Enacting a politics of possibilities against Zulm and towards Azadi from coloniality and occupation

Abstract

This article ethnographically maps two Kashmiri/Urdu concepts zulm and azadi and their conceptual salience in offering an epistemic-political account of India’s enforced militarisation as an unrelenting presence and condition of its coloniality in Kashmir. Beyond their descriptive value, the concepts of zulm and azadi, I argue, offer a grounded and affectual theorising of the structural conditions of militarised occupation, its violent shaping of everyday life in intersectional gendered ways, and the variegated politics of possibilities these concepts can engender. By combining ethnographic investigations with decolonial gender and feminist studies, this article shows how zulm and azadi can steer a politics of possibilities that propel action in the present. This politics of possibilities is embodied through ethical self-cultivation and as a resolute desire to resist being consumed by the violence of occupation, even as the state seeks to impose totalising domination. Responding to the ongoing calls of conceptual diversity in theorising from the Global South, the article asks: What might an engagement with grounded critical vocabularies of Kashmiri Muslims living through occupation tell us not only about the nature, logics and modalities of (post) colonial control, but also which subjects are banished as epistemic and political subjects?

Introduction

How to write about zulm and azadi when zulm abounds and azadi slips away, or has always been a deferred possibility, depending on where one is located in the global imperial present?

The world we inhabit is being ravaged by extractive racial capitalism, climate crisis, coloniality, war and genocide with transnational resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism. As I write this, at least 46,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 100,000 injured, thousands left to starve and thousand others buried under the rubble in Israeli genocide in Gaza, brazenly supported by Western imperial states (Al Jazeera, 2025). All of Gaza’s universities have been decimated. For Palestinians, Israel’s deliberate destruction of universities, libraries, educational centres and historical archives constitutes ‘scholasticide’ that systematically represses ‘Palestinian history, epistemology, scholarship, and subjectivity’ as part of its settler colonial elimination (Palestinian Feminist Collective, 2024). However, Israel’s annihilation of Palestinians did not begin in October 2023. Land theft and dispossession, exile and dislocation, blockades, siege, apartheid, cultural elimination, material and psychic violence and, just as importantly, epistemic violence and erasure have long constituted Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine (Abdullah, 2019).

Critical social scientists, especially Indigenous, anticolonial, feminist scholars, have mapped the durability of colonialism through colonial frameworks and modes of thinking that have ‘inculcated an amnesia toward local forms of intellection with their own long histories’ (Menon, 2022: 143). Coloniality’s persistent grip on our present not only structures the material conditions of life, being and (severed) relationalities in service of modernity, but also dictates epistemic presence and credibility: determining who becomes the knower, who/what is recognised as the subject of knowledge production and in which locations/metropolitan centres is knowledge produced (Fricker, 2007; Lugones, 2003; Medina, 2013). For Bolivian feminist sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2012: 102), however, it is not enough to focus only on the ‘geopolitics of knowledge’; we must also be attentive to its ‘political economy’ particularly how the co-optation and re-packaging of subaltern southern knowledges in Global North universities create newer economies of circulation, exclusion and extraction, which empties decolonial politics of its praxis. The task, then, is not to simply build more critiques of Eurocentric or colonial epistemes, to make dominant knowledges porous to differential geographies and lifeworlds or to render subaltern knowledges commensurable and translatable into familiar frames. But rather how, theorising in relation to ‘subjects negotiating life’ (Lugones, 2003: 42), refusing the pre-set analytical conditions of engagement – whether through conceptual diversity or thinking with/from/about the Global South (Madhok, 2021; Menon, 2022; Pandit, 2025) – and conveying the incommensurability of southern histories, lexicons and politics ‘to the content of the episteme’ (Arondekar, 2023: 4, emphasis original) can cultivate epistemic-political shifts. These shifts can shape up as reflexively extending ethical credence to marginalised subjects’ ‘capacity as a knower’, engendering epistemic trust and authority in their ability to account for their conditions that can constitute anticolonial knowledge creation, and resist their epistemic banishment and ungraspability in dominant (post)colonial historiographies (Fricker, 2007: 20).

