Women and Militarisation

We would like to thank the guest editors Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia, and the members of the editorial advisory group of the Review of Women's Studies Mary E John, J Devika, Kalpana Kannabiran, Samita Sen, and Padmini Swaminathan for putting together this issue on " Women and Kashmir.

A new addition to critical Kashmir studies resources: ‘Women and Kashmir: Knowing in Our Own Ways, ‘ published in Review of Women’s Studies, Economic and Political Weekly. An all Kashmiri women-scholars team: Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia as guest co-editors, authors include Mona Bhan, Hafsa Kanjwal , Inshah Malik, Mir Fatimah Kanth, Samreen Mushtaq, Uzma Falak, Essar Batool and Aaliya Anjum.

'What serious scholar of Kashmir could deny the simultaneous existence of human rights abuses and a political problem that needs a political resolution which must involve the Kashmiris themselves? Yet, even something as basic as this is hard to find being reflected in the Indian mainstream media, through which most Indians form their opinions on Kashmir.
We urge the readers of this review issue to move beyond the comfort zone of merely acknowledging the vulnerabilities of the marginalised Kashmiris, by equalising the illicitness of the military and the militants, by thinking past the self-serv- ing machinations of the Indian power brokers at the centre and Kashmiri mainstream politicians at the periphery, and by asking the difficult question: How long must ordinary Kashmiris suffer their traumatic history as endless memory before their calls for freedom and justice are taken seriously enough to warrant a political resolution?
The Kashmiri women herein speak of myriad things: of spectacles and street protests; women’s companionships and female alliances; women’s movements and imaginaries of resistance; the links between militarisation, militarism, and the creation of impunity by the law; competing patriarchies and sexual violence as they seek to break Kashmiri communities; the infrastructures of control that limit their mobilities, bodies, and experiences; public grief at funerals as a challenge to Indian sovereignty over Kashmir; and autobiographies, oral histories, and the textures of political memories.
In the powerful idiom of postcolonial criticality, the ques- tion we should ask is not “Can the Kashmiri women speak?” but rather “Can you hear them?”'

[We would like to thank the guest editors Nitasha Kaul and Ather Zia, and the members of the editorial advisory group of the Review of Women's Studies Mary E John, J Devika, Kalpana Kannabiran, Samita Sen, and Padmini Swaminathan for putting together this issue on " Women and Kashmir."]