of civilians during military operations. The narrator is surrounded by news or the recounting of gory deaths, such as when her mother dreadfully recounts how a young woman was “blown into smithereens” in a blast (p. 124) or when the corpses of three boys show up (p. 139). This condition of the expendability of Kashmir’s commoners and the pervasiveness of death lie at the heart of the work, revealing the play of necropolitics in Kashmir.

5. The Kashmiri Muslim Childhood: Religious Identity in the Memoir

With the narrative being about the plight of a Muslim woman in conflict-stricken Kashmir, the author’s religious identity is a recurring element in the memoir. Kashmir, a Muslim-majority area in a nation that is going through a period of aggressive Hindu nationalism, has continued to be a burning issue to this day. The recent abrogation of Article 370 by the Hindu nationalist BJP government was followed by the imposition of a communication blockade in the region and a subsequent unrest, which led to several protests and arrests (The Hindu 2019). Bashir’s poignant account of her childhood is about the difficulty of living through an unrest similar to this. It also reflects the difficulty of bearing Muslimhood in the aggravating hostility of a radical Hindu nation with riots, vigilantism, and hate speech, turning the memoir’s narrative, which is located temporally in the 1990s, rather contemporary. Several scholars, including Christophe Jaffrelot, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Jyotirmaya Sharma, have acknowledged the turn of India towards an ethnic state where minorities are villainized and targeted (Jaffrelot 2021; Hansen and Roy 2022; Sharma 2007). Jaffrelot has termed this tendency “ethnic democracy” in his work, where Muslims are systematically disqualified as Indian citizens and are the “epitome of the other” (Jaffrelot 2021, p. 194). He observes the abrogation of Article 370 as a move towards the unitary ethnostate envisaged by the cultural outfit Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (p. 360). The Kashmiri Muslim identity, which is at the centre of the political conflict, is constantly evoked by the violence in the state. Bashir does not identify with the extremist insurgents either. Her position is that of the helpless commoner trapped between state violence and insurgency, while strongly condemning the harmful effects of militarisation on Kashmir’s peace.

The narration keeps leaning on the Qur’an and the tenets of Islamic belief throughout. The night of the author’s grandmother’s death reminds her of Shab e-Barat, or the night of atonement observed on the 15th night of Sha’ban8, when the Muslims would sacrifice their sleep to repent their sins, as well as those of their ancestors, and pray for forgiveness. She also recalls the Eid of 1989, the festive day on which the author decided to abstain from festivities thereafter. Eid, the most significant festive day among Muslims, turns into a painful reminder of the violence etched in the author’s memory (Bashir 2022, 6)9. A crackdown on the day turned their prayer ground into a “martyr’s graveyard,” and the author’s remarks reveal the trauma induced by the incident (p. 8). She “began associating inexplicable melancholy with Eid, and the heaviness that settled on the heart that day sank deeper each year” (p. 6). In an attempt to bear this ruthlessness of everyday life, the narrator’s community turns to the Qur’an for solace. Different chapters of the Qur’an are mentioned in the work. Hoping to be protected from evil, her family would resort to Ayat-al-kursi (p. 89), a verse that asserts the supremacy of Allah as the omnipotent lord (2:255), and Surah Fheel, the 105th chapter that illustrates the power of the lord by evoking the incident when he defended Kaaba10 against invaders by sending a flock of birds. When the narrator gets stuck in a life-threatening crossfire, parts of Surah Fheel come to her involuntarily, in the way that faith often shelters its believers in times of crisis (p. 116). In the memoir, those in distress keep leaning on their only God. Mayhems are termed Karbala11 (p. 47; p. 121; and p. 128), which refers to the disastrous war in 680 CE in which the Umayyad Caliphate defeated and massacred Shias, leading to an annual commemorative ritual of Shia Muslims worldwide (Hussain 2005, p. 79). The memoir shows how Kashmiri Muslims rely on the supernatural at a time of unnatural violence, as evident in a chapter titled “Surah Fheel: Faith in the Faith” (p. 115). Verses that are supposed to be recited on occasions of crisis are easily memorised as the conflict presents plenty of chances to turn to them. The narrator interprets the religious doctrines in her own ways and constructs her own idiosyncratic beliefs (p. 118).

