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

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?