The context of the Kashmir valley under India’s militarised control is an important site to map the contours of these epistemic and political denials through which the state declares that Kashmir is ‘normal’ and ‘fully integrated’. India’s post/colonial sovereignty in Kashmir is asserted through manifold forms of gendered, racialised, militarised and colonial control through discourses, narratives and material structures (like governance, laws, carcerality), which are manoeuvred to occupy a people who demand self-determination (Junaid, 2013; Pandit, 2023, 2025; Zia, 2019). However, statist control is not simply material but ingrains epistemically. The epistemic banishment and ungraspability of Kashmir’s peoples, especially Kashmiri Muslims – from incarcerating and framing as seditious and anti-national those who name their subjugation as ‘occupation’ – devalues them as epistemic and political subjects capable of a social diagnosis and political struggle while repeatedly situating Kashmir in nation-state and nation-based frames (Bhan et al., 2023; Pandit, 2020). Elsewhere, I have argued how thinking with Kashmir offers epistemic routes to reconceptualising state-enforced militarisation as a condition of coloniality and imperialist expansion (Pandit, 2025). Building on this argument, what might an engagement with grounded critical vocabularies of Kashmiri Muslims living through occupation tell us about the nature, logics and modalities of control? How might these located articulations diagnose the intersectional gendered ways in which occupation structures everyday life? Finally, what might an epistemic commitment that values banished knowledges and knowers reveal about the ‘politics of possibilities’ – one that not only renders conditions of subjugation legible but also enacts ‘the vision of transformation as a continual struggle to change subjects, places, and conditions of life’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxvii), even amid saturated control and the indeterminacy of these possibilities.

This article thinks with two Kashmiri/Urdu concepts zulm and azadi as they emerged in my immersive ethnographic fieldwork, and charts their conceptual salience in offering an epistemic-political account of military occupation as an unrelenting presence and condition of coloniality that seeks to wrest totalising control by ossifying in everyday life. Beyond their descriptive value, the concepts of zulm and azadi, I argue, offer a grounded and affectual theorising of the structural conditions of military occupation, its violent shaping of everyday life in intersectional gendered ways, and the variegated politics of possibilities these concepts can engender. In engendering a careful diagnosis of occupation, zulm, azadi and how they are used by my interviewees also steer a politics of possibilities that can propel action in the present. This politics of possibilities is embodied as a resolute desire to resist being consumed by the violence of occupation, even as the state seeks to impose totalising domination through its manifold strategies of colonial militarisation, control, violence and depletion, all guised as ‘integration’. It also manifests in the act of imagining freedom from colonial occupation, especially when the mere conditions of such imagination are deemed seditious or ‘deserving’ of maiming, killing or incarceration. This politics of possibilities propels action in the present, the here and now, through an ethical cultivation of the self that is articulated in relation to Kashmiri land and peoples.

Grounded in an anticolonial feminist epistemological approach, and in mapping these concepts beyond their heuristic potential, I insist that zulm and azadi do epistemic work: first, in enabling an intersectional analysis of occupation, these concepts refute postcolonial statist discourses of progress, integration and normalcy, and frame the postcolonial present as a settler colonial one. Second, when we ‘refuse to disentangle epistemology from ontology’ as a matter of feminist ethics, as Madhok (2021: 82) has proposed, we can begin to recognise which subjects are evacuated of their epistemic agency and authority, and how such discrediting, always inflected by differential power relations, renders certain lifeworlds and struggles ungraspable. In doing so, I contribute to the ongoing push for conceptual diversity in theory-building from the South – one that not only challenges Western imperial epistemologies but also interrogates the colonial dynamics of South–South relations, such as those between India and Kashmir. The article also contributes to theorisations of everyday politics and subjectivities from non-western contexts beyond accounts of bare life, which is assumed to be bereft of agency and possibility under conditions of exception.

This article emerges from my ethnographic fieldwork in 2020 for doctoral studies when I spent several months across Kashmir to map the structures of spatial, temporal, bodily and affective control of military occupation on everyday Kashmiri life and landscape. In this time, I spoke to 26 Kashmiri Muslims across gender, class and geographical locations, and conducted a few follow-up conversations in 2024. This article emerges from my doctoral study that explores the everyday politics of living under coloniality and occupation, and honours my interviewees’ epistemic-political understandings of their conditions of subjugation as ‘occupation’ and the attendant concepts of zulm and azadi that shape their politics of survival and contestation.

Zulm

Zulm is an Arabic term that describes injustice, oppression, violence, cruelty and tyranny, and assumes similar meanings in several South Asian languages including Koshur, Urdu and Hindi. For historian Layli Uddin (2023), zulm, azadi and haq among other worlding imaginaries form part of the repertoire of vernacular, anticolonial knowledge traditions that germinated with the entanglements of Islam and socialist politics in 20th-century South Asia. She explores how Deobandi scholars like Mahmud al-Hasan understood zulm in Islamic terms – as ‘a transgression of God’s plan for His creation, which was centred on ideas of justice, beauty, and equality’ and had to be deterred and resisted whenever Muslims encountered it (Uddin 2023: 10). Within justice frameworks in Islamic contexts, zulm can be understood as the practice of injustice and implies an enclosing darkness which occurs when ‘haq is overshadowed’ (Smirnov, 1996: 346). In Kashmir, the haq that is snatched away and being demanded is also the haq-e-khud-iradiat that translates into the right to self-determination (Rizwan, 2020). While concepts like zulm, azadi and haq in South Asian linguistic cultures owe their presence to Arabic and Persian influence, they serve as dynamic and creative frameworks, interacting with the located albeit diverse socio-cultural politics of the Indian subcontinent, with the potential to catalyse radical political consciousness and transformation against colonialism (Uddin 2023).