Apart from instances of textual Islam, regional superstitions and folklore also find their place in the narrative. One such instance is when the narrator’s mother tied knots in her shawl, chanting Qur’anic verses to make her wishes come true. Given the dire crisis in the valley, her dupattas (shawls) were full of such tiny knots. In 1991, when the crisis escalated, the narrator watched her mother tie knots frantically.

“That evening, all four corners of Mother’s dupatta were full of knots. She’d helplessly break out into Ya Shah-i-Hamdan, Ya Rasul Allah, Peer-e-Dastgeer, Ya Hazrat-e-Sultan aloud, intermittently, invoking as many Sufi saints and prophets as she could remember.”

(p. 173)

Many of the stories that Bobeh tells her grandchildren invoke the magical powers of the Sufi saints. They would often visit the shrines of saints like Makhdoom Saeb12 and Baba Reshi13 (p. 182). According to the grandmother, Pasikdaar, the spirit who cherishes purity in Kashmiri folklore, is in charge of watching over every house. “Faith is as potent as the saint,” Bobeh would say (p. 183). The narrative shows us how religion influences Kashmiri life, not only in the form of textual teachings but also through local myths. The curious diversity within a religion as all-pervasive as Islam is evident in the spectrum of belief systems and practices among Kashmiri Muslims alone.

The memoir does not hesitate to point at the tyranny of religion either. The narrator mentions how her grandmother forbade her from drawing pictures. Watching movies was also considered un-Islamic by some of the community members, and there were fundamentalist groups that dictated the right ways to live. But in practice, believers negotiated with such restrictions and found ways to exert their freedom. The author recalls when all the saloons were closed down during the rise of Dukhtaran-e-Millat (trans. Daughters of the Nation), a fundamentalist group founded in 1987, and other hardliner factions that denounced Western ways and “ordered girls and women to cover their heads with scarves” (p. 56). Violating dress codes at schools often led to punishments such as monetary fines and public shaming. The narrator also recalls the incident when a couple of boys attacked her classmate, Nuzhat, for “wearing jeans” and leaving her head uncovered (p. 57). These instances reveal how the patriarchy worked in the society in spite of the conflicts in the region that threatened lives, revealing the intersectional marginalisation of women and girls. The bodies of the women were monitored by religious doctrines, societal norms, and the invasive state apparatuses simultaneously, thereby denying them bodily autonomy and agency. But this later gave way to change as these factions weakened.

While religions, as all-encompassing systems, can be confining, they leave space for multitudes of disagreements when it comes to practice. While the narrator negotiates with the rigidity of fundamentalism, she also holds onto the aspects of her faith in difficult times. Thus, Bashir’s memoir shows how Muslims in the region hold on strongly to their belief systems, even as their very religious identity is of utmost importance in the conflict. Their responses to shocking occurrences involve prayers and a spiritually charged hope for redemption. Their Islamic belief system also encompasses several local myths. The Muslim identity of the narrator plays out as a central theme in the memoir due to the character of the conflict in the region. It, curiously, mirrors contemporary India, where the Muslim identity is incessantly dragged into the mainstream political discourse.

6. Women in War Zones

Subtitled “A Girlhood in Kashmir”, rather than “Childhood in Kashmir”, the narrative explores the difficulties of being a woman in a conflict zone. The events of Kunan Poshpora in 1991, when the Indian security forces allegedly raped tens of women in two Kashmiri villages, discloses the horror the women in this war zone have been subjected to. The tragic episode of Kunan Poshpora is mentioned in the book, where the names of these two villages—Kunan and Poshpora—are pronounced in fear. As her mother was consoling her cousin, she added in a whisper, “I too have heard. Yes, Kunan Poshpora. Boozum” (p. 37).

Sexual assault has been recognised as a weapon of war and was declared a threat to “global security and peace” in the landmark 2008 resolution by the United Nations, which condemned the rampancy of rape in conflict areas14. The conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) paradigm15 can be applied to the incidents in Kashmir as well. Bashir’s work painstakingly sketches a picture of womanhood in Kashmir. Apart from her own experiences, she also delves into the suffering of other women around her, presenting a more nuanced picture. The security forces constantly stared at the women whenever they ventured out into the curfew-ridden streets, which made them feel extremely uncomfortable. The terrifying gaze of the densely militarised streets of Kashmir perpetually surveilled them. The narrator remarks how she felt “naked” while passing the check posts (p. 106). They made her feel so disturbed that she wanted to turn ugly or invisible to evade their penetrating gazes.

