Martin Heidegger first coined the term “worlding” in his 1927 book Being and Time. 4 This destabilizes the dominant understanding of the Kashmir conflict as an internal political matter for India and Pakistan, and instead foregrounds the everyday struggles for survival by Kashmiris living in the conflict zone, highlights their subaltern modes of resistance against oppressive political regimes, and gives voice to the ways in which they imagine effective conflict resolution.

In these, the Kashmir conflict is reimagined in conversation with other global contexts of state oppression and people’s rebellion, like, for example, the Palestinian “intifada,” the 2011 Arab Spring, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in China.

A key strategy recently emergent in such rewritings has been that of “worlding” the conflict. Finally, they reclaim Kashmiri landscapes, histories, and political-cultural imaginaries, and rewrite them through Kashmiri people’s experiences of the conflict and their hopes for the future. Second, they criticize the world’s apathy to the “forgotten war” of Kashmir. First, they challenge the fetishistic gaze of India, Pakistan and China, and their self-serving nationalist histories of Kashmir (Kabir 3). These protests do three important things. 3 However, their voices have only recently (in the last five to eight years), come to public notice because of a decade-long repression of such protests by the Indian state, and censorship by the national and international media. 2 Since the 1990s, Kashmiris living in the Valley and elsewhere in the world have protested against these debilitating conditions by organizing mass rallies on the streets of Kashmir, in print, on film, and on social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. 1 In the last three decades it has been ravaged, trampled, and rendered destitute by conflicting nationalisms (Indian and Pakistani), and militant and military violence.

4 See Sanjay Kak’s “The Fire Is at My Heart: An Introduction” in Until My Freedom Has Come: The New I (.)ġThe Kashmir Valley, bordered to the north and west by Pakistan, to the east by China, and to the south by India, was once world famous for its pristine natural beauty, saffron fields, and hand woven carpets.

3 See essay anthologies like Until Our Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir (Kak) creative- (.).

2 It is important here to make a distinction between militants, insurgents and terrorists, since all (.).

1 Here “Kashmir,” “the Kashmir valley” and “the valley” all refer to the Indian-occupied parts of Kas (.).

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie