Pahalgam’s Stolen Season
When seismic events rupture the fabric of politics, culture, or collective memory, they do not merely alter circumstances—they fracture language itself. Words, apparently stable vessels of meaning, are wrenched from…
Ghulam Mohammad Khan
Between the Text and the Reader: A Death in Context
Ali Chak passed away the other morning, a death as sudden as it was shrouded in speculation. He had just returned from the mosque after attending the early morning prayers,…
The Crisis of the Mother Tongue: ‘Kashmiri’ in a Changing Kashmir
It is quite common in Kashmir not to teach the mother tongue, Kashmiri, to children. The reasons for this neglect are complex, as the issue transcends language and reflects a…
Anecdote, History and Kashmir
An anecdote is a concise, frequently personal narrative that communicates a certain point or idea. Anecdotes are frequently used to shed light on a person, location, or occasion and can…
Kashmir, Journalism and the Reversal of Binaries
As a society, we humans both consciously and unconsciously draw upon an indefinite, already existing cultural repertoire of knowledge for making meanings. Making meanings is only possible when we temporarily…
Contextualizing the Bois Locker Room Scandal
Our perception of ourselves; our bodies, our relationships, our understating and, above all, our behavior comes from the complex system of rules unconsciously governing us all the time. Like the…
Coronavirus: The Unfolding of an Epistemic Crisis
Epistemology involves the philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and how it informs the ontology of the concepts like truth and belief or how beliefs are formed, internalized and…
Roland Barthes on Kashmir
From the curious academic debates in contemporary socio-cultural theories, we have learnt that our society is like a meta-text in which diverse territorial or generic mental sets intricately inform the…
Kashmir and the Politics of Punishment
With the brutal 'drawing and quartering' of the domestic servant Robert-François Damiens, who attempted the assassination of King Louis XV of France in 1757, to 'make the amende honorable before…
The Political Lexicon of a Disciplinarian State
In contemporary literary theory nothing seems to put breaks on the ever-complicating thematics of fluidity, arbitrariness or the slipperiness of the signified in human languages. The complexities of language, its…
Of Ennui, A Servile Fearfulness And Kashmir
Being from Hajan and waking up to the azaan being played to a familiar beat of bullets, to a familiar anguish and desperation in the family, to the…
Kashmir: Our Colleges And Human Resource Development
Before my transfer to an Engineering College recently, I taught at Govt. Degree College Bandipora, situated on the top of a hillock, an idyllic place surrounded by a majestic bulwark…
Separate Settlements: A Divisive Politics
Diaspora, deracination, or displacement are chronicled civilisational processes and must not be confused as entirely new burgeoning political or cultural subjects. Sometimes galvanized by national economic catastrophes, sometimes by droughts…
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