Zulm also carries gendered connotations. In her polysemic Qur’anic readings, Asma Barlas urges attention to how sexual oppression is read into Islam, always set up to contrast the enlightened imperial West. For Barlas (2001), an alternative exegesis reveals that the zulm of patriarchy – understood both as a rule of the father/man and as a politics of sexual differentiation that naturalises gender and sex to justify women’s oppression – ‘cannot find support’ in the Qur’an (p. 130). Engaging hermeneutically with Islamic theology, she argues that it is against the nature of God to inflict zulm in ways that infringe upon the rights of another person, and insofar as ‘inequality, discrimination, and hatred’ are understood as forms of zulm, the very structure of patriarchy, which embodies these unjust conditions, is not condoned (Barlas, 2001: 129). Barlas’ analysis enables a reading of gendered relations into zulm and the gendered ideas, meanings, practices and discourses that give substance to the concept of zulm. In what follows, I hold space for the plural and sometimes gendered understandings of zulm as narrated by my interviewees, and how the concept evokes meaning-making potentialities. Zulm, in the context of my interviewees’ narrations, exceeds its translation as violence, oppression and tyranny by contextualising the unrelenting conditions of occupation in Kashmir. These conditions are not simply limited to political violence or oppression inflicted by a ‘postcolonial’ state but constitutive of its colonial governance and rule in the region thereby, challenging secular narratives of progress that neatly segment time into past, present and future or colonial versus postcolonial (Falak, 2023; Pandit, 2025). In preparing the epistemic ground that exposes the colonial violence of a ‘postcolonial’ state, the concept of zulm, located in people’s daily experiences of living through occupation as opposed to statist accounts of ‘normalcy’ and ‘integration’, can propel a shift to knowing and acting differently, and of cultivating an ethical self that struggles against asymmetrical power.

During fieldwork, many interviewees used zulm as a signifier of the unbearable uncertainty and magnified precarity of everyday life under occupation. In considering zulm as a ‘generalised condition’ of life, the concept does two-fold work: it bears witness to and renders legible the processes of repression; it also articulates people’s experiences and understandings of that repression as occupation (Mir, 2021: 85). Conceptually, zulm accounts for the continuum of violence in the region signifying much more than physical repression to also consider the ‘violences . . . that are rather invisible’ (Mir, 2021: 87). These include the closing of mosques or the restriction of prayers (and more recently, limiting Friday prayers to suppress any offering of solidarity with Palestine), as well as more cultural forms of imposed Indianisation in schools, state bureaucracy and public spaces through the introduction of Hindi to enforce ‘integration’ (Zargar and Osuri, 2024). It is worth noting that these techniques of control and regulation are deliberately made invisible by the state, buried under rhetorics of ‘normalcy’ or framed as measures for ‘peace, stability and national security’. These discourses epistemically conjure Kashmir as ‘integral’ to India – thus, narrative control becomes a key modality of settler/colonial governance (Zargar and Osuri, 2024; Pandit, 2023).

While acknowledging the insidious nature of all-pervasive militarised violence – from ‘routine’ checks and interrogation to the fear of impending gendered harassment, as many women shared with me – alongside more visible and organised violence like mass pellet blinding, zulm becomes the very condition of occupation. The colonial-military occupation is neither benign or bereft of violence and control – even though the state claims to ‘integrate’, ‘save’ and ‘protect’ Kashmir or enforces colonialism through erasure often guised as assimilation and protection – nor an aberration or a punctuated presence to the ‘liberal democratic’ state character (Kanjwal, 2023; Pandit, 2025). But rather, occupation enforces a near permanent sense of uncertainty of life and possible futures and so, of unrelenting zulm. This is not to say that zulm exists only in the infrastructure of occupation, nor to minimise the zulm of interpersonal gendered violence, especially since the women I interviewed did not downplay the gendered nature of zulm in terms of social patriarchal norms and gendered expectations imposed upon them; instead, I offer a place-based mapping of the zulm of occupation, its entanglement with gendered relations and how recognising zulm can inject the desire to build an ethical self that steadfastly contests coloniality.

