| dc.description.abstract | This thesis addresses the everyday experiences of violence and militarization of children and young people living under the Indian occupation of Kashmir. The research builds on the conceptualization of childhood as a site of colonial reproduction (Nandy, 1984; Virura and Cannella, 2004) to examine their experience of India’s settler colonial project in the region. Using feminist, postcolonial and decolonial methodologies, the research is framed by the conceptualization of childhood as ‘being and becomings’ (Uprichard, 2008) and the Kashmiri child as a ‘geopolitical subject’ (Smith, 2013). Through my ethnographic work with 31 children and young people across three districts of Kashmir, the thesis closely examines the spatial, temporal and corporeal sites of the streets, home and school to analyse the experiences of this violent militarization in the everyday lives of these children and young people and their practices and understandings of resistance and citizenship. Public life on the streets in Kashmir is experienced in spaces of fear, everyday violence and resistance. While the routinization of violence and fear is described by children and young people as ‘normal’, it is also subject to their critique and recognised as a tool of violence used by the Indian state. By studying the narratives of the children and young people of the military raids on their homes, the research builds on the work of feminist scholars that challenge the binary between the private and public and between the emotionality and materiality of home. It also examines the violation of the home life of Kashmiris under military occupation through the processes of home unmaking and argues for home remaking as everyday acts of resistance. As intergenerational solidarity plays a pivotal role in the lives of these children and young people, the impact of the occupation is expressed through feelings of trust and mistrust within the neighbourhood. India is further experienced as a colonial force in their lives through their experience of time spent at schools where the disparity between the imposition of democracy and equality and the reality of their lived experiences is most acutely present in the lives of school-going children. They recognize that it is the land and not the people of Kashmir that India wants. Their politics of refusal to leave and their insistence on existence become central to their everyday practices of resistance and highlights their rejection of the status quo of their lives to reclaim citizenship. As the voices of children and young people that I foreground in this thesis attest, they practice resistance against what I argue is India’s military occupation and settler-colonial project in Kashmir of slow genocide. | en_US |
