Wouste Farooq (Master Farooq), known for his profession of tailoring, lived with his wife, daughter, and son in one of the houses destroyed by the Indian military forces. He did not own a shop; instead, he would sew and mend clothes from his attic. On Sundays, he would sell used clothes in Srinagar’s weekly market. Incidentally, Wouste Farooq had renovated his house after it had been destroyed by the massive floods of 2014. On midnight on May 19, 2020, he and his family woke up by a knock at the door and a voice saying, Bahar nikloo! Come out. Indian military officers then barged into his house, and he was asked to take his family into an adjacent alley. It was a Cordon and Search Operation (CASO), and the heavy artillery caused a fire in the neighborhood. Wouste Farooq’s daughter, MF, recalled the incident: “We were scared and left in our night suits. Instead of taking precious things, such as gold and money, my father picked up his sewing machine, saying ye chum rozghar (this is my livelihood).” Along with 12 other families, they took refuge in the house of a neighbor who had a COVID-19-infected patient and a pregnant daughter at home. “At that time, we forgot about COVID, no one wore a mask, and all of us packed in the same room,” said MF. Such intimate and perilous behavior reveals how the everyday lives of Kashmiris were tested when confronted with a choice to survive between war and a pandemic. Wouste Farooq then shifted to his in-law’s house in a suburb of Srinagar called Qamarwari, where he was severely infected with COVID-19. Though he managed to reconstruct his house and rebuilt his life, the trauma caused by the violence led him to experience depression and high blood pressure, which in turn led him to experience a paralytic attack. Subsequently, he had to undergo two consecutive surgeries, after which he lost function in his right hand and his speech became impaired. This is a stark instance of how, during turbulent circumstances, people with limited choices face complex and unfolding ordeals. The violence he endured stripped him of his livelihood and reshaped his life; his body is marked by memories of loss and survival. While looking at the sewing machine in the corner of the room, MF said, “meechine bacheiye, wouste gov mouzurr” (sewing machine was saved, and the Master became disabled).

Kagzaen Loug Narr (Documents burnt down)

In a conflict zone, people retrieve their memories through material possessions, conscious and externalised representations of their very being. Material possessions are active and constitutive parts of a person’s individuality and an extension of self out in the world. Many people living in conflict zones equate material loss to a parting of their identity and emotions. In the case of MF, whose wedding was disrupted due to her vardhan (dresses, bedding, and gold ornaments) being consumed in the fire, she was left with nothing except a pair of earrings. NF put them in front of me and said, “bas yehai bachoav,” only this was left. She picked it up, put her hand on MF’s head, and said, “ath manz tei shukkur, soun kumluiv insaan bachoav” (I thank God that only gold was melted; that we [humans] are unhurt). In families experiencing multi-layered grief and misery, a certain kind of subjectivity emerges which seeks comfort in unremembering material aspects of their life. NF had purchased the gold ornaments for her daughter from a local jeweller through monthly instalments. She could not make these payments because Wouste Farooq was out of work due to the two consecutive lockdowns: the military lockdown in mid-2019 followed by the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020 (Zia 2020). Indeed, the informal sector in Kashmir was doubly hit and disadvantaged by these lockdowns.

Baiye Wathouv (We will rise again)

Kashmiri Muslims have shown individual and collective resilience against state terror. Individual members of the family rendered homeless have focused on economic pursuits by resorting to small jobs that contribute to the family income. For instance, MF has taken a part-time job at one of the vehicle showrooms in Srinagar, and her brother, SF, started working as an assistant to a local electrician. Their mother, NF, got a job as a caretaker in a nearby kindergarten. Additionally, neighbors and relatives have shared their house with the family, and the local Masjid Committee collected donations to rebuild their houses. Dar Seb, a community elder and the President of the Masjid Committee, said: “we cannot give back exactly what they have lost; nevertheless, this collective effort symbolized our unity and resilience.”

Though the stories of material loss and resilience varied across the 22 surviving families, all of them were forced to negotiate the circumstances of their everyday lives in order to have access to basic amenities and safeguard themselves from COVID. More than material, the narratives they shared with me during my ethnographic fieldwork highlight their emotional and cultural bonds to their lost “home.” The charred remnants of their homes, preserved as photographs in their cellphones as well as images in their memories, are now part of their identity. During my interactions with Wouste Farooq’s family, I often thought about words of solace I might offer, but I was fearful that each comment would sound inconsequential. To my surprise, the words of comfort came from NF: “ath manz tei shukkur jan bachouv, qamar gandav baiye wathouv.” Thank God, we are alive, she said, we will struggle and rise again.

Over the past decade, with the right-wing Hindutva regime at its centre, the Indian state has used brutal military and extra-judicial methods against Kashmiris, both at the individual and the collective level (Zia 2020). The staged encounters by the Indian military to “neutralize” the rebels, which ended up with the burning of multiple houses in the locality, was part of a collective punishment. Moreover, state surveillance has become omnipresent, choking out all spaces of dissent. Anyone raising the issue of human rights violations, or making mention of houses destroyed in encounters, is subjected to unspeakable reprisals. Until 2019, people resisted the structural violence of the militarized state through street protests, hartals, poetry, songs and graffiti on walls. Recently, however, resistance itself has transitioned from a collective, organized and explicit movement with revolutionary impact (Hollander and Einwohner 2004) to what James Scott calls a subtle or imperceptible movement, outside the obvious public domains (Scott 1990). Instead of explicitly registering their protest against this violence, destitute families made a conscious choice, which I called a “survival strategy,” to rebuild their houses in the same spots without any compensation from state institutions. This survival strategy has become a purposeful act of defiance for Kashmiris amidst apprehensions that integrationist policies of the Indian state constitute a threat to their identity and livelihood. Defending the land upon which they live and protecting themselves from the consequences of dissent are not—and will never be—acts of neutrality or compromise.