The ethnographic narrations of zulm that I follow are of Beenish ¹ , Fatima ² and Zara ³ – three university-educated women, now in their early 30s who are based in Srinagar for professional work although Fatima travels to Delhi frequently. I was introduced to them through trusted friends, after which I first interviewed Beenish and Fatima via encrypted calling applications while Zara in-person, and met them on separate occasions in Srinagar in 2020. The substance of what Beenish, Fatima and Zara understand as zulm varies, and they often use zulm to describe the arbitrariness of military violence and the ubiquitous bodily, affective and spatial control that structures occupation (Junaid, 2013; Visweswaran, 2013). At other times, particularly as they switched between Urdu and English, zulm was often used interchangeably with violence and occupation. Yet, zulm merits conceptual attention beyond its heuristic value as it allows an analysis of the logics and everyday effects of occupation in its contextual complexities in four ways that I elaborate below.

First, zulm opens an analysis of the conditions of life and (un)liveability that occupation imposes. For Beenish, zulm was not only the reported cases of sexual violence or massacres that have occurred over many decades but also the everyday surveillance and policing that Kashmiris are subjected to. She shared a few instances she was aware of, one involving a younger colleague, where men are beaten for wearing camouflage clothing or for installing VPN (virtual private network) apps on their phone that can bypass regional Internet bans:

Any soldier can stop you and demand to check your phone. They can book you and beat you for having VPN on your phone. Young boys who wear camo print clothes are beaten. This happened with one of my younger colleagues . . . he was beaten up for wearing socks! Aisa zulm hota hai (This is the kind of zulm here).

Beenish shared this to emphasise that zulm is not just overt violence, but the perpetual zulm of occupation also infuses temporal uncertainty that is marked onto everyday Kashmiri lives, bodies and spaces. This comes across in what Beenish said next: ‘People here don’t know whether they will come back home safe from work or a leisure outing’. This uncertainty of not knowing what will happen next enforces a sense of waithood where routine tasks like visiting a doctor or going for a walk can escalate into stop-and-search, humiliation and possible violence. Likewise, hours-long electricity cuts can disrupt daily activities including studying, applying for jobs or phone-based business, examples that both Beenish and Zara shared. Notably, Beenish does not use zulm to simply describe isolated instances of violence or material harms that can be quantified through death counts, nor as a limited diagnosis of the structural conditions of coloniality that generate such fatal violence. But rather, her narration of aisa zulm hota hai and not knowing whether one comes back home points to the continuum of everyday barriers that arrest time or loop lived time into cycles of perpetual pause and delay, evacuating any sense of familiarity or certainty from everyday life. Zulm thus is not episodic but a protracted and unreasonable condition of living through occupation. ⁴ While the state continues its narrative capture through claims of ‘normalcy’, unless the structural conditions of coloniality are abolished, it is not going to be the end of zulm but its enforced continuation.

Second, zulm conveys rupture. Zulm accounts for the severing of sociality and social relations where small joys and rituals such as weddings or family functions that sustain life and community are either disallowed by the architecture of militarised control or left to the mercy of armed authorities for permission. As our conversation was drawing to a close, Beenish shared with me a tweet she had then pinned on her Twitter/X timeline. In the aftermath of August 2019 and subsequent COVID-19 lockdowns, posting political commentary on social media, especially Twitter, became the only outlet for Beenish to talk about Kashmir, despite knowing that a viral tweet could invite serious reprisals. Given the ongoing curtailment of dissent, surveillance of social media and the silencing of Kashmir’s press (Zargar and Osuri, 2024), Beenish has since deleted the tweet, which was a screenshot of a letter posted in early 2000s by a Kashmiri father in a north Kashmir village. In the letter, the father informs and, in a way, seeks permission from the head of the Rashtriya Rifles ⁵ camp in his neighbourhood for a small, two-day family celebration of his son’s wedding. In sharing this, Beenish, exasperated, posed a question to me: ‘where in the world do you see a family seeking permission from military forces to host a wedding? Aisa zulm hota hai yahaan!’ (This is the kind of zulm we are subjected to). In the scenario Beenish describes, there is no overt act of violence but the material and affective architecture of occupation is such that everyday joys or moments of celebrations require approval from state forces. When zulm is used this way, it emphasises the stripping away of haq – of self, of life, of mobility, of celebration and of the small essences that nurture life and social relations.

