Intifada: From Palestine to Kashmir

Intifada: From Palestine to Kashmir

Ather Zia, a Kashmiri anthropologist and poet, argues that Kashmir’s struggle for azadi, or freedom, should be read alongside Palestine’s as part of a single continuum of colonial violence. She shows how Kashmiris have long expressed solidarity with Palestinians through protests, prayers, graffiti and art, and how their use of the word intifada for their own uprisings reflects that bond. She calls this “affective solidarity”, which gives Kashmiris an outlet for their grief while affirming their own resistance.

Zia describes India’s revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy in 2019, the laws that have curbed protest and press freedom and the ban on expressions of solidarity with Palestine, even in Friday sermons. She points to shared experiences of militarisation, checkpoints, raids, dispossession and environmental destruction, to the pellet-gun blindings of the 2010s and to reported ties between India and Israel in weapons and surveillance. She also traces literary links, from Kashmiri readers of Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish and Refaat Alareer to her own poem “No Rose Red in Kashmir”, which begins in Kashmir and ends in Gaza.

She concludes that knowledge and writing are tools of decolonisation and that feminist solidarity can build bridges between occupied homelands.

Full article

Read the full article on Social Text

Support our work