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Nyla Ali Khan is visiting professor at the University of Oklahoma and is the author of The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism and Islam, Women, and the Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan , and is the editor of the essay collection The Parchment of Kashmir: History, Society, and Polity . In the interview below with Natana DeLong-Bas (Boston College), Khan describes her efforts to incorporate the previously marginalized voices of women. Khan’s emphasis on the oral traditions of Jammu and Kashmir (J & K) is aimed at subverting the traditional narrative of her native region, which, as she explains, has been distorted by competing interests.
Natana DeLong-Bas: One of the most exciting aspects of your work is your use of oral evidence in your research, especially in Islam, Women, and the Violence in Kashmir. Can you tell us what this process entailed, and what trends or surprises you encountered in your interactions with women from the Jammu and Kashmir region?
Nyla Ali Khan: As I explain in my Preface and Introduction to Islam, Women, and the Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan, I wanted to emphasize women’s perspectives on issues of nationalist ideologies, religious freedom, democratic participation, militarization, intellectual freedom, judicial and legal structures in a milieu that does not co-opt them into mainstream political and cultural discourses or First-World feminist agendas. So, I employed, particularly in chapters 2 and 5 of my book, self-reflexive and historicized forms, drew on my heritage and kinship in Kashmir in order to explore the construction and employment of gender in secular nationalist, religious nationalist, and ethnonationalist discourses in the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
I underlined, at the outset, that the focus in my monograph on Kashmir was on the gendered activism of the women of the Kashmir province in the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J & K). The battlefield of armed insurgency and counter insurgency has been the Valley of Kashmir, and the political, economic, and sociocultural dimensions of the conflict have rendered asunder the fabric of that province of J & K, more than the other two parts of the state, which are Jammu and Ladakh. Also, considering my analysis of gendered violence and gendered activism in Kashmir is interwoven with my own personal and intellectual trajectory, I attempted to explore the struggles of a particular ethnic group, Kashmiri Muslim, in the most conflict-ridden part of the State.
Talking to women from different walks of life and different ideological positions, it struck me that although women of Kashmir have been greatly affected by the armed insurgency and counter insurgency in the region, they are largely absent in decision-making bodies at the local, regional, and national levels. I am painfully aware of the fact that although substantive ethnographic work has been done by local and diasporic scholars on the brunt borne by Kashmiri women during the armed conflict as well as on the atrocities inflicted on women by Indian paramilitary forces, the local police, and some militant organizations, Kashmiri women continue to be near absent at the formal level. It would be foolish to turn a blind eye to this gaping lacuna. In my conversations with several women, I recognized the attention paid to gender-based violence in Kashmir by scholars, ethnographers, and NGOs, but not enough attention is given to the political, economic, and social fall-out of the armed conflict for women. Some of my interviewees pointed out that not enough emphasis is laid on how Kashmiri women of different political, religious, ideological, and class orientations can become resource managers and advocates for other women in emergency and crisis situations.
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