It is not given that zulm, as a concept, will instinctively mobilise a gendered analysis of occupation, the gendering of the everyday or even a critique of local and militarised patriarchies, despite the fact that most interviewees, both men and women, referenced the pervasive sexual violence in the homefront like the mass rape of the women of Kunan and Poshpor villages by Indian soldiers in February 1991, during our conversations. However, for Fatima and Zara, while it is difficult to disentangle gendered social relations from the violent conditions of occupation, they emphasise the importance of accounting for the intersectional gendered vulnerabilities that constrain the lives of Kashmiri women. This brings me to my third point: when the zulm of occupation is seen in relation to unequal gendered relations, it can open up space for analysing the hierarchical gendered relations of everyday life, and the role of gender as a modality of control through which occupation perpetuates differential vulnerability. For Zara, understanding zulm in gendered terms made her see how military presence and militarised restrictions obstructed her access to public spaces, which further amplified patriarchal control over her movements and life choices, as her family feared the heightened risk of gendered violence. Occupation thus reinforces and magnifies existing intersectional gendered hierarchies, limiting women’s access to public spaces while increasing the vulnerability of men, particularly young men and boys, to violence – even as all Kashmiris are continuously subjected to control and surveillance (Pandit, 2025).

For Fatima, a social science researcher, who lives in a multigenerational household, zulm can offer a language for the women in her family to make sense of their experiences both within and outside their homes. In the aftermath of August 2019 when the Indian government revoked Kashmir’s nominal autonomy and accelerated settler colonial governance, it was only in November that Fatima could travel to Srinagar. While lockdowns, shut shops, empty streets, heavy personnel deployment, curfews and surveillance have been ‘routine’ features of daily life under occupation, it was the ‘repeated images of changed demography’ that haunted her:

We are used to seeing empty roads, you know schools shut, but that felt a bit different because I told you right repeatedly we were we were repeatedly getting images of changed demography of Kashmir. And you felt like you’ve been cheated upon . . .

And when I came here, I remember my mother who is not educated enough or my aunt . . . so you know, it was . . . so they started saying dekho hum pe kitna zulm hua (look at the zulm being inflicted upon us). And when it comes from people like them, you know it’s very much evident that yes, something really wrong has been done to you.

In the weeks that Fatima spent at home, she was able to initiate conversations on the multi-layered zulm including what she named as the ‘internalised misogyny of the women of her family’ as well as the misogyny upheld by men. While conversations on challenging patriarchal notions of gender roles and norms were exhausting, coming to terms with these unequal gendered relations, for Fatima, has shaped her imaginary of azadi as multidimensional, imaginative and emancipatory for all. As she added:

yes, resistance at the political front . . . it has given me that courage because you know, that idea of resistance comes from the political history of my state. But I think we equally need to resist the patriarchal norms of the society.

Both Fatima and Zara expressed deep anger at the intersecting, multi-layered patriarchal and occupational violence, using words like ‘cruelty’, ‘harm’ and ‘injustice’ to describe the continuum of zulm, its militarised socio-spatial logics and gendered effects. As practicing Muslim women, they shared that their conceptualisations of zulm are informed by Islamic meanings, particularly the idea that if ‘oppression is human-made, [it] must be human-alleviated’ (Wadud, 1995: 46). This leads to my final point: for some, recognising zulm becomes a call to action as part of their spiritual duty and commitment towards alleviating it – an acknowledgement that propels a politics of possibilities that things can be different in the here and now despite the overwhelming control of a colonising state where the everyday struggles do not simply entail acquiescing to oppressive power or can be reduced to bare life. This politics of possibilities is enacted in plural ways from telling one’s stories on one’s own terms, by acknowledging one’s spiritual-political responsibility in the wider struggle for self-determination or by refusing to be complicit in the occupational infrastructure.

Infused with meaning-making, zulm as a concept has the potential to propel contestations to occupation, even if in times of heightened surveillance and chokehold on Kashmiri spaces, the will to contest may simply manifest as ‘getting by’. I am not suggesting that witnessing zulm always leads to a prescribed course of action, but an accounting of zulm can activate an agential response, a recognition and a belief in a different kind of lifeworld. This comes through in Beenish’s eschatological belief in the certainty of justice, which drives her commitment to not being a collaborator in the occupational machinery:

Maybe it will take 300-400 years but I know this one thing that truth will always be victorious. 300-400 years mein to chhodna hi hai inhe Kashmir. Zulm ek na ek din khatam ho hi jaata hai (they will have to leave Kashmir in 300-400 years. Zulm always ends one day) . . . I will eventually get a teaching job and there will be state duties but it is not like I am a bureaucrat and an active collaborator. So in my life, I always ensure kam se kam damage hona chahiye (there should be minimal damage [to our cause]).

