On Kashmiri Men: Disappearance, Nonbeing, Islam

Abstract

This paper proposes that we consider the erasure of Kashmiri Muslim men from Indian feminist solidarity discourse. This is a question both of disappearance and of nonbeing. Gender, far from being a self-evident ontological fact, obfuscates; a process explored through the Fanonian notion of “the colonizer’s invitation to identity” and the psychoanalytic concept of the impossibility of sexual difference. A certain grammar of gender—deployed by both the Indian state and the secular liberal-left—covers over the fundamental antagonism of Islam heightened by the occupation. Carceral consensus among seemingly opposed political forces produces Islam as an intensely masculinized threat, against which the precarious Indian project needs to be protected. The Kashmiri militant, always rendered male, simply does not “fit” progressive imaginaries and makes neat solidarities tense, which are themselves emblematic of the colonizer’s terrified consciousness. That this Indian grammar loses coherence when confronted with militant Kashmiri women also reveals how, far from being coherent, gender is a grammar mediated and disarticulated in its relation to Islam. This Indian grammar, this covering over of the drama of nonbeing, justifies the disappearance of the Kashmiri man—rendered excessive and in excess, everywhere and nowhere.