“I thought maybe if I looked ugly and less pleasant, the men would not look at me, and I’d be safe. I wouldn’t wash my face for days. I didn’t want to look attractive in any way at all, lest it invited undue attention and that indescribable guilt. I wanted to somehow become invisible.”

(p. 59)

She dreamed of a safe life, safe from both patriarchal violence and the troubles of military occupation, which was denied to her. She wanted “not to be thrown acid like Nuzhat, not to be stared at by the troops” (p. 59). Nuzhat was attacked by two boys on a scooter in a highly militarised area called Nehru Park; she was wearing jeans, and her head was uncovered at the time. Religious fundamentalism added another layer of oppression to the lives of Kashmiri Muslim women, repressing them further. As a girl with irregular periods, the narrator had to go through sleepless nights and unexpected cramps. During the curfews, she was afraid to even move around to get medicine for her pain.

“It was impossible to move about anywhere in the house without causing alarm. All the staircases inside the house were made of wood. Even tiptoeing on those made them creak. Who knew which of those noises would travel outside and alert the troops to barge inside the house? Sounds could attract a volley of bullets fired in your direction, unwarranted. It was a thought that kept me stuck to my mattress, writhing in pain.”

(p. 72)

She was reminded of an incident in the neighbourhood whenever she thought of getting up. An asthmatic old woman was shot down when she got up at night to get her medicines, and “her heart was neatly pierced” by bullets (p. 73). Reaching for medicine at night appeared like an irresponsible act that would call for horror. That was the extent of the absurdity that she was going through: “I’d have rather continued to lie quietly, cry, and let my hair soak up the tears through the night than attract dangers for the family” (p. 73).

The act of plucking hair was the narrator’s response to the distress caused by the curfew and the fear around her. The conflict not only curbed going outside but also wrecked the inner lives of the civilians. Nida, the narrator’s cousin, held her own neck tightly in sleep, traumatised by the events around her, pointing to the grave mental health issues that such violent conditions could cause (p. 158). Armed forces broke into their house for raids in the name of protecting the region from security threats. But, ironically, when they left, everything in the house had to be rearranged; the coal in the storage room had to be separated from the rice grains. Thus, the raids in homes, which violated the private, domestic spaces, troubled the women more, who had to run around to keep everything in order. While the first search had left them pale, the narrator found that her mother remained stoic afterwards. There were a total of nine searches in a span of four months. As her father remarked, bolts and doors were rendered useless by the search parties, who had ammunition at their disposal (p. 99).

While the memoir is about the suffering of Kashmir in general, it also takes effort to unveil the horror that the women in the valley were forced to endure during the crisis. In the face of war, the marginalised are rendered further vulnerable. Conflict situations work differently for the victims depending on their gender identities. As Samreen Mushtaq argues, there is a need to surface discussions on gender while responding to the narratives from such regions. In popular discourses on identitarian conflicts such as that in Kashmir, women are generally portrayed as helpless victims. With harassment rampant, the nuances of their everyday suffering are either ignored or sidelined. It would be unjust to limit such discussions solely to the brutal cases of rape. Bashir’s memoir, rather than resorting to the graphic narratives of violence against women that she must have heard, turns to the everyday realities, revealing the agony of living through the conflict as a woman. Women who are meant to be “kept safe” at home no longer feel so when homes turn into frontiers. Everyday violence against them includes, as Bashir’s memoir reveals, a denial of medical care and support, as well as gazes and harassment at the check posts. Thus, the memoir effectively zooms into Kashmiri reality and shows how gender is crucial in contemporary discussions of conflict.

7. Memoirs by Women in Conflict Zones

Memoirs of women from conflict zones have been analysed as trauma narratives and from feminist viewpoints. Rumours of Spring belongs to the corpus of works that are written by women in warzones. The Holocaust memoirs by women, despite their idiosyncrasies, share striking similarities owing to the narrators’ subject position as double victims. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl16, one of the most widely read memoirs ever written, tells the story of a young girl’s tryst with the horrors of the Nazi invasion, and it remains the most impactful and popular cultural expression of the Holocaust to date (Couser 2012, p. 30). Frank’s work exemplifies the power of memoir as a genre that presents an experience of political oppression to great effect with shocking authenticity, imparting the horrors of the Holocaust to generations of readers and evoking compassionate responses.