Fatima and Zara’s understanding of zulm rooted in their Islamic practice gives form to a will to struggle in their everyday living, which is inflected by their gender, (middle)class, professional and locational constraints. For Fatima, witnessing zulm infuses a sense of responsibility in her as a Kashmiri to talk about the oppressive force of occupation and build solidarity with non-Kashmiris (cf. Sokhi-Bulley, 2023):

Kashmir is in a bad condition and haan zulm ho raha hai lekin chal raha hai (zulm is happening but we keep going on) . . . I think in order to be a responsible Kashmiri, it is our duty, it’s our obligation to bring up the truth to non-Kashmiris and talk about the oppression.

But Fatima is also cognizant, and when speaking with non-Kashmiris, especially Indians, she only brings up the question of Kashmir once she trusts the people. Indeed, practicing a moral-political responsibility towards self and Kashmir causes emotional depletion given that the burden of explanation always falls on Kashmiris thereby, rehashing the stark power differentials between the colonisers and the colonised. While Zara’s job in an Indian organisation has constrained her in relation to talking about Kashmir, she often brings in Kashmir through storytelling. As she said, ‘Islam teaches me ki zaalim ka zulm sehna is also a sin’ (to bear the oppressor’s zulm is also a sin). These nuanced ways of naming and confronting zulm also point to the intersectional gendered complexities of everyday life under occupation where the struggles of Kashmiri women cannot be analysed solely along the single axis of gender (Falak, 2023; Zia, 2019) – my female interviewees’ politics too are shaped by an opposition to the gendered social structures and their imbrication with occupation. In epistemic terms, the concept of zulm in the narratives above makes occupation legible in frames, affects and effects that dislodge (post)colonial statist narratives and frameworks of normalcy, progress and integration while propelling a politics of ethical self-making and continued struggle in everyday life.

Azadi

Azadi transcends national, political and linguistic borders; an insurgent concept, it signifies freedom and liberation from oppression. Azadi is a polysemic and plural political imaginary, which envisions many possible futures grounded in self-rule and collective liberation. These futures, however, are not confined to existing formations like nation-state proffered by coloniality/modernity nor is azadi a singular or definitive goal that can be achieved at once. What azadi gestures towards is the different forms of worldmaking that cannot always be neatly subsumed in the infrastructures of the nation-state; and an ongoing process of liberation, unfinished and always in the making. Exemplified in the popular Kashmiri slogan, ‘Hai haq hamara, Azadi! Hum cheen ke lenge, Azadi!’, azadi is framed as a haq, a rights claim and imaginary, one that sustains life, which when not offered, can be snatched from institutions of power like the nation-state (cf. Madhok, 2021). As a metonym for Kashmir’s Tehreek (the movement for self-determination), azadi infuses an ‘insurgent political consciousness’, shaping dissident practices like Kashmiri youth, especially those from working class backgrounds, participating in stone throwing protests (Ganie, 2023: 98) or in its everyday iterations where ‘people design, establish and work upon itineraries to navigate the circuit of violence, power, and vulnerability’ (Sharma, 2020: 34).

Originating from Farsi, azadi is a transnational and pluriversal concept deployed in many anti-imperial and social justice struggles across the globe. Azadi’s revolutionary emphasis reverberates in the Kurdish women’s political struggle ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’, in Indian anticolonial struggle against the British where independent leaders and organisers framed azadi as life and human right (Saikia, 2017: 206), and in South Asian political struggles including feminist and student movements in Pakistan and India. And yet in contemporary South Asia, azadi and the popular slogan: ‘Hum kya chahte? Azadi!’ have become synonymous with Kashmir’s struggle for self-determination. What emerges clearly from my ethnographic encounters is that azadi is a plural political imaginary – it retains the possibility of the many futures for Kashmir pending a people’s vote yet my interviewees unanimously imagined azadi as an end to India’s repression and towards political, spiritual and social liberation. These conceptions of azadi make visible its multiple layers and articulations that are not simply about spectacular political shifts, but rooted in and in concert with everyday life and struggles, giving weight to people’s anti-occupation politics and praxis.

In mapping the generational struggle for azadi in Kashmir, Faheem (2018) observes that azadi mobilisations and articulations in movement texts, protest materials and actions, art and public memory ‘emerge from the routines of everyday life and are deeply connected to the political events of past and present’ (p. 246). However, in certain narratives – often those advanced by collaborators ⁶ who work in alliance with colonial statecraft – Faheem (2016) notes that the essence of azadi has been watered down to ‘autonomy’ within the nation-state, critiques of human rights violations that do not challenge militarisation or demanding economic support from the state. These state-aligned narratives ultimately strip azadi of its political persistence towards self-rule and determination. My discussion here does not seek to present the vast and rich histories of different political aspirations tied to azadi as articulated by distinct religious, political communities, against different autocratic rules, and also in the different parts of the historic state of Jammu and Kashmir (on this, see Bazaz, 1954). There is also a plurality and indeterminacy in what political azadi would entail. Instead, I offer an ethnographically informed epistemic accounting of azadi, including my interviewees’ narratives, many of whom brought up their visions of azadi in our conversations. Through this grounded epistemic and empirical approach, I explore the politics of possibilities embedded in these imaginaries of azadi: whether through an epistemic and ethical reckoning with the post/colonial condition as a settler colonial one, in altering people’s relationships to land and community or in rallying against a deferred social and gender equality until political azadi is achieved, thus giving azadi more expansive, generative and dynamic gendered meanings.

