In this article, I analyze social media responses by Hindu men to the Indian government's August ... more In this article, I analyze social media responses by Hindu men to the Indian government's August 2019 revocation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution that codified Jammu & Kashmir's special status. Kashmir has been under Indian military occupation since 1947 and it is now the most militarized place in the world. Hindu men reacted to the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A with glee, declaring on social media that this latest abrogation of Kashmiri sovereignty entitled them to "fair Kashmiri wives." My article contextualizes these responses in Partition era violence against girls and women. In addition, I argue that this representation of Kashmiri women resonates with colonial era martial race theory. My larger point is that the construction of race in India is part of a complex discursive formation that includes colonial attitudes, Partition violence, regional rivalries between India and Pakistan, and the rise of Hindu nationalism.
In this article, we analyze contemporary discourses of counterinsurgency in relation to dogs in K... more In this article, we analyze contemporary discourses of counterinsurgency in relation to dogs in Kashmir, the disputed northernmost Himalayan territory of Jammu and Kashmir, and the site of a prolonged military occupation. We are interested in the widespread presence of street dogs in Kashmir as both embodiments and instruments of military terror. We consider the competing narratives of how canines function variously in Kashmiri perceptions of counterinsurgency and in Indian nationalist discourses. Through ethnographic and cultural analyses, we track how street dogs appear in various cultural and public narratives as the Indian military's "first line of defense," and the ways in which their overwhelming presence produces deep anxieties about the nature and extent of the military occupation of Kashmir.
In this article, I analyze social media responses by Hindu men to the Indian government's August ... more In this article, I analyze social media responses by Hindu men to the Indian government's August 2019 revocation of Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution that codified Jammu & Kashmir's special status. Kashmir has been under Indian military occupation since 1947 and it is now the most militarized place in the world. Hindu men reacted to the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A with glee, declaring on social media that this latest abrogation of Kashmiri sovereignty entitled them to "fair Kashmiri wives." My article contextualizes these responses in Partition era violence against girls and women. In addition, I argue that this representation of Kashmiri women resonates with colonial era martial race theory. My larger point is that the construction of race in India is part of a complex discursive formation that includes colonial attitudes, Partition violence, regional rivalries between India and Pakistan, and the rise of Hindu nationalism.
In this article, we analyze contemporary discourses of counterinsurgency in relation to dogs in K... more In this article, we analyze contemporary discourses of counterinsurgency in relation to dogs in Kashmir, the disputed northernmost Himalayan territory of Jammu and Kashmir, and the site of a prolonged military occupation. We are interested in the widespread presence of street dogs in Kashmir as both embodiments and instruments of military terror. We consider the competing narratives of how canines function variously in Kashmiri perceptions of counterinsurgency and in Indian nationalist discourses. Through ethnographic and cultural analyses, we track how street dogs appear in various cultural and public narratives as the Indian military's "first line of defense," and the ways in which their overwhelming presence produces deep anxieties about the nature and extent of the military occupation of Kashmir.
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Papers by Purnima Bose