The extent of militarisation (one soldier per twenty-five civilians) and the identitarian angle in Kashmir have often led to comparisons with Palestine, another conflict zone notorious for an extensive network of checkpoints and human rights violations (Osuri 2016). Goldie Osuri has argued that Kashmir is another Palestine in the making (2016). The scholarship on these regions has explored the broad similarities and differences between them (Zia 2020, p. 1). Bashir, in her interview with Shakir Mir, reveals the influence of Saud Amiry’s17 Palestinian memoir, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah Diaries, on her work (Mir 2021). These two works, 18 years apart in terms of publication, stay close to each other in spirit. In the realm of extensive conflict, their personal stories attain political significance as narratives of resistance. Amiry’s memoir is an account of the difficulties faced by a woman in the face of the Israeli invasion of Ramallah in the West Bank region (Amiry 2006). In the preface, Amiry claims that the work is an account of everyday life under occupation during the last two decades of the 20th century. With the Ramallah region under Israeli occupation, Palestinians suffocate under numerous restrictions. She is often “not in the mood” to explain herself to the intrusive probes of Israeli security officers, staring at them and even talking back to register her resistance (p. 7). Amiry navigates through the painfully bureaucratic reality of occupied Palestine with her anger and sense of sarcasm. The memoir is filled with instances of Amiry’s encounters with Israel’s military and bureaucracy, such as when an Israeli soldier tears up her visitor’s permit (p. 35) or when she walks in, agitated, to an army camp demanding an identity card from an Israeli captain (p. 45). In a notable instance, Amiry responds to a humiliating interrogation by a group of soldiers with a sharp stare, which unsettles them (p. 76).

“Do you Now understand why we act deaf, blind and mute for most of our lives? Do you realize what it would be like if we started acting like normal human beings every day, every hour, every minute or second in which you have violated our rights?”

(p. 74)

She also evades a checkpost by claiming to be the driver for a dog with a legal permit, even though she is without one (p. 117). This memoir shows how occupation disrupts and wrecks the everyday lives of Palestinians. While Bashir’s bildungsroman is about the troubles of growing up under curfew, Amiry’s memoir is about an adult woman’s ways of standing up to it. In her attempts to rescue her mother-in-law from the Israeli forces of Ariel Sharon, the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Amiry deals with the absurdities of invasion with courage and humour. She argues her way through some checkpoints; she also gets into trouble for refusing to stop staring at a soldier. While Bashir’s memoir draws out a picture of helpless agony, Amiry brings ironic humour to the narrative, which questions the absurd state of the world where “a dog” can roam freely but a human being cannot.

8. Conclusions

Kashmir’s continuing agony has inspired volumes of fiction and non-fiction works. Rumours of a Spring deals with the experiences of an adolescent girl in the conflict-ridden region of Kashmir. Militarisation, a process by which the army dominates every aspect of a community’s social being, blurs the lines between private and public lives and spaces. The memoir illustrates how Kashmir’s homes ceased to be safe spaces, especially for girls and women, whose sufferings are often neglected in discourses related to the conflict. Analysing the narrative from an intersectional viewpoint, with the use of the concept of militarisation, discloses how everyday forms of violence disrupt and deform Kashmir’s individual lives as well as social life. Women’s experiences are more nuanced than the reports of harassment that appear in the media. In Bashir’s memoir, her experience ranges from unbearable gazes by the armed forces to the traumatising violence all around. The everyday struggle by Kashmiri Muslim women against militarisation, religious fundamentalism, and the patriarchy entangled in both, demands intersectional readings. The memoir thus works as an effective recounting of conflict years in Kashmir from a subjective point of view. The memoir also dwells on the way religion works as a respite for its believers in times of crisis. It is an important work that narrates the experience of being a Muslim woman in an India of aggressive majoritarianism. It is also possible to locate the work in the corpus of works by women in conflict zones. Amiry’s work, which has served as an inspiration for Bashir, shows notable differences in style and context. Despite such differences, these memoirs engage with the experiences of women in conflict zones, which deserve further attention and analysis.