In the first phase of my fieldwork in 2020, as I was reading through Kashmiri news and literary websites, I came across an article in Kashmir Lit magazine by Kashmiri writer Azeem (2016) who interviews young Kashmiris, both men and women on what azadi means to them. Responses ranged from seeking azadi from the constant demand to prove one’s identity through i-cards to foreign military personnel, to being granted the option of a plebiscite, the end of colonial violence and resource extraction, a demilitarised, peaceful Kashmir and rebuilding an identity that has been not fractured by colonial occupation. For one of Azeem’s interlocutors, azadi denoted ‘freedom from all oppression, whether external or internal. It means freedom from India and freedom from any trait that resembles that of an occupier or oppressor, from traits that can turn us into an oppressor tomorrow’ (Azeem, 2016: para 16). Conceived this way, azadi enabled a critical appraisal of the coloniality of mind–body–being and a commitment to fully break away from these logics so as to not emulate them. In this sense, azadi becomes ‘an existential concern of being human’ (Saikia, 2017: 207). Breaking away from coloniality opens abundant possibilities of being able to live without fear and without the unrelenting zulm. What unites these varied imaginaries of azadi is their shared insistence on being free from the nation-state, its occupational and settler colonial statecraft towards anticolonial possibilities.

My interviewees Fayaz ⁷ and Lubna ⁸ , both in their late 20s and engaged in the social sciences, echoed these sentiments. During our follow-up conversations in 2024, they insisted that despite the colonial violence of ‘integration’, the fervour for azadi in Kashmir – while muted given the deep state surveillance – is hard to be expunged from people’s collective psyche. Lubna, in particular, highlighted the misappropriation of azadi in contemporary Indian activist spaces, where Kashmiri slogans and chants are co-opted to demand azadi within nation-statist frameworks – without acknowledging Kashmir’s anticolonial struggle for self-determination against the occupying state (see also Kanth, 2020). These co-optations remind me of Kashmiri filmmaker Sanjay Kak’s 2007 documentary ‘Jashn-e-Azadi’ which archives the everyday violence of conflict and occupation in Kashmir alongside people’s insistent demands for azadi. In one scene, the viewer witnesses the military and police-led celebrations of India’s Independence Day on 15 August 2004 at Lal Chowk in Srinagar. The ‘celebrations’ take place under heavy military deployment with no Kashmiri civilians, who become present only through their defiant absence. Juxtaposed with these visuals is the patriotic Hindi song ‘Apni Azadi ko Hum’: ‘Our freedom, we will never allow to be erased. We may be beheaded but we will never bow’, as if asking the viewer: whose azadi becomes legible in the post/colonial moment?

My conversations with Fayaz and Lubna brought to light three meanings of azadi in relation to how azadi is a process always in the making, a multidimensional praxis that is not limited to political representations or simply macro-scalar political shifts in power and a praxis of restoring severed affective, material and spiritual links with land. Azadi embodies many possibilities such that its articulations do not seek to put forward a singular or solutionist approach towards ‘resolving’ the question of Kashmir but remain open to the many possibilities of what may become conceivable when the people of historic Jammu and Kashmir are able to exercise self-determination. This refusal to offer one-track solution is not to dilute the substance of azadi, which for Fayaz and Lubna, and both emphasised this several times in our conversations, bears certainty in being free from militarisation and occupation: ‘azadi in the sense, that these brutal structures should be annihilated throughout’, said Fayaz. And yet, the question of what may happen next is open, indeterminate and plural. While indeterminacy may conventionally be understood as negative and undesirable in justice struggles, one that must be averted, staying with the belief that zulm will end one day affords many possibilities that things can change: ‘after all, imagination is how you survive’, he added.

