Abstract
On 16 June 2013, a new Facebook group, The Kashmir Bicycle Movement (KBM), appeared. Its aims were ‘to reclaim streets of Kashmir for people, displace cars and restore pride in riding bicycles’ (Kashmir Bicycle Movement 2013). Through photographs, commentary, and organization and reportage of mass cycling events, KBM combined ecocritical consciousness with a concern specific to Jammu and Kashmir: the long-term effects of political conflict as reflected through an alienation of Kashmiri people from their natural environment. The cycle promised resistance not just to modernity’s accelerated temporalities, but also to the conflict’s impact on a Kashmiri’s relationship to Kashmir. Unsurprisingly for this volatile region, KBM’s freshness of purpose was from the start compromised by vulnerability to political violence. A month later (19 July 2013), a post announced the cancellation of a mass bicycle ride through downtown Srinagar, which was to have reclaimed an urban space marked by heritage monuments, indigenous protests as well military and State-sponsored demonstrations (Kabir 2013). This was to be KBM’s last effective post.
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Notes
- 1.
Many of the themes in Malik Sajad’s internet-based graphic work analysed in this chapter are developed in his recent graphic novel Munnu: A boy from Kashmir (2015), which appeared too late to be discussed here.
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Kabir, A.J. (2016). The New Pastoral: Environmentalism and Conflict in Contemporary Writing from Kashmir. In: Tickell, A. (eds) South-Asian Fiction in English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_11
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