Playing hide and seek with Childhood in Kashmir
Date: 20th September
Time 8.00 p.m. IST/7.30 a.m. PT
Venue: Zoom
To register: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSefhZoQa5OydpF_YGxQOCNP5PYY9hEQcEGIhZu0iKlPvjtmDA/viewform?usp=dialog
Talk Abstract
Kashmir is one of the most contentious territories in India. Caught in the imbroglio of insurgency and counterinsurgency, it has become eclipsed by terror, violence, and trauma and has become a necropolis[1] – a territory of desire that has witnessed “politics of death within a sovereign nation”[2]. Generations have witnessed a systemic loss of cultural ethos, ecological denudation, rise in militancy, civil curfews, sweeping counterinsurgency acts by the armed forces, enforced disappearances, fake encounters, surveillance, and sexual violence. Generations have been affected in visible/invisible ways.
Children, without debate, are the worst-affected victims of any conflict. Besides physiological and psychological trauma, their economic and educational futures are deeply compromised. This talk has as its focus how countless children’s lives have been distorted and how they exist in a dystopic, conflict-ridden Kashmir.
For children, the fondest way of engaging with the world around them is through play. One cannot undermine play as an essential tool for the cognitive development of children. In the context of Kashmir, children born to families of internally displaced Kashmiri Hindus, as well as those born in the womb of a terror-ridden valley, play has become almost impossible. Moreover, being exposed to a constant threat of terror has changed the nature of the games that children play. From simple games, games have become heavily loaded semiotic signifiers of the conflict that children are exposed to. As Atina Malik points out in her study, the games that children play in Kashmir are semiotic expressions of their violence-ridden reality; children either play games such as ‘stone pelting,’ or playact an encounter (with one group pretending to be militants and the other being the armed forces). Heimlich spaces where children could play hide and seek, hopscotch, cricket, climb trees, or play with dolls have disappeared, and instead, spaces have become encumbered, alienated, and contested. Cooped up for days within the confines of homes during curfews, which can be entered at any moment, either by armed militants or armed forces, these children have been exposed to mindless violence and gun culture from a very tender age. For them, stone pelting, curfews, and gunshots are the new normal. By referring to texts such as Basharat Peer’s memoir Curfewed Night, Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir, Rahul Pandita Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir, documentary film Raqs-i-Inquilab by Mukti Krishan and Niyantha Shekhar, Ashvin Kumar’s films Inshallah Football and No Fathers in Kashmir this talk seeks to address the pertinent issues of psychological and cognitive abuse that children in Kashmir are being subjected to.
[1] Ghosh, Amrita
[2] ibid
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Kamayani Kumar is an Associate Professor of English, Aryabhatta College, University of Delhi, India. Her PhD from the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi focused on children as victims of Partition-induced trauma and narratives exploring transgenerational transmission of Partition as a cultural trauma. Her research focuses on the cinema of Ritwik Ghatak, Childhood trauma studies, Memory studies, and Partition and cinema. Her recent publications include an edited volume on child and trauma, titled Articulating Childhood Trauma in the Context of War, Sexual Abuse and Disability published by Routledge. She is currently authoring a book that focuses on how artists have represented Partition violence and how post and prosthetic memories of Partition inform the work of contemporary artists too. Her work on children as victims of conflict in India as examined through literary and visual narratives is soon going to be published by Palgrave McMillan. She has chapters in several books and journals and has presented papers at National and International Conferences. Her areas of interest include Partition Studies, Childhood Studies, Film Studies, Trauma Studies, and Visual Narratives of Partition.