For Lubna, like many other women I interviewed, azadi remains a multidimensional imaginary and praxis in the here and now. Taking exception to the dominant and often masculinist narratives around azadi as simply political and removed from the social minutiae, Lubna refuses the neat separation of the political from the social: ‘Azadi has to be simultaneous. It’s simultaneous liberation from the state, then from these other masculine structures that don’t let me do what I want to do’. In calling out the ‘masculine structures’, Lubna articulates her vision of azadi as inseparable from challenging patriarchal and intersectional gender inequalities. She resisted temporalising azadi to the future, as a deferred victory, as if social transformation can occur only when political freedoms are realised. While critically attuned to the gendered and sexual modalities of occupational control, or statist narratives that reduce Kashmiri Muslim women as victims in need of saving or the co-optation of gender and sexual rights to justify occupation (Pandit, 2025), Lubna insists that these complexities must be addressed in Kashmiri society. For her, azadi is a process of moral, spiritual and socio-political transformation that does not replicate the coloniality of power–knowledge–being but actively seeks to dismantle and transform its violence. Fatima, too, resists the deferral of gender equality to the future or its reduction as a parenthetical aside within azadi struggle. For both of them, azadi does not defer social transformation of intersectional gendered relations to later or the future; azadi’s substance and praxis must continually and undeniably envision azadi for all.

While Lubna’s understanding of azadi is multidimensional, she is also deeply aware of how it is in the nature of occupation to sever community relations, affective bonds of trust and intimacy, especially in their relation to the land with accelerated settler colonial governance. For many indigenous and colonised communities from North America to Palestine, land is a life-force that ascertains reciprocal sustenance, community building and learning, as opposed to the settler/colonial conceptions of land as a resource to be exploited, consumed and expropriated (Simpson, 2014; Tuck and McKenzie, 2015). Intimate relationality to land also makes flagrant the overarching hold of occupation in how it severs relational and affective ties with land, nature and communities. And, it is this relationality to land and community that needs radical rebuilding, as Lubna explains:

The presence of the state alters my relationship with my people and my land. So I need the state to go, the occupation . . . because it does affect all my relationships. I can’t really speak to my friends on WhatsApp because we are too scared. Or people that I have met during work, I can’t really call them and have a chat. So there is always this tension which affects the relationship I have with Kashmir . . . my relationship building is not determined by the state but the functioning of these relationships, their sustainability . . . the state influences them.

Later in our conversation, Lubna emphasised that resisting the state requires centring people’s relation to land as crucial undoing the violence of occupation – this, she said, is not only in terms of resisting extractive capitalism, which has detrimental ecological effects on Kashmiri land and landscape, but also in reframing Kashmiri relationship to land through spiritual, affective and generational intimacies, especially when land has been a key node of settler colonisation (Zargar and Osuri, 2024). Making sense of azadi through grounded and plural narratives offers an alternative epistemic route to understanding the (post)colonial condition where Kashmir continues to reel under the effects of occupation. Interviewees’ conceptions of azadi refuse the linear temporality and seamlessness often assumed in ‘postcolonial’ spaces, where distinct regions and peoples are forcibly integrated or partitioned into nation-states, at the cost of their located political struggles. They also reject the onto-epistemic framing of land as mere territory for extraction, instead seeking to cultivate different relationalities as part of their ongoing struggle for azadi against coloniality.

Conclusion

In tracing occupation’s ruptures in terms of delayed time and deferred freedoms, Kashmiri scholar and poet Falak (2023) evocatively proposes that we think of ruptures as ‘portals or wormholes through which liberation is possible’ (p. 75). In colonised contexts where futures are deliberately denied, although their imagination remains alive in people’s minds and praxis, for Falak, ruptures offer a fruitful ‘timelessness’ where the fusion of past, present and future in the lives of the colonised alerts us to different possibilities of the future beyond coloniality, one that is distinct from the colonial state apparatus. I would like to extend the analogy of rupture to the two concepts of zulm and azadi that I have begun to ethnographically map in this article. The grounded, vernacular imaginaries of zulm and azadi rupture the epistemic, narrative and temporal landscape of post/colonial times by visibilising not simply the coloniality of a post/colonial state but also the gendered, affective and material infrastructures of occupation that institute systematic violence and control. In so doing, the concepts enact another rupture: they insist on the epistemic and political agency of Kashmiri Muslim subjects who are repeatedly denied agency and reinstate their narratives, which are erased to enable settler colonial capture. In paying ethnographic attention to zulm and azadi, I show how epistemically mapping them requires that we open our conceptual apparatus towards studying coloniality and occupations, query the linear temporalities and onto-epistemic assumptions of ‘postcolonial’ presents and how they enact integration through colonial violence. And as importantly, how these concepts can enact a politics of possibilities precisely in their complexities, indeterminacy and disruptive capacities. With this, I hope to open up pathways for anticolonial feminist approaches to (resisting) coloniality and occupation by recognising the conceptual and epistemic force of grounded vocabularies in undoing post/colonial complicities and towards conceptual-epistemic diversity.