Researching Freedom and Sovereignty in South Asia

Across the world today, historical resentment borne out of neglect, deprivation or violent afflictions has culminated into new forms of communitarian rights, identity politics and imaginations of justice. As a social anthropologist from South Asia researching on Kashmir and the question of freedom and sovereignty, I am invested in exploring how Kashmiri Muslims living in Kashmir valley experience neglect and voice their historical resentments to assert their rights to self-determination.

Itineraries of Freedom : Politics of Life and Resistance in Kashmir

My book project, Itineraries of Freedom: Politics of Life and Resistance in Kashmir, is an ethnographic study of everyday life situated within the contemporary right to self-determination movement, popularly referred to as the movement for Azadi (freedom) in South Asia’s oldest conflict zone. This book develops out of my decade long ethnographic engagement with Kashmir valley. Despite the difficulty in conducting research in a militarized geography and the subsequent Indian state-induced hinderances upon life and work on Kashmir, I have researched and written on everyday life in Kashmir that draws upon over 30 months of fieldwork and follow-up field visits conducted before and after the prolonged lockdown.

My conceptual intervention is focused in exploring the practices that communities undertake to aspire a ‘future’ and ‘good life’ while enduring political violence and uncertainty. It unravels the textured everyday life of a range of people from the Kashmiri Muslim community —from university students, street vendors, women religious scholars, leaders of resistance movement, and state-level bureaucrats to tourist guide and protestors.

Itineraries of Freedom explores how life and resistance against oppression in geographies of violence is animated by individual’s and communities’ drives to navigate through their mundane yet chaotic lives that reflect their aspiration, articulation, and actualization of freedom. Leveraging storytelling as an anthropological method, the ‘Itineraries of Azadi’ in Kashmir reveals how lives submerged in a conundrum of suffering, loss, and helplessness create, maneuver, and live through their journeys to actualize the idea of freedom. This book project offers a rethinking of understandings of the human desire for freedom and political right to dignity and sovereignty, from an unlikely but critical location in the Global South.

Support for research

FMSH visiting fellowship during the summer of 2023, provided me with focused time to relook at my manuscript and revise sections to infuse conversational tone to the book and its arguments. The fellowship provided opportunities to present my work and ideas to colleagues working on South Asia at the EHESS Condorcet Campus that provided me reinvigorated ideas for my book project. Being situated in Paris, also allowed me to meet with other scholars working on South Asia from Germany and Switzerland. The fellowship provided me with valuable opportunity to not only learn from scholars in France but also allowed possibilities to collaborate over various future projects.

Article published in the second issue of the Journal de la FMSH.